A couple of friends and I are at a similar, practical juncture right now. We find ourselves caretaking some of our young adult children’s stuff, but we’re spending a lot of time right now wondering why.
One friend recently moved. You know how moving is: You think you don’t have that much stuff, but somehow, emptying the closets and the attic, stuff expands almost magically, like all those clowns piling out of a Volkswagen. The move included 40 boxes of photos from her two—now grown--children’s youth, as well as other boxes with their artwork organized and labeled by year, and their schoolwork and report cards. She’s been trying to get one of her children to go through this paraphernalia with her, to help identify what to keep and what to let go. Her son says, “I’m not really interested in that stuff, Mom. Just throw it out.”
Yet she observes a particular kind of delight when one of them actually does encounter something from their personal past. “Oh, look!” “I remember this!” And, as a result of encountering that artifact, other memories and stories bubble up. It tends to make everybody feel good.
So my friend is at a crossroads. She doesn’t want to be stuck caretaking, storing, looking after the evidence of her children’s childhood. She can easily identify the things in there that she treasures (but let’s note that that would still require a lot of time and energy sifting and considering—two little-acknowledged labor-intensive and time-consuming tasks). But she wants her own children to care enough about this work of keeping, caretaking, and cataloguing that she has done to venture through it now and select those items that they will want to share with their own children or grandchildren, nieces and nephews, or kids in the neighborhood. This would credit her keeping, caretaking, and cataloguing efforts with meaning, the meaning she imagined when she undertook this project.
But when there’s no buy-in from the kids, it feels like, “What am I, a maroon? I painstakingly schlep this shit from location to location, protecting it from water damage and cat urine. Why? What’s the point?” Because I think many of us, my friend and I certainly included, want to do some other stuff. Now that we’re older, we have some personal goals we’d like to realize, and freeing up the time and space, and emotional and mental energy that goes into caretaking memorabilia could allow forward movement on those personal projects.
Our generation bridges two pretty different generations on either side of us: our parents, who were impacted either directly or indirectly by a powerful Depression-era mentality; and our kids who are part of a generation more comfortable with quick disposal of “old” things and immediate replacement with new things. My own parents displayed potent Depression-era mentality. “That’s a perfectly good ________ (fill in the blank: little piece of string; rubberband; pencil stub; etc.). I’ll just put it in the drawer with the other ____________ (pencil stubs; rubberbands; little pieces of string; etc.).” I may not go that far personally, but memorabilia, particularly of my children’s accomplishments—I can’t help it, they have value to me, my instincts point me toward keeping them. Ultimately, the two generations we’re bridging are pretty unbridgeable in this respect.
I recently engaged in a thought experiment, though, that’s giving me pause about the whole question. My older sons have a lot of sailing trophies from their youth. I know they all enjoyed their time spent sailing, and these trophies seem not only reminders of accomplishments, but of cherished good times. The trophies are on a pine cabinet in my house. They collect dust, they take up space, and they add to a general feeling of congestion. I asked each of them if they wanted the trophies. One son had one trophy, and he wanted me (!) to keep it for him. (Notice how we landed back at square one here?) The other two sons said, “Throw them out. Who wants that stuff?”
I haven’t been able to throw them out yet. AARRRGGHH!! But I played this future scenario out in my mind:
I box up the trophies and put them in a closet because I don’t want them crowding up the joint any more. After I die, my kids--going through the stuff that they were loath to go through when I was still breathing—open the box of trophies. “Oh, look. Sailing trophies.” Then they close up the box again, and give it to Good Will or toss it in the trash.
What am I? A maroon?