Posts Tagged ‘living’
“A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.”
George Carlin.
My previous post “No box! No toy!” is the perfect lead into this next subject. Stuff. It fills our lives right up to the edge. Think about all the stuff you have. Especially as a parent. You have the stuff you need and then there is the rest of it. We are so guilty of it, and by we I mean me and my husband. We aren’t the type to just shop and fill our spaces, but when you have children, friends & family stuff just flows your way. We have a house filled with stuff and we have a barn filled with stuff. Stuff we need and stuff we don’t. But we have gotten better about weeding through it all over the past few years, whittling it down. Making donations twice a year. But it can take over your life if you let it.
Like many of you out there, there is the stuff you have been dragging with you since you left college. Then you get married, and your stuff gets married. Then your parents upgrade their stuff and pass on their old stuff to you, which might be a hair nicer than what you had, so you take it. Then you start to run out of room and you either gotta give stuff away or buy a bigger house.
We bought a big and very old – 1860′s Victorian – house on an acre when we were 29, in 1999, because the thought was we would never buy again. (My husband actually factored in how much we would save by NOT having to move, say, 3 more times, into the cost of this home to convince me to take the plunge) And that still holds true. We are here to stay. Now that we have kids, it fits perfectly. But it seemed so empty in the beginning, not alot of stuff, and I loved that. But parents and family want to buy you housewarming gifts. Grandparents move on to assisted living and leave you furniture, paintings, more dishes. But you keep it under control.
And then comes the kids. There is no more control. We had three different strollers for our first, born the summer of 2001. Three! My husband and I had gotten used to living in a streamlined, clean, uncluttered home for two years before Sophie. By the time she was one I was getting a little frantic. The first grandchild and great-grandchild, of course she is going to get a slew of her own stuff. But now I have to try and keep it in check along with my stuff. I kept it together…until…
Max was born in early 2004. Then it all fell apart. I couldn’t keep it together having to breast feed all night my ravenous baby boy, as well as deal with a toddler suffering from sleep apnea. Turned out Sophie had seriously enlarged adenoids and tonsils which would result in breathing problems, thus keeping her from sleeping. She would wake up repeatedly throughout the night until we found out what the problem was and got them removed when she was 3 1/2. And I thought it was just bad parenting skills!
So we got even more stuff. It is in the grandparent, friend and family DNA to give a child a gift. And even when you try and explain that you don’t need so much, they don’t always understand what the big fat deal is. Our parents just threw everything in the garbage when they were done with it. I don’t know anybody who donated anything when I was growing up, do you? (Disclaimer: please don’t get me wrong, my kids have received some wonderful books and toys that stand the test of time from their grandparents and family. This is not the stuff I am referring to.)
Anyway. After I came out of the toddler and baby fog,( which was around when max turned 3 1/2) I started to get a grip. Managing all that stuff on a daily/weekly/monthly/yearly basis is an utter total time suck.
This past June, during a week after school was out and being stuck inside by endless rain, I had a moment of clarity.
Time to get rid of sh*t.
Over the next few days, the kids and I went on a rampage, dumping out every toy bin. Matching pieces to sets of whatever. Filling bags and boxes with all that stuff they never play with anymore. Clothes. Itemizing for the write off. (My husband would never let it go without getting a write off!) Of course when the kids said that certain items meant too much to give away, I respected that. But you wouldn’t believe how much got cleaned out of this house. The kids loved how much space there now was in their rooms. And they never, ever missed anything we gave away. Not once did they bring it up. Now, here was the most surprising thing about it all:
The toys that they kept were now being played with all the time that summer, with a renewed interest and zeal. I loved how they rediscovered toys that had been buried under other less interesting toys and forgotten. I pointed it out to them, to try and drive home the fact that sometimes less is more, and that more is not always better.
It felt like I was finally able to exhale after years of holding my breath. Relief.
The seeds were planted a long time ago. Summer of 1982, in Hamburg Germany. I was 12 years old and spending the summer there visiting my Oma and Opa. I remember walking into town with them. Seeing a car pull off to the side of the road, watching a man drop old batteries into a metal container and driving off. I asked my grandparents what was he doing; they explained that he was throwing the batteries away in a special container so that they may be thrown away properly. I thought to myself, “what a hassle! Just throw them in the trash at home!” and promptly forgot about the incident.
Until college. Texas Tech University, Lubbock Texas. Working at a fudge & coffee store in the mall, autumn 1990. I was 20. We had a key location at a four corners intersection where you could get food, sit and rest, socialize. We were a walk up store, not one you could enter into, with a coffee bar at one end where you could have a sit and a joe. Busy Saturday afternoon, lots of people eating fudge and drinking the then newly novel (in that small town, anyways!) cappuccinos at our counter. A woman orders a soft drink and the owner/manager hands it to her in a Styrofoam cup. The woman then launches into a whole clearly pre-thought out spiel about how bad Styrofoam is, choking up landfills with non-biodegradable waste. She is angry and pious. The owner, a thoughtful woman, listened. (A lot of people were listening, wanting to see where this was going) Though the owner didn’t know what to say, she was just trying to run her business. The woman who ordered the drink handed it back and said she didn’t want it. I saw what was going on, this was her way of making an impact, now we would have to eat the loss of the drink and the cup. To me, that woman trying to make her point had just put that cup into the landfill herself. We got on with our business. I forgot about the whole thing pretty quickly.
Maybe 1993. Hanging out with my friends, a good bunch of us that just hung out together. We were always at Bryan and Dave’s rented house, it was the most comfortable place to be. I forget who it was but someone brought up recycling. I don’t know why. Maybe there was an initiative on campus. But I remember thinking to myself, “what a pain in the ass, recycling! Like we don’t have enough to do already! Just throw it away and be done with it!” That was what I had thought. I remember it clearly. I didn’t want to add something else to my life, there was enough stuff in life you had to do without adding that to it. This whole recycling thing was starting to be like a pesky mosquito that kept buzzing around my ears, it won’t go away.
It took me many years later to figure it out. That throwing something ‘away” really just meant throwing it ‘away from me‘. And since we are all throwing it away from me that means it has to go somewhere, near someone else. At some point that could be you. Or me.
What’s the impact there? This is huge.
This is a blog about my journey. From naive, dismissive, and ignorant, refusing to engage in any of this nonsense called recycling, being green, making a difference. To trying to see how little waste me and my family can produce. To wanting to learn more about organic food. Living naturally. Healing naturally. Passing this on to my kids. I am just beginning. And this blog is more than just about all that.
Wanna come with? Let’s go…
