De-nesting
When I was in hard labor with my third child, I remember the visceral need to vacuum, change the sheets, rearrange the furniture, followed by the need to do it all again after I took a shower and took inventory of all the baby clothes in the house. It didn’t matter that it was 1:41 a.m. Nor that my contractions were five minutes apart and that I should have been packing for the hospital. Nope, nothing mattered but the sheets and the floors and the furniture. I was experiencing a classic case of hormones driving the urge to prepare for the baby’s arrival called “nesting.” I’ve heard of women cleaning out basements and garages, washing second-story high windows (from the outside), and re-organizing the entire contents of the kitchen despite amniotic fluid dripping, husband’s pleading, or common sense.
Pregnancy hormones apparently are one of the few things that can get me to clean my house. Also, imminent company. I assume we’re all the same: a week before company arrives, make a grand list of things to declutter, clean, fix and paint. The expectations and priorities are whittled away and then mostly abandoned as the deadline approaches, like summer bathing suit-ready diet plans. I run the vacuum and repeat the mantra “good enough is good enough.” [Pro tip: dim lighting, wine, and scented candles seem to take the (my) edge off whether it’s a not-perfectly clean house, or a not-perfectly trim body.] Also, note the kitschy sign prominently displayed in my kitchen that reads “A clean house is the sign of a dull woman”. Obviously, this makes my guest think that my life is so filled with exotic excitement that I’ve no time to clean, I laugh-lie to myself as I dust off the sign. We’re all in on the joke. We all know that I’m just lazy and that I hate cleaning. (See my blog post on the brilliant-if-I-do-say-so-myself dirty kitchen floor hack.)
While the nesting hormone hasn’t been triggered in actual decades, 22 years, 9 months to be exact, other kinds of mommy hormones kick in more consistently. A few days ago, two of my adult kids came home from NYC for a couple of days of family time and for help in training their new kitten who has a nasty biting habit. They caught up on (free) laundry, (less expensive NJ) groceries, and visited old haunts and high-school friends who are still living with their parents because of COVID. My nervous safety mom instincts kick into high gear when my son — who hasn’t really driven much in five years since moving to NYC — wanted to “practice driving” my car on the way back to their apartment. I crankily shut that notion down as if he was asking me to sign the lease on a post-prom party house. I said some hysterical mom things for which I’m not proud, and shoved him off to his father who has a much better disposition for such risky endeavors. The night before, my daughter slept-walked into the kitchen, tripped, and fell hitting her head on the tile floor, resulting in a concussion. Just like when she was four years old, and she would sleepwalk into closets or bathtubs, she wanted nothing more than to snuggle with me and get some comforting mama love. So all 5'-7" of her, and a pack of frozen peas on her head made for a restless and crowded night, but my mommy-instincts wouldn’t have it any other way.
After I drove them back to the city the next day, I came home to a (mostly) clean house that I had sorta tidied before their arrival. My list of things to do was empty: my floors were clean, no bathrooms needed scrubbing, nothing to cook, no dishes to do. We climbed early into bed and my husband exclaimed, “isn’t it so nice and quiet to be alone in our empty nest?” Well yes, and no.
A whole new set of hormones has taken hold lately, driving as much urgency as labor cleaning, or the hysteria of worried mom syndrome, and that is, my need to de-nest. I ponder, strategize and make endless plans surrounding the concept of shrinking my nest: declutter, re-purpose, recycle, swear-commit that I’ll never buy another thing. I even fantasize about moving to a tiny house with no closets or attics to hide anything away. The thought of a big house is actually nauseating.
Last week I learned a new word that is related to the kajillion tons of barely-used-but-lots-of-plans art supplies in my basement studio: de-stash. As in, get rid of my art stash, not my persistent upper lip hairs. There are nearly 50K de-stashing tags on Etsy and of course, we all know the multi-billion dollar EBay was built on brokering relationships between collectors and the early destashers of the internet age. I recently discovered a delightful young entrepreneur in Massachusetts who is building an entire art supply business called Make and Mend, like a Good Will for gently used paint brushes, colored pencils, and fat quarters of fabric.
Her business is on point for the more mindful Zoomer consumers who seek out consignment shops and yard sales for clothes, music, and housewares. I’m such a fan of this concept — we all have TOO MUCH stuff — I’m glad the old stuff is bringing joy and just getting shifted around a bit instead of collecting dust, stacking up in landfills, or packed away as fodder for a future episode of Storage Wars.
For my own de-stashing effort, I can’t seem to find the will to sort through my old things and haul them out to the lawn for a sale, or down to the Good Will, or even write up an Etsy or Ebay listing complete with description, tags, and several good photos (not to mention the hassle and expense of packing and shipping). Also, for the record, anytime I do go to the Good Will I come back with more than I donated. Bargains trump decluttering 100%. This is a fact.
I know a lot of people have taken to ultra popular tidying up system of Marie Kondo. It should come as no surprise that I haven’t read her magical decluttering advice book… Cleaning of any kind does not spark happiness and I’m certainly not going to read a book about it. I understand the concept: Evaluating the joy of an item; making piles to toss, keep, donate, etc. As an aside, I’m intimately familiar with the psychological underpinnings of hoarding — attaching significantly higher meaning to things than what they are worth. I have a relative who has hoarded her way out of her own home and is now living (and filling up) a second home down the street. I think of her stacks of unread newspapers/books/magazines and how they represent her hope to have time to read them someday. I get it. Some would argue that her hope IS her joy and therefore, a pretty hard thing to put into a donate or toss pile.
I don’t consider myself a hoarder — who does? — but I confess I have a very hard time letting go of some things, particularly clothes and memorabilia related to my kids. The clothes have come to represent ideas hard to relinquish: All the hard-earned money that was spent buying them; a successful career gone by; the idea that I’ll be thin enough to wear them again (even though they are totally out of style); that someday I’ll resume attending fabulous black-tie affairs and vacations in far-away places; or that I’ll return to the corporate wardrobe-wearing world as a perfect size 10.
Accepting that I’ll never be donning a bikini in Belize anytime soon is not really that hard. Dealing with the kids’ memorabilia however is nearly impossible. I just can’t. Mommy hormones reign supreme — the utter need to cherish and hold onto my babies and their childhoods forever and ever, unchanged, amen. Beyond the obvious solution of working with a good psychotherapist to tackle my neurosis, there are some sound strategies that can help. The KonMari method for sure, but also digitizing (taking photos, tossing the thing), and inviting my kids to help me process the memorabilia. It’s theirs after all. We empty nesters are in effect residing in the living museums of our children. I know their perspective on what to toss and what to take and what to fit in a small box for posterity, will do wonders toward resolving my own projection. Nesting started with them, so it’s only logical that they should be a part of the de-nesting, right? Right.
Finally, one of my favorite strategies incorporates my hobby of making art by way of a term that I‘ve coined “rememories.” It’s an art therapy process of recycling and upcycling mementos and scraps into beautiful and useful works of art and gifts: A rag rug made from the kids’ sports/theater t-shirts; a collage or sculpture made from hand-painted playbills, ticket stubs, music sheets, school report cards; hand-rolled jewelry beads or Christmas garland made from greeting cards, or Mother’s Day/holiday school projects. I’m starting slowly: Last week I made a coil basket from left over scraps of material from last summer’s massive mask sewing effort. Not really great memories, but I’ve got a ton of scraps and I need to work my way up to dealing with the good/harder stuff. This week, I prepped some collage papers by mono-printing over some old school papers and choir music sheets.
My long list of upcoming basket weaving, decoupage, collage and paper mâché projects are a way for me to deal with emotions of loss and memory while also being creative and productive. I must sort, edit, and deconstruct the materials that once sat hidden away in untouched boxes. Not easy, but my joy is truly sparked by the idea of turning them into something more useful and beautiful and present. Treasured trash into treasured art. Hopefully, my new creations will take up a little less space in my nest while keeping my heart fully cluttered with happy memories.
