I’m getting the stuff out of my dad’s basement: my old stuffed animals (which need to air out for a few months before they go to a child) and boxes and boxes of things I loved when I was younger, before I had to be careful of how much stuff I had.
I’ve been through the stuffed animals and the bag of clothes. I don’t know how those clothes got to the basement — they should have gone to goodwill ages ago. But I’m glad, because there are a couple of baby clothes that I was thinking of the other day that I’d like to keep for my baby if I could find them again. Hopefully it’ll be a girl…though I would kind of like my daughter(s) to have at least one big brother.
The stuffed animals are more difficult. I have never been able to shake the childish feeling that anything shaped like a living creature has feelings and can hear and see what goes on around it. I still sometimes have trouble eating animal crackers; I can’t suppress a twinge of guilt, as if the damn cookie is aware by virtue of having been cut into that shape. It’s absolutely ridiculous, and it drives me batshit crazy.
The process of admitting that some of my stuffed animals are unwanted and putting them in a bag for Goodwill is made even more difficult by two things: the knowledge that they throw out some things if they don’t think they will sell or if they’re not in good condition (I hate destruction and can’t stand the thought of stuffed animals, especially mine, in a landfill), and a nightmare I had when I was 4 or 5 involving one particular bunny that rose from the floor every time I entered the living room of the townhouse we lived in at the time. I’m 30 goddamn years old and I’m still just a little afraid of the damn thing, as if it felt the years I kept it in the corner of my closet (and then in the basement) or would know that I don’t want it, which is not as easy to admit as you might expect, or would be able to do anything to me if it did. There are reasons why I don’t watch horror movies.
But it’s in the pile with the holiday animals, which I still haven’t completely decided on giving to Goodwill…I probably won’t, I think now, which makes only a couple of stuffed animals that will be given away. I don’t really have space for many stuffed animals, but I will later, and I would rather they be given to my own child than another’s. Even if my kids are likely to destroy them, which will be hard to watch.
And now: to go through the rest of the stuff.
My notebooks from when I was a teenager make me cringe all over. I read through some of them when I was downstairs, and I have a dilemma. Do I throw them out so no one can ever read them and discover (or be reminded, if they knew me then) what a damned fool I was? Or do I keep them for such time as I might have a teenage daughter who needs to know that her mom went through the same things (or, hopefully, that her mom was dumber than she is)?
I wrote constantly from the ages of 15 to about 19, and there are at least three boxes containing my journals and notebooks. I want to cut the used pages out of the nicer ones, but I’m afraid to write more in them because I might look back in ten years and cringe anew. And anyway, I’d much prefer to type.
So the question is: am I ever going to need them? I don’t really think so. And if I don’t need them and I don’t want them, there’s no reason to keep them.
But I’m still not quite ready to throw them out.
Nettabird 