Minimalist or Not

On Friday I decided it was time to start going through the boys room to get rid of unwanted and unloved things and pack up the items that they are going to keep. Since we are moving into our new home in two weeks, it has been recommended by both my mom and mother-in-law to go through all of our belongings and get rid of the stuff we no longer need or use. 

“You don’t want to bring all of your crap to your new home. A new home will allow you to have a new beginning. Start fresh, without all the junk. In the long run it will help you to feel less stressed.” I hear my mom saying.

Lately, I have been playing with the idea of becoming more of a minimalist. After I finished reading “Goodbye, Things” by Fumio Sasaki, I felt empowered to get rid of everything. Then I thought about it. The reality of getting rid of everything made me feel uneasy. I personally can’t imagine moving into a 200 square foot studio apartment with our two kids and two dogs having only one bed, one towel, one cup and one plate. So I researched minimalism a little more and discovered that I don’t have to get rid of everything, that there are indeed variations of minimalism. 

What I can get rid of are the things that we don’t use and don’t need, donating the items so that they can be used by someone who does need or want them. Clearing out the clutter will help me to get rid of some of the angst and those dreaded feelings of being overwhelmed with stuff. It seems the more things that we have the more things that we have to put away and clean, which is often the battle in this house and I don’t want to fight that battle in our new home.

I started with the boys room, because they were at school. In the past any attempt I’ve made to get rid of anything of their’s proved to be very difficult. They want to keep everything, including broken toys and other various pieces of trash. Everything seems to be a treasure. They might be considered borderline hoarders. If I allowed it, they would never get rid of anything. So it was highly recommended by my mom to go through their bedroom while they weren’t home so that I could actually make some progress. I found that it would be best to do it while they were at school and due to time constraints I didn’t get as far as I would have liked to either.

I never considered how hard it would be for me to go through their toys. Some things were incredibly easy to get rid of, anything that was broken or missing pieces, was immediately trashed. Anything that they haven’t thought of or touched in the past year, went into the donation pile. Also any toys that I didn’t consider worth keeping went in the donation pile. Things that I struggled with were things that they had as babies, that were good quality nice toys and reminded me of good memories I had of them as babies and toddlers. At one point the thought of getting rid of their baby toys became so overwhelming to me, that I decided to take a break and call my best friend. 

I can’t remember the last time I had talked to her and thought the conversation would help to steer me away from what I was currently experiencing, those feelings of struggling to let go of my babies. I did, I felt like by getting rid of the baby toys I was getting rid of my babies, which when I write this now, sounds completely ridiculous. I thought that my best friend would provide a good distraction and while I was on the phone with her I would continue to go through the toys and make better decisions since I wasn’t completely focused on the memories of the toys, more focused on the aspect of whether it was played with or not. Well that proved to not work at all. Instead I sat and talked to my best friend for over an hour. It was her birthday and like I said I hadn’t talked to her in ages. 

It was after I got off the phone with her, that I began to approach the boys toys again and realized that I couldn’t get rid of some of the toys that they have been clearly done playing with for some time now. All of which were wooden toys, a set of trucks, a car carrier with four brightly painted cars, and a truck carrier with a digger and steam roller, also a shape sorter house, along with two trains, and also a pull toy that included numbered and lettered blocks. I think I had such a hard time getting rid of these wooden toys because they were of such good quality and they were attached to wonderful memories of the boys when they were babies and toddlers. I sat there stuck, not sure what to do. The boys honestly had not played with any of those toys in a long time probably over a year, but I felt attached to them in some way. 

So I did what I always do, when I don’t know what to do, I called my mom. She suggested that I pack up the toys in a box, and prepare them for storage. She suggested that maybe I wasn’t quite ready to get rid of the toys and that was okay. “It’s not like you will have nowhere to store them. The home you’re moving into has plenty of storage.” She then reminded me how she had hung onto some of my baby toys and the boys were able to play with them when they were babies. With her telling me that, I was reminded of playing with her toys when I was a kid. My grandma let me play with my mom’s porcelain tea sets and her Barbie Dolls who had outfits that my grandma had sewn for her.

“You don’t have to get rid of those toys, especially if they’re good quality toys and they mean something to you. Maybe someday when you have grandchildren, you can get those toys back out and tell your grandkids and your grown boys stories of the time when they once played with them.” 

With that I felt better about the situation and finally gained some momentum, packing up a box that will stay in storage and finished getting rid of all the “plastic cheap shit” that they no longer play with. 

So maybe I’m not much of a minimalist. But I am trying to minimize some of the stuff we have. Yes, we are moving into a home that is two and half times the size of our current home, but that doesn’t mean we have to fill it full of junk. I want to be wise in my purchase decisions and make sure that we only buy things that we need or truly love and will make good use of. I think that’s why I’m struggling with what to get the boys for Christmas. But that is an entirely different story.