I have a 45 minute timer set, and I’m cleaning Augustine’s room. It’s not just tidying-up. It’s the type of cleaning that is subtractive, the kind where some things don’t make the cut. Really cleaning.
I have co-opted a bag for ‘trash’ – probably sized originally for something more like a bracelet. It’s not going to be enough.
To Augustine’s credit, there’s very little true trash. Yay, but also – ugh.
What there is, is actual things. And, truthfully there are just to many ‘things’ in her room for her to cohabitate with.
So, some – in reality, many – decision have to be made about what stays and what goes. Decisions that resemble in all ways the sorts of decisions I avoid.
I’m going to describe these decisions, but, fair warning, my attempts sound both hysterically-dramatic and also pedantic.
Here goes : We all know the types of decisions we (parents) make about ‘things’ as our kids grow up. For each thing that they own, we eventually have to ask – what does it say or help define about who they are? who they were? what leads them forward? and what keeps a part of them stuck in place as someone I remember them being and loved them being?
I’m keenly aware that Augustine is 10 and that her birthday is next week and she will be 11 and she is growing up. The smattering of true 6-year-old things that I sort and organize force me to acknowledge that she is not anymore what she once was.
But, if I keep her shelves, bureaus and other flat spaces cluttered with Stitch and legos and tangled mermaid bracelets – she also isn’t leaving the past behind. This is probably why this clutter has gotten so out of control.
I pick up the same butterfly barrette I remember picking up dozens of other times over the past handful of years. Never used, I find a convenient place to tuck it so I don’t have to say goodbye yet and I move onto something 3D printed that seems less emotionally atomic – it’s goes in the bracelet bag.
I’m aware of my own flaws and worry I’m passing on a fear of leaving the past to Augustine and Atlas, but I calm myself in staying they’re probably just learning hoarding habits.
So I’m here, picking up small pink plastic ducks, hair scrunchies, lapel pins and deciding what makes it till tomorrow. I save some doodles that have no distinct time or place by feel vaguely 8-ish. Each thing I ask, what best tells the story of who we/she is and what has served its purpose.
How am I supposed to get rid of anything and how could we possibly keep anything?
If I wipe the whole dresser into the trash and evenly disperse items from her desk across it, I’m relatively positive that she wouldn’t notice a difference. Not because she doesn’t care, but because the sight of these things has become just that – stuff. So this has to be cleaned – I start a pile on the bed so that the bureau is tidy.
I’m actually pretty good at cleaning up. You might be surprised. (Don’t look at the bed) But I’m relatively slow. So the timer ticks by.
Is this simpler for most people?
I’ve spent the past decade changing my skin every 1-2 years. Today, who I am is less ‘the pinnacle of the mountain I’ve climbed’ and more ‘the amalgamation of all the things I’ve need to take on to get us to the next place’. I’m more pastiche than purpose-built person.
This is no doubt why I cling to everything. Knowing in a few months I might be someone else and who I am now might fade into memories and into the few scraps of ‘things’ I collected when I was who I was when I needed to be that person.
This also complicates Augustine’s room. Here are the useless trophies from when I was ‘coach-dad’, here’s the magazine clippings from when I was ‘travel-dad’, here’s a lego from when I was ‘teacher-dad’.
In each piece of Augustine’s room I see the opportunities we took and those we turned away from. I see the paths we took and didn’t take. I wonder for a moment about who we’d be if Augustine had worn the butterfly clips in her hair – which she never will but maybe she would. I think about the trip that lead to her talking about whales and wonder if this bracelet is needed as a concrete reminder or if it’s just a repetitive thing that doesn’t serve its purpose as much as the memory.
There’s just so much stuff, and when I hit a stack of recent congratulations cards, I realize that there’s a lot here and there’s still so much more to come in the years ahead. There’s too much now and there will be so much more that all of these hard-decision-pieces will eventually be replaced anyway…everything that comes into my kid’s life at this age is already gone in the future.
A mantra appears out of the ether and repeats in my head :
there’s to much
everything is a memory
there will be more
but this is still important
Everything that I’m sorting through depicts a specific time and moment that is part of who Augustine is and will always be. But the transient nature of these items means that we can never really trace back to the exact thing that made any of us who we are – we have to leave those things behind.