PHILLY
EVENTSLoco Parentis: Stuff Happens
Why can’t my son throw anything out?
- Illustration by Tanner Lowry
WEB SPECIAL
See more illustrations and sketches for this article from students at the Tyler School of Art.
See more illustrations and sketches for this article from students at the Tyler School of Art.
I LIFT THE LID OF THE WASHING MACHINE AND LET OUT A SIGH. Okay, I let out a string of curse words. There in the drum lies a sodden pile of my son Jake’s gym shorts and sweatpants and hoodies, decorated with snowlike flakes of soaked and pulverized stuff — tissues, math tests, detention slips, Post-its, gum wrappers, Important Notices to Parents. I owe the squall to two facts: I’ve forgotten, once again, to go through his pockets before tossing his clothes in the washer, and Jake has never in his life willingly thrown anything away.
Kids are the world’s major producers of stuff. It starts at birth — hell, it starts before birth, at the shower, when you’re gifted with a whole bunch of rattles and teething rings and fey wooden giraffe puzzles that your kid won’t be able to pick up for months, maybe years, but that you, in the meantime, are going to have to put someplace. The stuff keeps on coming, at Christmas, at birthdays, at — if your mother-in-law is like mine, and chances are she is — St. Patrick’s Day and Groundhog Day and International World Hunger Day, piles and piles of stuff, to be added to the stacks of preschool artwork and boxes of LEGOs and closets full of Halloween costumes and drawers full of plastic McDonald’s Happy Meal crap. And it burgeons and grows and multiplies, like those enormous fungi that spread out over acres and acres just belowground — tamped into cabinets, shoved onto shelves, crammed into closets, ready to erupt the instant you go to get your hat so you can walk the dog.
“Just throw it away,” says my husband, Doug, who is wholly unsentimental. He recognizes sentimentality in others — he apologized profusely when he broke the fruit bowl my mom, who’s dead now, once gave me — but frankly, he doesn’t give a damn about stuff. I attribute this to the fact that his ancestors lived on farms, where, Charlotte’s Web or no Charlotte’s Web, there’s no sense getting attached to the pigs. Our daughter Marcy, who’s 17, takes after him. Most days, her room’s a god-awful mess. But every couple of months, without any parental urging, she’ll go into a frenzy and purge her personal space, tossing out old clothes and shoes and school papers and anything else she doesn’t need anymore.
Her brother Jake, who’s 14, has never felt an impulse to tidy up. Jake saves everything. We’re not talking important detritus, like old copies of Mad magazine or the original packaging to the 10,000 video games he’s purchased or been given while he’s been on this planet. We’re talking the ticket stubs to every movie he’s ever attended. The scorecards from countless rounds of mini golf. Shoelaces. Postcards. Books. T-shirts. Every. Single. Birthday card. He is awash in stuff.
“What are you doing?” he asks suspiciously as I stand in his bedroom, contemplating the bookshelves brimming over with model ships, seashells, magnets, penknives, K’NEX, crayons and pencils and stamp pads.
“I thought I’d straighten up a little.”
“You mean throw things out.”
“I mean straighten up!” I consider the top of his dresser, where dozens of the little animal figurines you get for free in boxes of Red Rose tea form a jumbled menagerie. “You have three of the polar bear, and four owls,” I point out. “You could just keep one of each.”
“You could stay away from my stuff.”
“You can’t think clearly surrounded by all this clutter.”
“It only bothers you,” he says. “It doesn’t bother me.”
He’s right, of course. But it really bothers me. It isn’t even the stuff so much as the indiscriminateness of it, which bespeaks a lack of mental filter, an inability to assign proper rank and meaning to the objets of one’s life. I love it that Jake has kept every one of the letters I send him when he goes away to Boy Scout camp each summer. But what does that mean, really, when he’s also kept every Snapple cap he’s ever opened? Sometimes, when I survey his overflowing desk or peek into his closet, I think of those recluses who turn up every now and then in Manhattan, living in apartments so packed with piles of old newspapers that only narrow tunnels remain. And I wonder: How hard is it to just throw stuff out? What does it mean that Jake can’t?
Kids are the world’s major producers of stuff. It starts at birth — hell, it starts before birth, at the shower, when you’re gifted with a whole bunch of rattles and teething rings and fey wooden giraffe puzzles that your kid won’t be able to pick up for months, maybe years, but that you, in the meantime, are going to have to put someplace. The stuff keeps on coming, at Christmas, at birthdays, at — if your mother-in-law is like mine, and chances are she is — St. Patrick’s Day and Groundhog Day and International World Hunger Day, piles and piles of stuff, to be added to the stacks of preschool artwork and boxes of LEGOs and closets full of Halloween costumes and drawers full of plastic McDonald’s Happy Meal crap. And it burgeons and grows and multiplies, like those enormous fungi that spread out over acres and acres just belowground — tamped into cabinets, shoved onto shelves, crammed into closets, ready to erupt the instant you go to get your hat so you can walk the dog.
“Just throw it away,” says my husband, Doug, who is wholly unsentimental. He recognizes sentimentality in others — he apologized profusely when he broke the fruit bowl my mom, who’s dead now, once gave me — but frankly, he doesn’t give a damn about stuff. I attribute this to the fact that his ancestors lived on farms, where, Charlotte’s Web or no Charlotte’s Web, there’s no sense getting attached to the pigs. Our daughter Marcy, who’s 17, takes after him. Most days, her room’s a god-awful mess. But every couple of months, without any parental urging, she’ll go into a frenzy and purge her personal space, tossing out old clothes and shoes and school papers and anything else she doesn’t need anymore.
Her brother Jake, who’s 14, has never felt an impulse to tidy up. Jake saves everything. We’re not talking important detritus, like old copies of Mad magazine or the original packaging to the 10,000 video games he’s purchased or been given while he’s been on this planet. We’re talking the ticket stubs to every movie he’s ever attended. The scorecards from countless rounds of mini golf. Shoelaces. Postcards. Books. T-shirts. Every. Single. Birthday card. He is awash in stuff.
“What are you doing?” he asks suspiciously as I stand in his bedroom, contemplating the bookshelves brimming over with model ships, seashells, magnets, penknives, K’NEX, crayons and pencils and stamp pads.
“I thought I’d straighten up a little.”
“You mean throw things out.”
“I mean straighten up!” I consider the top of his dresser, where dozens of the little animal figurines you get for free in boxes of Red Rose tea form a jumbled menagerie. “You have three of the polar bear, and four owls,” I point out. “You could just keep one of each.”
“You could stay away from my stuff.”
“You can’t think clearly surrounded by all this clutter.”
“It only bothers you,” he says. “It doesn’t bother me.”
He’s right, of course. But it really bothers me. It isn’t even the stuff so much as the indiscriminateness of it, which bespeaks a lack of mental filter, an inability to assign proper rank and meaning to the objets of one’s life. I love it that Jake has kept every one of the letters I send him when he goes away to Boy Scout camp each summer. But what does that mean, really, when he’s also kept every Snapple cap he’s ever opened? Sometimes, when I survey his overflowing desk or peek into his closet, I think of those recluses who turn up every now and then in Manhattan, living in apartments so packed with piles of old newspapers that only narrow tunnels remain. And I wonder: How hard is it to just throw stuff out? What does it mean that Jake can’t?
