Moving on
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- October
- 16
When you’re a sentimental procrastinator like I am, things have a way of piling up.
Last weekend, I finally gave in and got a few things out of the house: the potty seat, a bright yellow kiddie chair, a few pairs of tiny wing-tip shoes.
I always feel good when I give the kids’ old clothes and toys to someone who needs them. But still, I can’t help but feel a little sad knowing the next time a baby comes over to sit in the high chair (gone, actually) or crawl in the portable play yard (gone too), it will likely be a grandchild. Wow. Weird thought.
Going through the stuff, I also came across letters from an old boyfriend written in the early 1980s. I didn’t remember reading them the first time around. But I guess I saved them for the same reason I save everything else: a stubborn sentimentality that one day will probably get me in a lot of trouble  or a lot of mess.
There are a few things I refuse to give away: a baby outfit we dressed our first son in when he came home from the hospital, a pair of white “first shoes,” the ratty blanket one of the kids dragged around the house until it turned gray and started falling apart. He doesn’t know, but I have it tucked away in a plastic bag on the top shelf of my closet (along with my high-school majorette outfit, my Girl Scout sash and the dress I wore to the junior prom).
Anyway, I’m trying to become less sentimental and more practical. After all, you can’t save everything without turning into an eccentric pack rat, right?
How about you? What do you hold on to?
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 1:09 pm by Linda Lombroso.
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Baby boomer Linda Lombroso was born in Queens and grew up in Port Washington. She began her journalism career at New York Magazine and Rolling Stone, and came back to the field after spending 10 years as a stay-at-home mother. Linda joined The Journal News in 1997 and has been a Life & Style writer since 2000. She has three children.
I was always afraid that, in some weird cosmic irony, I’d discover I was pregnant as soon as I gave away the playpen. I guess that’s why I waited until I was 45 before I did it. About the same time, I heeded a good friend’s stern warnings to shred the journals I’d kept for ten years prior to my wedding (twenty years ago). “Dangerous,” she’d warned, “Get rid of them.” Strangely, I haven’t parted with the letters. Or the kids’ artwork over the years. I’ve kept it in bags-
one for each of them-and one day I will just give each kid his own bag. Just not yet!I was brought up with an inherited sentimental attachment to all things ‘family’. After my parents and grandmother died, I inherited much of their 70 and 98 year old collections, to be shared with siblings. It took years to even think about going through it, though I moved some into storage to wait until I was emotionally ready to deal with it. I must say, it is like an archaeological dig to go through boxes and papers and belongings, finding ‘treasures’, such as letters we wrote to our Mother, which she had saved, along with other childhood gems, such as the itty bitty braids she cut off my head, with their pink ribbons, or the necklace I had hand-strung of lilac florets, now dried brown, but still faintly fragrant, that she saved in an envelope. It is so telling to find out what was meaningful for your relatives, when you go through these artifacts!
My mother also saved every art work we ever did, in old ‘camp’ trunks and old ‘shirt boxes’ that used to hold Dad’s freshly laundered shirts. I was shocked and delighted to find that she had made notations on the back, basically documenting the first time we had drawn a person doing something, instead of just ‘scribbling’, and at what age. These items I will always save, and leave for my heirs to figure out when to toss them! The rest, I take pictures of, and then donate to charity (clothes, etc), and try to find suitable homes where they may ‘live on’ for a time. Occasionally, I have a clash of taste with their taste and mine, and those items just go in the trash or on the sidewalk for the informal ‘drive-by’ recycling that happens in our county.
Teresa—I also kept journals for years, but I didn’t have the heart to shred them. I just left them in my parents’ house and now I have no idea where they are!
Wendy-It must have been very emotional for you to go through all those things with your mother’s notations written on the back.
I think it’s a great idea to take pictures of some sentimental-value items before giving them away. I never thought of that. Sure takes up a lot less space.
Thanks to both of you for writing!