“For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven. A time to keep and a time to throw away.” Ecclesiastes 3:1, 6 (NLT)
Sometimes when a baby is expected people buy different types of books to record every new moment of the child’s life: a photo album, a book with fill-in-the-blanks for all baby’s firsts, and one for each of the years she spends in school. The intentions are good. To have a beautiful story to share one day of life during a time when she wasn’t even aware that it was happening yet. But as days get busy these books fill up only one-third of the way full. The rest of the pages are left with gaps and places for the young girl to fill in for herself.
Not the baby books my mom bought.
My mom had a gift of capturing every moment of my childhood through pictures and stories and notes. Through keeping pictures that hung in my room. Clothes she made me. My favorite dolls. All of my Barbies. Every dance costume I ever wore. The afghans that she used to cover me. Every page is full with no room to spare.
Now they all sit in crates in my garage waiting to be opened and remembered, to be given life, again.
This past weekend I began preparing for this new bundle of baby that lives with us now in a condensed state, but is coming to live with us in all of his or her fullness in October. I opened those crates for the first time in ages to see what maybe I could now say good-bye to.
Looking down into each crate was like falling into the hole Alice fell into with dark, deep forests and a wonderland at the bottom.
My mind took me back to that living room I stood in with orangish shag carpet, barely two years old, holding that baby doll that was “my baby” since my brother had just come home to be my mom’s baby for a while. I lifted up that doll, now thirty-three years later, and as she looked into my eyes there was peace. I suspect the peace I felt then – my wonderland.
As I put her back down into the crate I picked up a jersey from my sorority days in college. Peace quickly left as I remembered that insecure, fearful, lonely girl who wore it. It was as if the longer I held it the more I transformed back into her – my dark, deep forest.
I stood there opening each crate feeling the intense need to make room for a new life, the life that lives in me now and the life that I am now living, with an equally intense pull to not let go. To let go might mean to deny that any of it holds a part of me. Tells my story. Where would it go from here?
Nostalgia grabbed hold of me and even told me that maybe I should feel guilty for wanting to simplify.
What if I miss seeing those baby dolls faces one day? What if my child asks me about the days from my past, and I don’t have those sorority jerseys to share with him or her? What would my mom say as she looks down from above?
There is much to be said for simplifying life. For not buying a bigger house just to keep more stuff. For being free from all the clutter that already surrounds our physical and our mental every day.
But there’s a time to hold on, too. A time to keep, to remind your future where your past has been.
I made some room in those old crates for some new memories to make a home. I said good-bye to some pieces of me that I was ready to let go of, that no longer serve me well.
The others I held onto a little tighter. Maybe one day their time will come too. But it wasn’t this weekend. Maybe the weekend in ten more years.
When you clean out items from your past, how do you feel? Is it easy? Do you feel guilty?
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