Objectification

I'm way too attached to things. I know this. I've never been good at throwing things out, not because of any intrinsic value but because of the memories attached to the artifacts. I feel a deep, yearning need to own books I love - just knowing that they exist in the world isn't good enough, even thought I tell myself I don't have enough time to reread them anyway. My house is crammed with souvenir mugs, old photographs, ticket stubs, wooden spoons from my mother's kitchen, and items I won't even admit to.Naturally it's only gotten worse since I had children. Some people keep the outfit they brought their baby home in. I have bins of baby and toddler clothes I can't bear to get rid of. Many people are able to keep one or two pictures their children have drawn and recycle the rest. I have teetering stacks of drawings and paintings: rudimentary people with only facial features and belly buttons; the picture Angus drew over and over of a house, a lawn, a giant flower and a rocket ship flying overhead; pages and pages of the tiny circles Eve drew when she was one and a half and could finally grasp a pencil; formless blobs and millions of rainbows.

It's a messy tangle, my reasons for being a near-hoarder. I've always had trouble with organization, so whenever I feel the impulse to get rid of something I always feel a vague fear that I just haven't remembered what I need it for, or that the day after I get rid of it I'll find the companion piece that makes it a vital part of my life. Also, despite my hard-bitten cynical exterior (shut up, I do so have a hard-bitten cynical exterior) on the inside I am a melting morass of sentimentality. I also tend not to sort events in my life into major and minor - for me, almost everything is a major event, and requires a careful curation of the accompanying objects.

When I cleaned out the kids' rooms last fall so my Dad could paint and lay down near flooring, I knew that keeping everything wasn't an option, so I employed my newest technique for easing the pain of separation, which is photographing the soon-to-be-gone things.

I still have trouble getting rid of things that hung in their rooms when they were babies.

Or examples of how they wrote.

Or things they made with their own little hands.

Or things they were passionate about.

Or things that seem bereft without their larger context.

Or things like whatever the hell this is.

 Sometimes we change a room around and then I feel a sudden lurching panic because I didn't photograph it how it was originally. It's like I can't orient myself properly if I don't have access to every successive iteration of any possible environment.

I know that part of it is my unwillingness to let things go - stages of my life, stages of my children's lives. And I know that there's no way to not let it go. Part of the beauty of having children - and, well, every other beautiful thing -  is the transitory nature of every change, every expression, every wrongly-pronounced word, every tiny starfish hand and gorgeously rounded belly, every daisy-strewn little dress and every tiny mitten. And keeping all the things won't change that. It just makes me feel drowned in things.

Also, I don't want to pass down the madness. Yesterday I was going through a bag of clothes we'd lent someone that they'd returned and found a pair of giraffe pajamas that Eve wore when she was three. I showed them to her and she clutched them to her chest and said "we CAN'T give these away! I'm going to use them for my daughter! If I have a daughter." So that was okay.

A little while later I was at the computer and I saw her looking down at something beside the stairs and saying "oh no! Are we getting rid of this? That's so sad!" I thought it was more baby clothes.

But no. We got a new fridge that dispenses water and ice, and even after much excitement over this development and constant clamouring for 'a glass of fridge-water', Eve was stricken that we were getting rid...

Of the ice cube tray.

Folks.... we may be in need of an intervention