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After I moved, my mother kept trying to get me to take boxes of my old childhood toys with me.
I told her to throw it away. I didn’t ask her to keep it, didn’t want it and didn’t have room for it.
When I finally had to deal with it, I learned a new appreciation for my mother and her sentimentality.
I sat on a bedroom floor full of childhood belongings and felt overwhelmed.
I was help my mother She moved from her three-story forever home to a 55+ condo community, and everything she salvaged from my childhood had to go.
She’d been trying to get me to take these things for years—baby dolls, Barbies, and monogrammed sweaters that I wore when I was seven.
“Next time you come home, we need to go through your stuff so you can take it with you,” she told me over and over to the point where it became a chorus.
In my mid-20s and early 30s, I bounced around a series small apartments in Manhattan which were about 600 square feet in size and had no room for boxes of toys. Not to mention, I didn’t ask her to keep any of it, and I really didn’t want any of it.
“Just throw it away,” was my refrain.
Years later, as I sat on my bedroom floor staring at the Victorian dollhouse I never wanted and a whole collection of Smurfs and Strawberry Shortcake figurines, I was quite stressed that she hadn’t just listened to me in the past.
I bought a large box of industrial garbage bags and got to work. While I was throwing away the shabby dolls, I also found old writing assignments from school and some of the first few magazines in which my writing was published.
I was glad she kept it. My behavior changed.
My mother was on the line older Boomerthe younger Silent Generation, and raised by older parents who had survived the Great Depression.
Like many people her age, she was raised frugal parents who learned to make much from little and ensure that everything lasts.
Her mother, my grandmother, spent her life tending a garden and ironing and reusing wrapping paper.
So I understand why my mother held on to anything that could ever be useful. She wasn’t a hoardershe was very organized and neat, she just had trouble saying goodbye to things.
However, I did not inherit her drive to save everything. Additionally, living in the constant change and change of New York changed the way I viewed sustainability.
Then my first favorite NYC restaurant turned over, and again and a few more times the sentimentality about objects faded before me.
When I came across old assignments and publications among my childhood toys, my feelings of stress and annoyance turned into a flood of love and gratitude.
My mother loved me enough to hold onto things that she thought were important and that reminded her of me.
I ended up throwing out all the junk toys and selling the rest. However, I kept the notebook she kept.
I don’t regret parting with toys that will never be of any use to me, but I now realize that she held on to many of those things as part of a dream I would never fulfill for her: becoming a grandmother.
I can’t do much about it, but I think so what life would have been like if I had taken that split.
Today, her Federal-style furniture is scattered throughout my 125-year-old New England home, where, after a few years in storage, it fits perfectly.
The Hitchcock rocking chair is the ideal seat in the corner of my bedroom. The family hope chest helps lift my fat cat onto the bed every night.
Even though she is no longer with me, it feels good to have a part of her in my home.
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