Some of the stuff we’ve saved over the years is laughing at us. Those keepsakes from our kids’ lives that we stashed away to pass down to them? The ones we envisioned handing over as forever-memories? If you tiptoe past that leaning tower o’ stuff, you’ll hear a soft chortle, because the stuff knows the truth.
Nobody wants those things.
You’ve collected a big pile of sentimentality that exists mostly to take up space:
every report card your child ever brought home;
book reports throughout the ages;
art projects involving torn construction paper, popsicle sticks, and cotton balls.
Nope. There’s not a world where your adult kid says, “Let me haul that big pile of stuff from your house to mine.”
You will have better luck with other items:
yearbooks;
the teensy shirt worn on Baby’s trip home from the hospital;
that lock of hair from the first haircut.
But ….
refrigerator art,
school celebration photos filled with kids your child can no longer name,
birthday/holiday cards. Lots and lots of birthday/holiday cards. Like, nearly every birthday/holiday card your child ever received.
Not a chance.
The truth is, you never saved those things for your kids in the first pace. You saved them for yourself.
If you can spare about a quarter of the space this stuff currently occupies, do it. Be brave and cull through the pile. Working with the wisdom of hindsight, get rid of anything that isn’t a seminal reflection of your child’s journey (goodbye, weekly book report; hello, term paper). Indulge in a little ritual if necessary: pour a glass of wine, light a candle, and say goodbye to documenting every single moment of the childhood your kid left years ago.
But keep the basics, because you weren’t wrong:
greeting cards from loved ones present and past;
notes and letters your child wrote while growing up;
yearly school portraits reflecting change in both appearance and attitude.
Like that nice wine I hope you grant yourself, some things grow in value as they age. Even if your kids never feel a pull to revisit their own pasts, the next generation will love mementos such as
autograph books from the 1940s, signed by family and friends,
high school newspaper articles written by the 1950s teenager who aspired to be a journalist,
baby pics and posed family portraits.
I’m glad somebody saved these snapshots of my parents’ lives. They shine even more brightly because they’re not buried in an overwhelming deluge of miscellaneous stuff.
I suppose the trick is to curate rather than collect.
Yes! Curate! As you know, I’ve given this a ton of thought since I wrote KEEPSAKE.
Nowadays, with digital photos being so easy to take and cheap to store, we’ve parted with a lot of things by taking a picture and making it just that much easier to surrender the physical thing.
(Don’t ask me how likely it is anyone will find those photos again or even look at them….)
The proverbial ‘test of time’ is a powerful sorter of priorities. Largely because, across wider stretches, it’s WE who change, and the blank, unchanging stare of mere stuff we’ve accumulated reflects that back at us. At the same time, to our core selves, it’s we who are constant presences, a thread that runs through whatever massive changes we may have actually undergone. Is your ‘I’ at 70* really different from who he/she was at 20? Gotta say ‘sure’ and ‘no way’ to that. At the same time.
Logical consistency on this one is for the faint of heart.
*Neither of us quite there yet, but (I observe a little indelicately) it’s coming–cf. Ballard’s ‘The Garden of Time’: the story, not its recent dumb Met Gala travesty . . .
I’ve “curated” my kids things into big Rubbermaid totes… one for each! When they come to visit we sometimes go through them and they will randomly take a letterman jacket or a yearbook home with them but, the tote remains in storage at our house UGH! when they were starting their big kid life no one had storage and only took from the house what they wanted at the time and said get rid of the rest!!! Now when they realize I have some treasures they will randomally go shopping in the bins for retrieval of their stuff! So, curate …
Kristina, I agree that certain objects are prime for digital storage. And, yes, knowing that keepsakes are stored somewhere else makes it easier to part with the object itself. But for me, the same problem might still exist, because in my mind, the internet itself feels cluttered. How do you find what you want to see? Would my stuff simply become a virtual heap instead of a physical one? Plus, so many mementos require touch. Beyond all this, though, even the historian in me recognizes that subsequent generations will be/are far more cyberspace-oriented, and this could be their perfect solution.
True, Bob, and as we change, so does the message of memory we want to share with future generations. We also can’t control what our kids will remember and/or what they will consider important. Events in our children’s lives that seem so very important to us may turn out to be a footnote to them.
Michelle. You lost me at “one [tote] for each.” I bow to your efficiency! You are a natural-born curator. I’d give you a trophy, but it would only become one more thing that needs a place to live.