Tag Archives: heirlooms

Decluttering Wars: Mother vs. Daughter

By Claire Posted in Clutter, downsizing, Retirement, Simpler Living, Small-House Living Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Donna is in the midst of decluttering her entire house before she sells it and moves to a smaller house in a better climate, a big change that she promised herself she would make once her kids were on their own.

Naturally, some items are harder to get rid of than others. One category she has really struggled with is her family’s collection of movies. She estimates she has more than 200 videotapes that her children once loved (she’s afraid to count them because it might be even more than 200). The idea of giving up these tapes is very hard for her.

To Donna, these videotapes represent happy times when her kids were still home. Even though she often complained at the time about hearing the same songs and dialogue over and over again, they are now fond memories. Since her daughter Esmé is the mother of her two grandchildren, she finally made the tough decision to call Esmé and tell her that the family’s precious videotape collection would soon be hers.

The phone call ended in tears: Donna’s tears. After she made her big announcement to Esmé, she noticed that Esmé didn’t sound very excited about it. So Donna sweetened the pot by saying she would bring the videos over as soon as she could pack them up, instead of having Esmé come to get them. That’s when Esmé responded, “Well, Mom, to be honest, I don’t have the room for them, and we don’t really need them. We stream a lot of stuff for the kids, and we can always rent a movie online and the kids can watch it for three days in a row, if they want.”

Donna couldn’t believe her ears. How could Esmé be so callous about these tapes that were once so important to her? Donna ended the call and then burst into tears.

This scene is being replayed in various forms every day. Boomer parents are finally downsizing, giving up things they’ve kept for far too long, and they want to make sure everything goes where it will be appreciated. But their millennial adult children don’t always want what they’re being given. Who’s to blame? The parents or their offspring?

It’s not a matter of blame: it’s a matter of expectations. The parents value certain items because of their sentimental value, or because they’ve been considered heirlooms in their families. But their children don’t want the items because they hold no sentimental value for them. In many cases, they don’t have the room for them, either. (Donna certainly knows that hundreds of videotapes take up a lot of space!)

These conflicting desires cause trouble in families. Ironically, if the parents weren’t making the effort to downsize their lives, their children would someday have to deal with all of these items when their parents move to a nursing home or pass away. But that may be the answer for some families: the parents keep the items, and after they’re gone, their kids can throw everything in a dumpster and hope Mom and Dad aren’t spinning in their graves.

On the other hand, young adults don’t usually realize that someday they may place greater value on where they came from and the people who loved them when they were small. They may find themselves wishing for something tangible to hold on to from those loved ones. But if they succeeded in refusing all such items years earlier, they’ll be out of luck.

Donna needs to consider Esmé’s opinion of the videotapes without taking it personally, and Esmé needs to understand that the tapes remind her mother of her children’s joy when they were young. Each will have to cut the other some slack. Perhaps Donna can think of something else to give Esmé from her childhood that she still values and that Donna also treasured.

Ultimately, we must always remember that relationships are more important than things.

Decluttering, Denial, and Grief

By Claire Posted in Clutter, downsizing, Simpler Living Tagged , , , , , ,

(The first of three posts on Decluttering and Denial.)

I was in 7th grade when my gym teacher’s young daughter died of leukemia. Everyone in my community felt so sorry for him and his family. After a few years, a rumor got around that he had not allowed his daughter’s bedroom to be changed in any way since her death. To us kids, that was spooky.

Now, as an adult, I get it. Most grieving people need a certain amount of time (which varies greatly depending on the person) before they can give up their late loved one’s belongings. Most people can do it within a few months (sometimes they’re forced to by circumstances), but then there are people like Edna and Henry, who I wrote about in Downsizing Your Life for Freedom, Flexibility and Financial Peace. They lost their mothers in the same year and brought many of their belongings into their own home. Those belongings still fill every nook and cranny of their home, thirty years later.

Denial is actually a stage of grief. It takes a while to accept that someone is gone. One way our minds cope with the fact is to deny it. Denial is a temporary stage. But keeping all of our loved one’s belongings helps prolong the denial and assuage the grief, for a while.

After the initial shock of the loss is past, some people are able to move on by going through their loved one’s belongings, keeping the most precious items, and sending the rest to places where they’ll be appreciated (a concept I emphasize in both How to Clean Out Your Parent’s House (Without Filling Up Your Own) and The Sentimental Person’s Guide to Decluttering.) This is only possible when you reach the point where you truly understand that keeping all of a late loved one’s belongings cannot erase the pain of losing them.

Sharing those items with others helps a grieving person heal. Making someone’s clothes into quilts, pillows or stuffed animals is one way of sharing a tangible memory of a late loved one with others, and helps both the giver and the recipient to heal from the grief.

Sometimes keeping a late loved one’s belongings lets you avoid making a decision about your future. Someone might have a dream of retiring to a condo near a beach someday, but they say they can’t, because what would they do with all of the heirloom furniture left to them by their parents years ago? When you allow inanimate objects to dictate where you can live, consider if you aren’t using them as an excuse to keep you from making a decision that you’re afraid to make.

It’s OK to Give Up Birthday and Christmas Gifts

By Claire Posted in Clutter, downsizing, My Books, Simpler Living, Small-House Living Tagged , , , , , , ,

Often, after a birthday, or the holidays, we’re left with more goodies than we really need. That’s why we need to go through the gifts we received, deciding which are keepers and which need to be moved along, so we can remain clutter-free, or at least somewhat clutter-free.

Of course, some gifts are absolute keepers: the scarf your daughter knitted for you, a book you’ve been wanting to read, a bottle of your favorite wine. But what of those gifts of a more generic variety? Items like:

  • A shower kit with a cheap plastic “loofa” and bubble-gum scented shower gel,
  • A box of cheese and sausage snacks from someone who isn’t close enough to you to know you’re vegetarian, or
  • A sweater (with no gift receipt or tags) in a color combo that hasn’t been popular since the 1980s.

These gifts are easy to pass along to someone who you know will want them, or to simply donate to a thrift store or charity that takes items to resell. Make the time to do that now, rather than move them around for the next few months before you finally become fed up and do something with them.

Then there are the wonderful gifts which replace something you already owned. For instance, someone once gave me a lovely pair of woolen slippers. They were sturdy, practical and quite expensive, I later learned. So why did it take me months to start wearing them and to throw out my old, ratty slippers? Emotional attachment is the best explanation, I suppose. But I tripped over the box containing the new pair for ages before I finally made myself do the trade and pitch the old pair.

Duplicate gifts are a bit easier to deal with. If you received two of something, and it’s not consumable, share one with someone else you know who might need it, or pass it along. Why try to make space for it when you already have one?

As you go through your gifts and decide which are keepers and which need to go, let the momentum that builds up carry you along so that you take anything else you happen to see that’s no longer useful to you and move it along, too. You’ll be surprised how that momentum works.

If you need help making the tough decisions about which gifts to keep and which gifts to get rid of, see my book, The Sentimental Person’s Guide to Decluttering for tips on moving along a variety of gifts, including heirlooms and expensive gifts.