My refrigerator is leaning, weighed down with so many masterpieces 5-year old Dylan has created.
This is not a problem, because it is socially OK that the fridge and your child's room are a museum to unidentifiable crafts. Creations that fall under the "Could you please tell me about this?" category since you have no idea what the heck your little angel just brought home.
So that is OK, but for the rest of the house I sport grave concerns.
I readily admit -- I am a pack rat who lives from pile to pile. This has become a huge challenge as Dylan is now in school every day and his backpack is overflowing with treasures; and I must decide keep it or pitch it.
This will require a complete change in behavior from me. My closet has sports clothes I used to wear before I became a mom, never mind that they are now about six years out of style and four sizes too big. These clothes are kind of like almost-forgotten friends -- maybe you haven't talked to them in 10 years, but that doesn't mean you don't care about them in some distant way.
So stuff comes home with Dylan, and I can't REALLY decide what to do. I want to keep it for his dad to see, and then I spy it the next morning, so I put it in a pile. Make a decision at a later date, that never comes... if I were to die tomorrow, you'd find mole and gopher mounds of preschool stuff hiding in various drawers because someday it might be important, to whom I am not sure.
So I need to exterminate (aka "The letting go process.") It's time to come to grips that Dylan probably won't care how he progressed writing every letter of the alphabet, which I've kept so far. I will keep the first little cap he wore home from the hospital; but it's not necessary to keep every T-shirt he's outgrown. I can keep the profile he wrote of me for Mother's Day where he said I spend most of my time running, I don't like junk food and I look my best while wearing my PJs (go figure!) But I can get rid of most every Crayola picture he's drawn where I am featured.
It's important because Dylan's got a 50-50 chance to get my messiness or his father's organizational skills. When I first saw Tim's closet I almost cried. Everything was hanging up -- shirts all facing the same way, perfectly spaced. When Tim first saw my closet, not much was even hanging. Piles abounded, and a laundry basket was overflowing. Curious, probably because he never had this problem, Tim dug to the bottom of the basket to find clothes that had been there for weeks -- OK, months -- wadded so tight you could launch them in a forward pass and knock someone out cold.
When he was courting me, this was "character," but now it's a trait neither of us wants Dylan to have. So now it's literally time to clean house. I'm waging a war on the clutter -- I hope I don't get injured tripping on all the piles as I wage it!