Our New Faith

It was something our minister said recently, that she has to have faith that throwing away something will not ruin her happiness.

Mama and I are very sentimental (read "pack rats"), instant gratification-seeking (read "I want it now") kind of people. We find throwing things away very, very difficult. Just ask my mom, who will tell you that I kept plates and napkins from birthday parties (and ask me how she must have stealthily snuck in to cull my collection often!). Our approach has been not to bring stuff into the house, so we don't have to decide to throw it out. But, with kids and Christmas, and our own natural tendencies, this approach isn't working.

We've been cleaning out our basement and throwing out a lot of things, giving away a lot of things. And each item is hard, some harder than others. Recently, we got rid of several side tables and two stuffed animals. This was gut-wrenching. One of the little tables, Mama had had before me, and I had taken a fancy to it and we'd used it for years, pre-kids. But it had gotten relegated to the basement because it wasn't practical or sturdy and, for awhile, I've known it wasn't the kind of table we'd ever put back upstairs. And we'd even found, at some point, side tables that matched it. A whole set (for those of you who haven't seen our house, nothing matches so to have matching furniture was a big deal). But just not us anymore, I thought. And so we decided to give it away. And then decided to wait. And then to take it. They finally all went on Sunday.

Along with a gigantic stuffed purple teddy bear named "Astro Grape Jelly the Purple Cosmic Bear" that I had won at Astroworld in 1988, when I was in high school on a visit with friends. I won it in one of those bean bag tic tac toe games and was so proud. It went everywhere with us that day, and has travelled around the country to my various abodes since. But it was showing its age and was, no doubt, made of materials that are no longer considered kid-friendly. Several times in the last several years, I'd gotten it as far as the car to take it away, but it always came back. Sis had considered getting attached to it when Bud claimed our giant "Mr Big Pengy" for himself, and this made us both nervous. We really didn't want her playing with this big, dirty, old bear, however much it held a sentimental place in both of our hearts (Mama has lugged this bear around the country with me). And so, taking one last picture of it, it went on Sunday, too. And no doubt, in 30 years, Sis will blog about how I got rid of her bear. And I did, I gave it away, but, honey, it was for your own good. And mine.

Our kids, of course, are quite an impetus in de-cluttering our house, but in their own way they have created so much of the clutter. There are boxes and boxes of their sweet little clothes and shoes in the basement, plus boxes and boxes of their baby toys. If we cleaned those up, pared it down even by half, we'd have so much more room. And we've told ourselves that our reward for doing so will be to finish half the basement, which we both desperately want. We're a long way from that reward, which is good because we have a roof to pay off first.

Why this attachment to stuff, we mused while moving it around the basement this weekend. Misplaced love? Overdeveloped sentimentality? Fear? And so we keep going back to what our minister, who is also a pack rat, said: we need to have faith that giving away the tables and the teddy bear and all the other things, even if they aren't broken and just because we don't use them and probably won't and especially if we don't even like them anymore, won't in the end dramatically affect our happiness. We won't miss them or decide down the road that we should have kept them. Even if we do decide that we made a mistake and should have kept something, it's just a thing, in the end. Our worlds won't collapse, nothing will end. It helps that we know, in many cases, that other people can use these things. And it keeps us from acquiring more. Because we've learned that keeping these things does affect us--we worry about space, we fret about clutter, we are concerned about being neurotic, we're tired of moving it all around and cleaning it all up. We have better things to do. Though, we both know, this is a lifelong challenge for us and we'll have to keep fighting the urge to keep.

So, we have a sleeper sofa in good condition--you can have it for free if you come and get it.