We rue the expense, we curse the clutter, and we despair as one toy is discarded in favor of the next. But why is it so hard to throw the darn things away? This mother reveals the inner turmoil in the simple act of tossing toys - and a possible solution that preserves family history yet clears the cupboards..
My two older kids are now juniors in high school and I have another who is in the middle of middle school (if you know what I mean). And a month ago, school was about to start for us - as it was for the whole country. So it was time for some summer cleaning.
Pretty simple you may think. Make some room for the next wave of stuff that was going to wash up along the shores of our home with the incoming school-year tide.
I put aside (paid) work for a morning and got to (unpaid) work. You know how that goes. You get started and then it's hard to stop - not because it's so much fun - but because there is no clear stopping point! Every cupboard that you clean stands as a reproach to the messy, cluttered other ones that you haven't touched. Even in other rooms.
Soft toys, marbles & dress-ups
I eventually got to the children's closets and surveyed all those remnants of their childhood. Soft toys, marbles, plastic binoculars, Lego sets, dress-up costumes, traveling chess sets, Bionicles, bouncy balls, and on and on it went. Shelf after shelf of plastic, wood and metal all worked into ingenious inventions designed to distract and even expand the juvenile mind. Some stuff was pristine, other stuff was in bits.
It was like some kind of family history museum! (Truth be told, our taste in toys now runs more to the electronic kind.) But I could see at once that all this treasure would find a better home with some new family. They would be enriched and I would gain back valuable space!
The bear stays in the picture
I got started. First shelf, looking me square in the eye, was an old bear. A bit "lived with" you might say - but he still had both glass eyes and he hadn't been touched in years. He did smell a bit "gamey" still; but then this was the bear one of my kids couldn't get to sleep without - for five years at least. (Internet privacy prevents me from identifying the kid in question!)
It all brought back that dark day that we left him (the bear) in another city. It was a gloomy day all round. Happily, a kind person mailed him back to us. But those 3 days waiting for the bear to return were the longest three days in my child's short life.
Do I really have to give the bear to another family? Hmm. There is a lot of family history wrapped up in his dear, po-face. I decided to make this one exception...
All hands to the boats!
Then there were those kitsch, painted wooden boats that my husband brought back from a business trip when the kids were still very young and he really had no idea. What a terrible present they were! Too delicate to be taken out on rainy days (to float in the rivers along the curb) so they stayed on a shelf in the boys' bedroom for years gathering dust.
In truth, they were artifacts of a simple time when toys were made from wood and kids were not obsessed with electronics. Year after year they stood ignored by their owners. Although, whenever I was in their room, I used to look at them - bright and cheerful, and was glad of them.
So, I needed to think a little bit more about those boats. And those memories. And that family history.
The Dreaded School Project
And then I noticed a whole new category of childhood detritus: The school project. We all have them - assembled in haste or created painstakingly - there could hardly be any family history worth keeping in a school project - surely?
In our house "school project" means two Christopher Columbus's ships - made from cardboard, copious amounts of felt pen, and hours of combined child and parent toil, sweat and tears. It means Greek helmets made from paper-mache slathered over balloons and decorated with brown enamels. It means book reports on famous people whose covers had to reflect an aspect of the life (Genghis Khan's shield, Teddy Roosevelt's bear, Captain Cook's map of the Pacific).
Each project was an epic creation that, at the time, transfixed the house and monopolized our attention. Once finished, we then faced the logistical battle of getting them to school without wrecking the things.
Can you give that kind of stuff away? Am I even ready to?
What about...
And what about the Christening blanket that my mother-in-law knitted and that I used with all my children? I hadn't touched it in years.
I couldn't even guess at the names of the intricate stitches she used to get the gorgeous pattern that it has. Just holding it up in my hands brings back family history memories of her sitting in her chair, knitting needles clicking away connecting her ever growing garment with the ball of colored wool hidden in the knitting bag by her chair.
Talk about an heirloom. I am sure there will be a daughter-in-law in my future who will value the Christening blanket.
(At this point my "think about" pile had grown quite large - and my "give away" pile was, well, not a pile yet.)
Artwork? Books?
Please don't get me started on their artwork.
Or the book of cartoons they drew one summer when they were 7 or so then got my husband to create dozens of photocopies at the office so they could sell them to their friends. (Let's just so no one got rich on the proceeds). Or the signs they made for lemonade stands. Or the journals I occasionally made them write when we traveled (what a struggle that was - the kids' enthusiasm for the task reflected in their spelling barely a single word properly).
What about the books we read together? Each cover (well, many of them anyway) as I looked at them again brought back a night we spent reading together, bears tucked securely under small arms, and the cry of "one more page, one more page..." greeting every one of my efforts to extricate myself.
Memories, family history, childhoods that have all but disappeared. This was getting ridiculous. Talk about separation issues.
Separation Issues
I realized at this point that my husband had no such separation issues. He has never thrown away a kid's toy in his life! He has his own family history museum every time he goes in the garage. He still has the kids' fishing rods and their archery sets. He still has their baseball gloves and the basketballs and the footballs - all sitting in the ball box where they have always lived. He even still has the cage where we used to keep the chameleons (despite my endless pleas for him to sell it on Craigslist).
He also has a vast collection of family video that he plugs in whenever he feels like it. He calls it a hard drive for his brain - helping him to remember all the good times. If anything, he is more sentimental about family history than I am.
It occurred to me that one solution might be to digitize this family history. Why not take photos of every item and place them into a family history album? It may not be as good as smelling that old bear, and feeling the soft texture of his fur, but it would be better than an empty cupboard and a challenged memory.
Or what about video taping the kids talking about their toys in a kind of family history documentary? ( Family history documentary is actually my job.) You could sit them down and interview them about the toy, recalling the good times they had, when they got the toy and all the history and memories. Then toss the toy.
What do other people do with all this family history embedded in toys? Keep them forever?
Well, that's what I eventually decided to do. I'm keeping these toys forever. Cleaning season is over.
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