Yesterday my husband came home from work to find me sitting on the floor with the contents of three garage boxes in piles around me. After I displayed the various sections—kids’ clothes to be given away, a box of recycling, bags of trash—he suspiciously asked, “Are you pregnant?”
Nesting-like behavior notwithstanding, I am not. (Three kids is more than enough crazy for me.) It’s just that having experienced some early success with the 1,000-Pound Project, I am eager for more. And my sorting had unexpected dividends.
The organizational chaos in my house has frequently meant that things go missing. As I emptied out boxes and bags yesterday, I found three such missing things:
Found item #1: Years ago I bought the boys a Hanukkah Fisher Price set through a catalog. I only put it out for the holidays (mostly because I didn’t want to lose all the pieces among the other Little People sets they had, but also because the main piece plays Hanukkah music when you press down on the menorah and it gets kind of annoying after the fiftieth time or so). Two pieces of this set went missing two Hanukkahs ago. Found them in a bag of junk on the upper laundry room shelf.
Found item #2: A critical piece of our garment steamer—the cap to the water reservoir—went missing some time ago. I searched repeatedly for it and came up empty every time. I seriously considered throwing out the steamer since it was not functional without this piece. Found it in a bag inside a box in the garage.
Found item #3: Son #3’s first pair of shoes. This was the biggie. Earlier this year we moved Son #3 out of the smallest bedroom and into the big bedroom, which he and Son #2 now share, so that Son #1 could have his own bedroom. (He is eleven and practicing to be a teenager.) At this point I realized that I had no idea where Son #3’s first pair of shoes had gone. This was a huge problem of my own making.
I say of my own making because I had both Son #1 and Son #2’s first shoes bronzed. It is hoky, yes, and one of those ridiculously sentimental things that makes my husband roll his eyes at me, but I did it anyway. To have to tell Son #3 that his shoes were not up there gathering dust on the bookcase with his brothers’ because I LOST them was not a conversation I was looking forward to having. It is bad enough that we have roughly five squintillion more pictures of Son #1 than we do of Son #3, or that almost everything he wears is a hand-me-down. I could envision him in middle age pouring out the whole sorry story to some therapist.
You can imagine my relief when I found those self-same shoes, all scuffed in the toes because he still preferred crawling to walking when we got them for him, buried in the bottom of the second box of outgrown clothes I sorted last night. My goal for today is to find the information to send them off for bronzing before I lose them again.
So those were the highs. The lows and the humility lesson part go hand in hand. I threw out half the contents of the bag of junk Found item #1 was located in without hesitating—so why on earth has it been sitting on a shelf for so long? How embarrassing to think that garment steamer would have ended up in the landfill for no reason other than my disorganization. And clearly we’ve reached the point where non-important stuff is overwhelming my ability to keep track of things that are important, if I spent half the year anxious about the location of those darn baby shoes. Finally, despite having emptied two boxes of old kids’ clothes, I have stacks of other boxes to tackle in the garage. What they represent is a lot of putting off until tomorrow what I should have dealt with in the moment. I may be fighting back, but so far the stuff is still winning.
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