The Great Midlife Purge That Never Quite Happens
Last week, I was walking with a friend and announced that one of my goals for the month was to clean out my younger son’s bedroom and our storage room.
I said this with the confidence of someone who had not yet opened either door.
The children are both over six feet tall now. One lives across the country. The other is mostly away at university. There is no reasonable argument for why our house still contains enough childhood debris to mount a small regional production of Peter Pan.
And yet.
I still have the dress-up clothes.
All of them.
Capes. Hats. Various bits of military regalia. Something that may once have been a wizard. A pirate shirt. Possibly a knight. Definitely at least one superhero.
These clothes were wildly used.
They weren’t decorative Montessori dress-up clothes in a tasteful wicker basket.
They were worn hard.
They fought wars. They staged plays. They attended imaginary schools. They built governments. They were involved in activities whose plots were never fully explained to me and which frequently required every cushion in the house.
At some point, I washed them, folded them and put them into storage.
Where they have remained for approximately eleven years.
Neither of my six-foot-plus children will ever wear them again.
This is information I understand intellectually.
And yet apparently I have been keeping them in case one of them comes home one weekend and thinks, You know what would really complete this evening? The size-six velvet king costume.
So I have decided to purge.
I am always deciding to purge.
I enjoy the idea of purging enormously.
In my imagination, I approach the storage room ready for decisive action and emerge three hours later having reduced our possessions by 30 per cent.
There are labelled bins.
There is negative space.
I am suddenly the sort of woman who can open a cupboard without first placing one hand in front of her face.
The reality is different.
My system begins very sensibly with three piles:
KEEP
DONATE
DECIDE LATER
Within twenty minutes, DECIDE LATER has annexed most of the room.
I am not sentimental about things.
I am sentimental about approximately 83 per cent of my things.
This is different.
I can throw out obvious rubbish.
I am excellent with dead pens.
Expired coupons.
Single socks whose partners have clearly moved on.
Instruction manuals for appliances we no longer own.
Although even here I occasionally hesitate.
What if I need to know how the 2007 Panasonic cordless phone worked?
You never know.
The problem begins when objects acquire provenance.
A child’s handwriting.
A photograph tucked inside.
A Lego man missing one hand.
The pottery bowl that is objectively terrible but was made by someone I gave birth to.
Suddenly I am not cleaning.
I am curating an archive.
This is how a woman enters a storage room intending to become Swedish and emerges two hours later holding a papier-mâché volcano.
Apparently I do not own clutter.
I own history.
There are the obvious things you cannot possibly throw away.
First shoes.
First paintings.
Favourite books.
The height chart from the old house.
Then there are the things you know perfectly well you should throw away but cannot quite bring yourself to.
A broken Christmas ornament.
A school notebook containing fourteen pages of handwriting and eighty blank ones.
A rock somebody once presented to you with enormous solemnity.
A box labelled simply SAM’S BOX OF SMALL AND SPECIAL THINGS, which is particularly dangerous because no one remembers what qualified them as special.
The dress-up clothes fall squarely into this category.
If I found them today at a garage sale, I would walk past without breaking stride.
But these are our dress-up clothes.
I can still see two small boys running through the house in them.
This is how they get you.
Objects know things.
They sit silently in boxes for years and then, just as you are feeling exceptionally ruthless, produce a four-year-old in a cape.
This week, while I was still contemplating my purge, I was talking to my mother.
A friend of hers had just come over after clearing out her storage unit for the very last time.
She had said something that stopped me.
“I don’t want to leave that for my children to do.”
There it was.
The less charming end of the storage-room story.
Eventually somebody has to decide.
Maybe that is one of the strange jobs of this part of life.
For years, we accumulate.
We furnish houses. Have children. Receive wedding presents. Inherit dishes. Save report cards. Buy Christmas decorations. Put things aside because the children may want them one day.
We are constantly adding.
And then, somewhere in the middle, a tiny voice begins saying:
Perhaps we could stop now.
Not because anything terrible is imminent.
Because the arithmetic has changed.
There is now more behind us than there was before, and somehow that makes a box of old Halloween costumes feel less innocent.
I picture my children one day standing in the storage room.
“What is this?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want it?”
“No. Do you?”
“No.”
Pause.
“Why did she keep it?”
This imagined conversation has become surprisingly motivating.
I would like to spare them at least some of the mystery.
I do not want my legacy to be fourteen Rubbermaid containers and an unanswered question about why their mother owned seven extension cords that fit nothing.
So I went downstairs.
I opened the storage room.
I was ruthless.
I was decisive.
I was a woman completely unburdened by material possessions.
For about eleven minutes.
I filled a donation bag.
I threw away several things whose original purpose could no longer be established.
I found three empty picture frames, four tennis racquets, a Christmas wreath I had forgotten I owned and enough gift bags to open a small retail operation.
I made excellent progress.
Then I opened the dress-up box.
There was the handsewn silver and crushed blue velvet knight costume.
I picked it up.
I could see the boys.
Of course I could.
That was the problem.
I folded it neatly and put it back.
Along with the Lord of the Rings capes.
And the wizard wand.
And most of the hats.
I am not proud of this.
Although, in my defence, I did get rid of the pirate shirt.
I think.
After three hours, I had filled one donation bag, thrown away two dead pens and relocated a box of things I still could not decide about.
I put the box somewhere safe.
I’m sure you can see where this is going.
~ Danielle