The No Parting Zone

Hello and welcome back my Blogville friends. I have selected a Berry Berry Blast ‘Relaxing Tea’ for our visit today. Probably due to the onset of spring cleaning, my thoughts have turned to our possessions, and how we love to hang on to them. While I write this blog I am enjoying my tea, procrastinating on my spring cleaning, and having a little fun on the topic. I thought I might share some of my experiences with you from what I call ‘The NO PARTING ZONE’ (cue the 1959 Twilight Zone theme music here).

I have always wondered if it is because I was adopted that I have such a hard time throwing things out. Then I met my husband. He was not adopted but he has an even harder time throwing things out than I do. He jokingly says that is why we are still
married after 44 years. Hmmmm . . .

Do you have that drawer too? The one where you have 100 or so twist ties and at least as many elastic bands? I mean, you never know when you might need them right? Oh, and do you remember bread tags with the “best before” date on them? Why would we keep those, and if you reused them, how did you know the true expiration date? I mean seriously, throw out the bread tags and use some of your 100 twist ties!

I have to say that keeping all the greeting cards I have ever received can actually be an advantage. Say, for example that one of my kids forgets to send or give me a card for Mother’s Day one year. While other mothers might have to resort to sending their kids a little guilt message, we who live in the NO PARTING ZONE do not.  Instead, I can simply select a card from my Mother’s Day Card collection, being careful to select one that was signed by that very same child, and put it on display for friends and family who may happen by. I call that ‘emotional recycling’, especially if I had to read through all the cards in my collection to choose the correct, but not most recent, one. Friends or relatives that happen to drop by might notice the absence of a card, but they likely won’t notice that the card on display was actually ‘recycled’.

Recently I was looking for something in my underwear drawer and an old film canister fell open, spilling its treasured contents. I won’t say what these tiny little white things were but my kids got money for them. Also inside the canister was a tiny piece of paper identifying the matching child (I do have four kids after all). Why do I still have these?? I once asked one of the kids if they wanted them and they looked at me like I had lost my mind. Hmmm, now that I’m thinking of it, I’ll have to ask her if she still has her kids’ little ‘pearls’ saved somewhere.

Another fun thing I come across occasionally (more often than I probably should) are those little works of art that were once found crumpled in the bottom of my children’s back packs. Remember, my kids are now in their 30s and 40s. Years ago those works of art were carefully flattened out to the best of my ability and proudly tacked up on the fridge or the bulletin board. I mean, how do you now throw those out? What if one of them asks me about that cow picture they drew in Grade 2? (Hmmm I always thought it was a moose!) What do I say. “I threw it out.”???

Once our children aged out of post-secondary education we set them free to find and create new lives out in the adult world. Apparently though, we are keeping their toys, textbooks, DVDs, CDs, VHS tapes, and so on in case they come back for them. In the NO PARTING ZONE every souvenir t-shirt, hoodie, and hat or cap, whether it fits them or not, should be kept. After all, if those souvenir items are given away or discarded, how will our children be expected to remember that family vacation? For them, and for us, those ‘touristy’ items hold their family vacation memories like a time capsule. After all, we likely never spent the money developing their camera films from the trip because it would have been too expensive to develop photos of their thumbs, feet, or bottom of their backpack.

On the topic of pictures, keeping all their school photos stacked year to year behind each other in special individual school photo frames has special significance. It means that our children are perpetually immortalized in those frames exactly as they looked in grade 12, the last picture placed lovingly in their respective frame. If my grandchildren are interested, they will be able to see their parents photos from Junior Kindergarten to the last grade of high school pressed tightly together one single picture frame. My grandchildren can literally watch the years of fashion, the progression from baby to adult teeth (sometimes including braces), no glasses to fashionably framed glasses, and the remarkable hairstyles, of their parents. Of course there are post-secondary framed pictures as well, but they were too big to fit in those old frames. 

Maybe with all the recycling programs and things like electronic picture frames where you can simply upload digital pictures, people will no longer need a NO PARTING ZONE. I remember years ago, before I had even really heard about recycling, we visited my husband’s brother in his very progressively green community in Southern Ontario. My brother-in-law showed us a divided waste disposal system in his kitchen and gave us a quick tour of the plastics, paper, and glass sections of this divided can in which to place our recyclables. Then, adding even more confusion, he showed us a compost container for food waste. To this day I wonder if my brother-in-law and his wife ever suspected why my husband and I carried multiple plastic bags TO the local mall. Did they ever wonder why there was no extra recycling despite having two house guests? Luckily, once their children were old enough, we could ask the boys which waste item went where, as if we were testing their knowledge, not ours. Also when visiting in future, we started bringing an extra suitcase for the ‘un-sortable’ garbage that we could never figure out what went where. Then, we simply brought that stuff home and threw it out. 

By the way, you know the multiple sets of car tires that are piled up in the garage from all the vehicles you have purchased during your marriage, no worries, in the NO PARTING ZONE you can use them in your yard as planters, sandboxes, or maybe even hang a tire swing somewhere on your property. Of note, old vehicle tires also make a wonderful senior citizen’s obstacle course right there in the garage or in your back porch, or both. Oh, and if you are really lucky, once your children move out and purchase their own vehicles and new tires, you get to store their off season tires for them too!

I feel a little bad for what my kids will face once we are gone. If things don’t get spring cleaned out of here before we die, they will have three generations worth of stuff to go through and decide its fate. There are things from my husband’s parents that he kept when they passed, and things I have kept from my parents. Then there are the things we kept from our four children and now from our grandchildren. There are probably 20 or more photo albums (those are big books we used to put printed pictures in, instead of storing them on on our phones) that they will need to go through and figure out what to do with. We all place different value on different things so what we have kept may be easy for them to get rid of and they may keep things we think they will throw away when we are no longer here. Either way, I don’t envy them the task.

I do have to make a pro-NO PARTING ZONE note here as well. As you may or may not know, in a previous blog I talked about meeting one my foster parents when I was in my 60s. It was a quest I had been on for over 40 years and when I met her, she gave me photographs of the youngest me I had ever seen. She had saved them in the hopes we would find each other again one day. I love her for that gift. In a cedar chest belonging to my parents was the tiny little outfit I wore when my adoption worker dropped me off to my parents in June of 1959. My mom had kept that outfit and all the ‘Congratulations You Are Adopting’ greeting cards my parents received from family and friends when I joined the family. I love my mom for that. 

Again, I am not sure if my adoptee status has influenced my need to keep little treasures of the past in my NO PARTING ZONE but all I can say is, ‘sorry kids’ be sure to think fondly of me when you go through these things. Maybe you can finally throw out your ‘works of art’. I know I cannot.
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Thanks for reading this little fun blog, I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any comments, and I LOVE your comments, please share them with me as it gives me the motivation to go on writing these little blogs. If you prefer to comment privately, please email me at [email protected]. I look forward to hearing from you.