All of this sorting through stuff has me on the hunt for the root cause of my mild case of hoarding. I have read through #Fearhunters by Noah Elias enough times to understand that most often when we are trying to figure out the root cause of something we should look to the child within. Not all of our issues are rooted in childhood, but most of the roots at least extend there. As I attacked the rest of my bathroom tonight, while holding yet another random, used toothbrush, I heard my mother’s voice ringing across the decades, “Hey, don’t throw that away, we might need it someday.” We might need a used toothbrush? Then I thought of all of the uses for a used toothbrush. I could use it to apply stain remover to clothes. I could also use it to clean the grout on my tile floors (but let’s be real – I am never going to clean the the grout on my floors!). I held that toothbrush in my hand for far too long before I tossed it in the trash.
Why do I feel a strong desire to keep things that might still have life in them? Because I grew up poor. And I don’t mean the type of poor where you didn’t get an X-Box for Christmas, I mean the kind of poor where you didn’t have food all the time. I grew up in a house where we saved the napkins from the pizza delivery guy because we might need to use them for toilet paper later. As a child my sister and I spent hours searching the desert for the prettiest rocks so that we could shine them up and sell them in our front yard for extra money. We lived a life filled with less, saving hot sauce packets from restaurants, and the plastic dish that the margarine came in. I might need this later. That is the number one reason that I don’t want to get rid of things. When you grow up without, and you are unsure if you will be able to replace something, you don’t throw it away. But I am not eight-years-old anymore. And I am not reliant on my mother to buy me a new toothbrush.
Another reason that I don’t like to get rid of stuff is because it makes me feel wasteful. Back to the shame-game that I have been trying to work through for years now. Throwing away things that still have life in them feels wasteful. I guess it doesn’t just feel wasteful, it is wasteful, at least that is the truth I grew up with. But I realize that I have three options – trash it, donate it, or keep it. With a goal of removing 1,000 things from my home, keeping it is out of the question. And I am pretty sure the Goodwill isn’t taking used toothbrushes, so I am left with door number one – trash it. While I am freeing up space in my home, I am piling on shame inside. That little girl inside of me is in awe of this grown woman who has come to a place in her life where she feels comfortable discarding things that she would have treasured decades ago. When you’ve used shampoo as soap, you cannot understand throwing away the last sliver of a bar of soap. When you have dried off with a wash rag, or worse yet, the dirty t-shirt you took off to get into the shower, you don’t throw away a towel because it has a little hole in it. Shame tells me that I must think I have arrived, it makes me feel like I think I am better than that little girl who sometimes brushed her teeth with her index finger because she didn’t have a toothbrush. Shame would like me to keep this stuff to appease the child within, while frustrating the woman that I am.
One more reason that I hold on to things is because someone gave them to me and I feel obligated to keep them. Last year for my birthday, one of my sisters made me some bath salts. She added oils and fragrance, and something pink so they looked pretty. This was a year and a half ago, and I put them on a shelf in my bathroom and forgot about them (mostly because she started making bath bombs and they were so amazing that I didn’t need the salts). The oils got old and the scent became stale. But they were a gift. And not just a gift, but a hand-made gift, and a gift that I really loved and wanted to use. I knew they were no longer worth keeping several months ago, but I could not bring my self to throw them away. Last month I actually poured some in my bath thinking that it wouldn’t be that bad. I added a few drops of essential oils to mask the musty smell and suffered through it. But that was never the intention of the gift-giver – that I would suffer through using this gift. She intended for me to enjoy the gift. When the gift no longer brings me joy, I think that the gift-giver would want me to remove it from my life. At least I have to believe that to make it through this process. Today, I brought home ten bath bombs, and I tossed those old bath salts.
It isn’t easy, parting with my stuff. It is emotional and it is bringing up some things I hoped I had worked through. This process would be a lot easier if someone else did it; if I could just hire someone to come in and throw away the first thousand things they saw that looked like trash. But this is about more than clearing space in my home, it is about clearing space in my heart, it is about healing the child within. I have not even begun to address the reasons why I brought all of this into my home in the first place. I feel the question lingering and I know that before these thousand things are gone I am going to have to answer it, but right now I have to keep focused on forward progress.
My total for the day was 129 things. The trash bag consisted of a half-used bottle of lotion that my daughter gave me, but I never really liked the scent; a Sonicare toothbrush that was a gift from a client years ago that I replaced with a different brand awhile back; three jars of bath salts; four slivers of soap in their scummy soap bags; several bobby pins and hair clips; an attachment to a blow dryer I threw away six months ago; two bottles of body wash that were mostly gone; two used razors that have been replaced; several hair products; and so much more! I placed all of the contents into garbage bags, and then took the box containing my first sixty-nine items, and bagged those up as well. Then my son helped me take them down to the garbage can at the end of our long driveway, and we put it out on the curb for the trash collector to take to the landfill in the morning. I cannot believe that I had 198 extra items in my bathroom taking up shelf and cupboard space, cluttering my life, threatening my sanity! I am a embarrassed to admit that all 198 items went to the landfill, but I would rather work through the shame than live with the clutter. I am beginning to understand what is meant by the age-old saying, less is more.
Uncommonly Common Mom 