Taking Up Space – Part 1

Last Saturday was a biannual event that I look forward to with great anticipation…the elementary school yard sale. The week-long period for dropping off stuff to be sorted, priced, and sold by someone else is major motivation for me to clean closets and open bins that have been stored for years. Usually I’m one of the first to jump in and volunteer to help with any task, but my ability to work on the yard sale is mostly limited to supplying the goods. The sight of all that *STUFF* makes me nauseous.

When this stuff came out of the garage, I didn’t recognize most of it!

The same thing happens when I go into one of the kids’ bedrooms and they have stuff covering every flat surface including the floor. When they want “snuggle-time” and their room is like that, I just can’t do it. I think they’ve figured that out because Norah (the most frequent snuggle-time requestor) keeps her room really neat. She even makes the bed every day! When my own bedroom has stuff all over it, I don’t want to sleep there. And I avoid the basement and garage because of all the stuff stored there. The stuff is suffocating me.

I took 7 car-loads to the yard sale last week. I have been doing this for YEARS, but this time I was able to dig down to the next layer. There were 2 bins of CDs and a bin of VCR tapes that I sorted and delivered, plus 2 bins of DVD cases that need to be recycled. There were at least 3 giant trash bags of clothes that don’t fit anyone in our household and never will (we store Aliya’s for Norah). There’s another giant bag headed to Morocco. I purged several boxes of books and we still have 3 floor-to-ceiling bookshelves full. Housewares, toys, a couple of small pieces of furniture – out it all went.

Norah was concerned about reusing wine boxes for yard sale drop-off.

But there’s still more. A lot more. As I sorted, I kept thinking about the depressingly huge amount of money all of this stuff represents…tens of thousands of dollars. Before I became rabidly stuff-averse, I was an easy target of any type of marketing. Once I saw Julia Roberts on Oprah talking about how she was addicted to a handheld Yahtzee game and I scoured the stores until I found one. I was a “collector”…if one Reba McEntire CD was nice, owning her entire collection would be even better. I saw a lot of soundtracks in the CD bin, and I remember going to see the movie Cocktail with my friend Sherry and then driving directly to the record store. I also had a huge collection of games – we actually used to play them a lot back in the 80’s, but many of them had not been used since then.

The collection of stuff got worse when I had kids, because I would look at the lists on BabyCenter.com or in whatever article I was currently reading, and feel like my baby needed all of those things – plus the baby stuff is so cute it’s hard to resist! I had several slings, every type of baby seat, the entire Baby Einstiein DVD collection, and so many clothes that I could have dressed my baby in a different outfit every day. The baby stuff left my house long ago, but so did the money spent on stuff that was rarely or never used.

Ben is not as list-motivated or as vulnerable to marketing as I am, but he doesn’t like to get rid of stuff. In Morocco, there are a lot of things that are still not as available as they are here, and 40-50 years ago he had even less access to stuff. If someone in the posse had a soccer ball it was a big deal, and they played with it until it could no longer hold air. We probably have 15 soccer balls somewhere in this house. If I try to get rid of one, Ben sees it as an item with value and wants to hold onto it. The same goes for clothes…“someone in Morocco could use that.” He has all of his old college textbooks because they were a big investment. We were a lethal combination of 1 who buys (or USED TO buy) and 1 who can’t let go.

Stay tuned for Taking Up Space – Part 2…Gifts.