Declutter Despair

Let me be clear right from the beginning: I love my husband. I do. We've only been married three years but in that time I have discovered that there is a lot of truth in the saying "opposites attract". We are so different in so many ways. We follow different football teams, which makes for some interesting winter weekends when our teams are battling each other; we have diametrically opposite ways of dealing with drama in our lives, I can be a drama queen, he just says “get over it”; I am musical, he is not; I have hobbies, he does not. I don't need to go on. The difference that gives me the most grief though, the thing that will make me retreat to another room and refuse to discuss it, is that I am sentimental about my stuff: very sentimental. He is not. To him, if something hasn’t been used for three months, it has no business being in our house.

When I hear him groan as he opens a cupboard or walks into the spare room and utters those dreaded words, "do we need it?" and "we need to declutter", part of me starts to seriously reconsider having made the decision to make my life with him.

And when I look for something that I need and find it has mysteriously disappeared (been thrown out because he didn’t know what it was or what it was used for) I start to lose it. And it is not pretty.

But seriously, he is right. I have been collecting “stuff” all my life. My mother was a hoarder and cleaning out her house when she passed away was a nightmare. I don’t want to have to visit that particular pain on anyone else in my family. Being a hoarder, she clearly decided that I needed to understand the importance of never, ever, under pain of being eternally haunted by her aggrieved spirit, throwing out anything that she had given me. This included of course everything from both of my grandmothers.

So when the question is inevitably asked “Why do we have so many ramekins?”, the answer is of course “I need them, they were Grandma’s”. Or, “You haven’t used the bread maker for over a year” causes me to cringe, not just at the truth of it but at the thought of actually not having it on the bench in case I do have an overwhelming desire to bake bread at some nebulous time in the future.

<sigh>

I hear your gasps of disbelief and I understand. I really do. I am not a hoarder to anywhere near the level of my mother but I have started to become more aware of how much useless stuff I really own and ask myself “When did I use this last”? Often the answer is “last century” and clearly I can’t keep holding on to it. My challenge is getting myself to the position of being able to say “Okay, I can allow that to go now”.

I am proud to be able to declare right now Grandma’s ramekins have gone. The contents of the boxes and boxes of my mother’s belongings that I insisted on keeping in storage for three years have either now been sold or given to charity. I am, I think, I hope, getting better at this decluttering business. There is actually a sense of relief in many cases: there’s the knowledge that the thing that I have been holding on to, allowing to gather dust, is now being loved and used for its intended purpose by someone else.

There are of course some non-negotiable items. My non-musical husband would really like to see my piano head out the door. I have explained that when we inevitably downsize into a smaller home, whatever else moves with us, the piano is coming as well.

Yes, we need to be ready when we finally decide to move. Yes, I understand that we can’t think about what to discard when we’re in the process of packing up.

So, my aspiration now is to open at least one cupboard or drawer a day and select something or even more than one something that I can find a way to live without. Clearly I'm not going to be suddenly a better person for it, but living with less can't be such a bad thing, surely.