next time you decide to minimalize your wife’s football shaped jello molds that she was planning to use for your son’s birthday party… don’t!
related posts: note to self – scratch paper
note to self – jello molds
Previous post: two by two
Next post: lessons from the garbage dump
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I am enjoying reading all your posts from beginning to end (in case you are wondering how come I am leaving a reply for a 2008 post :) )
I admire you for taking this on, and for minimalizing everyone’s possessions in the process.
I went home to Romania a few years back and while there, decided to organize my mom’s pantry. See, my mom is in the “everything you might need in the kitchen” business, so you can imagine what her kitchen cabinets look like.
I finished everything in about 2 hours, the whole kitchen, and kept some basic rules, like the most used pans, even if in terrible shape, keep them, keep one more or less of the similar ones, and get rid of items that you can only use for one thing.
It looked great, so great that you could feel the energy moving with so much more ease.
Well, my mom had a completely different reaction, even if she was very into the idea when I started.
She burst into tears… and at that point I was so confused.
I was visiting after a long time, my mom was crying, I could not take things back, they were long gone to the dump… so I started talking to her as much as I could, trying to fight the “what the hell!??!” feeling.
I was so humbled to understand her pain. She came from a poor family, with 9 brothers and sisters, she didn’t have much when she grew up… To her, accumulating all that stuff was comforting, it meant success, it represented her work of a lifetime.
I am the opposite really, and have been ever since I moved out of my parents place and started creating the space for being myself, but having lived in both worlds, Eastern Europe, and USA… I understand her.
I learned to let everyone take care of their own stuff. I support them, encourage them, guide them… and that way they make their own progress real.
Ok… back to reading.
Great stuff!
Isn’t it weird how opposite we sometimes are to our parents? I hope my baby boy doesn’t become the opposite of me… well, not in the anti-stuff way. I definately don’t follow in my parent’s fashions… Anyone else experience this?
When you mess with someone else’s kitchen, keep the purged “garbage” boxed up someplace until it passes the time test. I can’t remember what the most popular time test is, but a year is reasonable for just about everything. (Turkey roasters at least fall under the special case of skipping a year, especially if yours was an expensive or vintage type.)
My jello mold collection is also wall art. I can be a little less precious about the “living” aspect because most pieces are in the category of if I lose them, I can re-collect them easily enough.
I’m just reading through your blog from the beginning, so I’m a little late…
I’ve been renovating for almost 2 years and the mess has gotten to me so much, I’m purging all my stuff now that we’re pretty well done.
The other day I was working through the kitchen and had a pile by the door. My husband came home and freaked on me that I was getting rid of some canning pots and cake pans. Neither of us has ever canned in our lives and he doesn’t bake…but he was insistent that he wanted to keep the canning pots because it was on his list of things he wants to try. I’ve had these pots for 20 years and they were my mothers before they were mine. In order to keep the peace, the pots are staying and the pans are going. It’s such a fine line to tread when one of you is ready to minimize your stuff and the other isn’t.