It Was Time to Get Rid of the Baby Clothes I Had Been Saving
I had resisted for way too long.
It’s not news that clutter and just having too much STUFF has been an ongoing issue for me for… awhile. I think it was always kind of an issue, but something that I was able to stay on top of, but then once I had a kid it just got a bit out of hand. There was the regular clutter, and then there was all the baby and kid stuff, and then there was all the baby stuff that I was holding on to because there seemed to be an infinitesimal chance that we might be having another kid. And getting rid of it all felt so fraught that I just kept avoiding it.
Before I go any further I also just want to say: yes, I am aware of all of the discourse around not making a moral judgment on having a messy or cluttered house, and I know that being “neat” and “organized” is not a sign of being a better person. Where I am coming from is that the clutter makes me feel stressed out and overwhelmed and makes it hard for me to focus because I feel like I’m being literally suffocated by the amount of stuff that I have. And every time I try to get organize — whether by giving stuff away or selling it or trying to come up with some system — it seems to just come back, often worse than before, like some kind of black mold that you just can’t get rid of.
There are really two buckets of things: old, nostalgic things, like letters my mom wrote me at camp or photo albums filled with pictures of kids in my freshman year dorm who I haven’t seen or spoken to in at least 15 years; and new things, like clothes and books and bags and just all the STUFF that seems necessary when I buy it and then more often than not ends up sitting in a pile in the corner of my office. The former category is not really surprising, if you know that I have a master’s degree in History, and — just to psychoanalyze myself for a moment here, bear with me — I love historical artifacts and primary sources, and sometimes I think I keep things around because they’re kind of like primary sources on my own life. Yes, this is vaguely narcissistic, but they’re my memories in physical form, and we don’t create as many physical memories now! People don’t write letters back and forth to their friends at other colleges anymore! They don’t take notes in notebooks! So imagine all of those objects, compounded with all of the STUFF of my current parenthood life, and… you see the problem, right?
I’ve tried Marie Kondo’s whole “does this bring you joy” philosophy, and it doesn’t really work for me, because a lot of the things actually do bring me joy but are completely impractical to keep around forever, because I do not live in a mansion and/or have unlimited storage (imagine if I did, though?!). I finally decided that a more useful rubric for me is, does this thing still serve me? So this was where I was coming from the other day, when I took out the under-bed storage container that held all of Henry’s baby clothes that I had been saving. I had gotten rid of a ton already, mostly giving them away to other people with babies because that is the circle of baby clothes life — people give you bags and bags of them before you give birth and you think, wow, how kind and generous of them!, and then once you actually have a baby who outgrows their clothes in a matter of weeks you realize, yes that was indeed kind and generous of them, but also GET THESE CLOTHES OUT OF MY FACE, and you give them to another unsuspecting pregnant person. But there were a few special items that I had actually bought or people had given as gifts that I really loved, and those were the ones I had kept, because there was always that possibility that we would have another kid and I would want them, in addition to having all of the circle-of-life clothes, to have the adorable things I had dressed their older brother in.
So the storage bin took up extremely valuable space under our bed — I say valuable because this house has BASICALLY zero storage. Most houses in California do not have basements because of earthquakes, so the logical place where you store all that crap when you grow up in a place that is not California does not exist, and we don’t have a garage because at some point in the last 40 years it was converted into an extra room that is now Matt’s office1, and we store some stuff in there but it’s just a big open space and he needs room to like, move in it, so it can’t really be a full-on storage area. There are two small walk-in closets in the house, one in Henry’s bedroom and one in his playroom, where we keep some things, but they don’t fit enough, and the closet in our bedroom is a reach-in that is literally bursting at the seams. My kingdom for an attic, she said!
I took out the bin. It was dusty, because no one ever cleans under the bed, and I opened it up. It was a motherlode of really cute baby clothes, from newborn stuff to around size 3T. (Apparently I just stopped saving stuff once he got bigger? Lol.) Every onesie I picked up was smaller than the last and I had that pang-y feeling of like, wait, he was really that small once? He doesn’t even seem THAT big now, but he was SO SUPER TINY!
I separated everything into size piles and posted it on a couple of kids’ clothes reselling groups on Facebook. Some of it sold, some didn’t. I briefly contemplated putting everything up on Poshmark but decided it was too much work, and am in the process of giving the rest of them away.
I’m not going to pretend that it wasn’t more than a little emotional to get rid of these clothes; it felt like I was really closing the door on having another kid, even though I was basically there already. But weirdly, once it was done, I felt more free than sad. The clothes had been keeping me almost subconsciously in a limbo that I no longer felt comfortable existing in. Now that they’re gone, I can move on. The rest of my house is waiting.
It’s one of those extremely frustrating spaces where you’re like, if they had just spent maybe $5,000 more this would have been a much more functional space, but instead they cheaped out and it’s just this big open probably unpermitted tiled-floor space with no insulation or climate control or storage. Like would it have killed them to put in a closet? Just one? Or even spent like, $20,000 and put in a bathroom? I realize both of these figures are a lot of money but they clearly spent something on this garage conversion and to just not go all the way REALLY CHAPS MY ASS.
My husband is in the military so we move every few years. It makes it really hard to hang on to things when I’m worried about exceeding our moving weight allowance or that it’ll get ruined in the move. I feel like we purge so much stuff on both ends of a move but there is still so much stuff.
Lucky for me, my dear MIL is an amazing quilter. She turned all those special onesies (like the ones people decorated at our baby shower) into a quilt. It’s so sweet to see my now 4 year old cuddled up with it.
Aww, I think I need to clear out the baby stuff too because I am feeling like we're likely not going to have a 2nd. We adopted our first and would need to adopt a 2nd. We're on the older side of things and we don't have the money to move ahead with the adoption of another. So we likely aren't but I still can't fully let go. I applaud you for getting rid of that stuff. You've inspired me and made me feel less alone. Thank you.