Stuff, Bittersweet Stuff

Stuff. We get rolled under our stuff. Never is that more apparent than when we are forced to move, or to paint a bedroom. You look at a kid's bedroom and you think, "There isn't all that much stuff in there, he's just a kid." And three days later, after you've been sitting on the floor going through the endless junk in his closet and bureau and bookcases, after you've found the tiny knit cap they plopped on his blonde head the day he was born, after you've found the two lost and expensive library books he incorporated into his bookcase and those long-lost lecture scripts you were dumb enough to put in one of his Spiderman folders, you realize that we all accumulate stuff, a bit here a bit there, until there is so much it takes three full days to sort, organize, give away, and/or toss it all.

Bill decided to give Phoebe's room a makeover, and Saturday morning waay too early, considering we had had a gig the night before, he began moving her stuff out into our living room. Liam was sad. Nobody was making over his room. So in a fit of equality, I decided to get new carpet for him as well as Phoebe. Which, I realized a little too late, meant that both of their rooms would have to be emptied. I thought it would save money to have the installers do two rooms at once. I did not fully appreciate what we were getting into. Bill worked like a dog to get Phoebe's room painted, all four walls a different bright color (!)

I'm waiting for the installers right now, and they had jolly well better show up this morning, because four days of living with two bedrooms' worth of stuff jammed into our living room has been about four days too many. It looks like something you'd see on COPS, clothes draped on everything, stacks and boxes of junk...arggggggh

and I have been bereft, inwardly wailing like a banshee wandering the moors, unable to settle when my house is upside down. It reminds me of the mood I was in when our kitchen renovation took 4 1/2 months. When I was cooking on a hotplate in the living room, all our food in boxes.

But these are the things you do when you make two more people and work them into your world. Their stuff becomes your stuff, becomes your problem to keep or dispose of. I sat on the floor doing children's book triage, separating the wheat from the chaff, smiling as I remembered stanza after stanza of those perfectly worded bits from Miss Rumphius and Goodnight Moon and The Napping House and The Polar Express and all the Beatrix Potter books and yes, Where the Wild Things Are; they are all there, now boxed and labeled in the basement, along with two big boxes full of Thomas the Tank Engine books and puzzles and three huge totes of trains and tracks. Things that served us well, things I realize with bittersweet pain that he's never going back to, not until he makes another person and works that person into his world.

And that will be all too soon.