Toys and Talents
Over the last few years, Forrest and I have been undertaking an effort to organize our house. The two of us are pretty good at organizing our lives - dinner gets made on time, appointments are scheduled, meetings are attended - but our home can be a different matter. Part of it is that I, personally, like clutter. I understand the “there’s too much stuff” crowd, but it’s not for me. I like knickknacks and special dishes we only use once a year and pots full of half-dead flowers. It all brings me joy.
The other part of it is that our house has no wiggle room. There’s no basement, no upstairs spare bedroom, no laundry room where we can hide everything. Every single room in our house is used for most of the hours of the day. But all that use means no room for the regular stuff, let alone extra. We’ve started talking about our house like a cruise ship - how can we maximize every single inch? We’ve got the cabinet organizers and the room dividers and the bins labeled, but there are just days where close living is a little too close.
Those days are almost always in late January. It’s dark and wet and cold and there is no more Christmas to look forward to. So we’re trying to organize our house, to have a little more room to stretch out. This is great, in theory. The only problem is that we still have kids living in this house.
They are both the reason for and the greatest obstacle to organizing. I’ve taken to sorting bins of dolls and clothes late at night, lest some child wander in and rediscover some toy they haven’t asked after for five years. I know that some parents have their kids help with this process, to teach them how to manage possessions properly. I figure, between having rules on homework, housework, and, well, not assaulting each other, I’ve earned one area of parenting where I can take the easy way out.
Forrest and I have very different philosophies on the importance of permanence, both in possessions and residences. He was raised in the same house from age 1 until his mom sold it about 10ish years ago. Me? I spent my teenage and early adult years hopping from apartment to apartment, spending summers couch-hopping or, in one ill-advised move, renting a basement room at an unoccupied frat house. (I woke up to a mouse eating my Special K, which was the day I realized that I luckily not that squeamish about rodents.)
I’m all for keeping the special things - the art and stories and baby clothes that are the detritus of a life fully lived. But I have a limit about the number of TY dolls I can keep around. Meanwhile, Forrest is basically a depression-era grandmother, hoarding cardboard and foil in case it comes in handy sometime. He loves nothing more than when I ask him for a spare jam jar. He smiles smugly as he leads me out to his secret stash in the garage, and I roll my eyes.
We’re well-matched, he and I, but part of that is realizing that I should do the sorting and he should do the disposal. I’m liable to put it in a box marked “Give Away”, move the box out to the garage, and then promptly forget about it for the next few years. I lack follow-through. I’m moving into my forties next year and one of my goals is to reach out to the next decade clear-eyed. No more trying to be something I’m not or making excuses for what I am. I’m good at deciding what should stay and what should go. He’s good at making sure the stuff gets there. Let’s leave it at that.
Maybe that’s the secret - finding the people who can do the things we can’t and accepting that needing that help isn’t a failing. It’s fortunate. Nothing binds us together like a shared project, and people love knowing that they can give each other something of value. Even if that something is having no qualms about throwing a broken dollhouse in the trash.
