Somehow I ended up with two weeks
off work at the beginning of the year.
And during those two weeks my children were in school, so it was like
the holy grail of awesomeness when you are a mother.
There was no one begging for just
one bag of “fruit” snacks for breakfast.
No one fighting over a certain spot at the table because it’s the best
one, obviously, and the other one, which isn’t all that different, is complete
junk. There was no wildness, no
bickering, no jumping off the couch or dumping water all over the floor.
It was just me and a quiet
house. In other words, complete
heaven. I spent that precious time cleaning,
or rather like organizing. It’s the
first of a new year, when you want everything to be new and clean and, in my
case, paired down. We had so much stuff
in our house - mountains of old clothes that were there just because I hadn’t
taken the time to decide what to do with them.
Keep? Toss? Attempt to sell? Also I still had a ton of
baby things lying around because we just decided in the past year or so that we
were officially done having kids.
So I downloaded a book on tape from
the library, grabbed a large cup of coffee, put in my headphones and got to
work. I spent the first day cleaning out
the worst closet. It’s bigger than our
bathrooms and had become a catch-all for everything I didn’t know what to do
with. I filled up mountains of bags to
donate and a few bags to sell and about three large bags of garbage. I found a box of old, half-used candles that hadn’t
been unpacked since we moved into our house six and a half years ago, so I
guess that means I should have attempted this task before now.
Now, I am a sentimental person. I hang on to things because of what they mean
to me, because of what I was doing when I wore a certain dress twenty years
ago, because whatever it is might be useful one day, or my kids might want to
have it when they’re older. But the
catharsis, the absolute freedom I felt seeing the floor of that closet
completely bare was worth getting rid of all of the stuff that has been hanging
around. And I did keep some things. I’m still me, regardless of the empty
closet. But I was just more discerning
about what I allowed myself to keep.
I put my newfound need to purge to
good use by cleaning out two more closets, one of which was my craft closet and
was overflowing with material and yarn and old boxes that fell on my head whenever
I attempted to open the door. And then I
made my way to the basement where I’d stored totes full of stuff from my
teenage and college years, things that I’d left at my parents’ house that I
couldn’t bear to part with but that I also didn’t really want at my own
house. I was finally told on no
uncertain terms that it was time to pick up my junk and it’s been stored in my
basement for the past two years.
And then I hit up a couple of the
kitchen cabinets before fizzling out because of exhaustion induced from a
daughter who spent hours awake when she was supposed to be sleeping. Three nights in a row. I spent those last few days relaxing and
knitting and totally not feeling guilty at all because of the amount of car
loads full of our stuff that my husband drove off to be donated.
I was productive, is what I’m
saying.
This column originally published in The News-Enterprise on January 28, 2015.
