It had been weeks since our Saturday night family outing to Ikea, complete with an Ikea dinner and lots of wandering. We went for the bedroom event and came home with a brand new king size bed. We had begun unofficially looking for a new bed about a year before, when we noticed that the faux leather from our headboard was cracking and beginning to flake off and we were finding pieces of it scattered throughout the whole house. In the span of a year, we never really found anything that suited both our taste and our budget.
Until one Saturday evening in Ikea where we both came to an agreement on a bed that was well within our budget. The kids giggled as we maneuvered the thing into the back of our SUV.
It sat in its box in our garage for weeks.
Although I knew we needed a new bed, I didn’t actually want a new bed.
I loved our old bed.
I loved it for so many reasons, but the biggest reason of all was because it was one of the first pieces of furniture my husband and I bought together for our very first house.
I remember us walking through furniture stores, laying down on each bed in the showroom, trying to imagine if I could see us sleeping on it for the foreseeable future, discussing how we would decorate our new home and how many kids would fill it.
I remember sleeping on a mattress in our walk in closet the first night after we got the keys to our brand-new house because we had the carpets steamed and couldn’t walk on them for 24 hours, but couldn’t bear the thought of not spending the night there.
I remember how excited we were when our furniture, including our bed, was delivered and how frustrated we were putting it all together.
It wasn’t about the bed.
It was about the memories.
I have a really hard time letting go of stuff.
Big stuff, small stuff, old stuff, and new stuff… once it enters my home, it becomes permanent.
Every time I try to purge things, I find myself sitting on the floor reminiscing, somehow feeling as though I will retain the memories if I hang on to the item, the “to keep” pile becoming bigger with each walk down memory lane.
I cried, actual tears, when we gave away our stroller, even though I am certain that our baby days are done and over with.
I’ve been using a clutch purse from the nineties each time I attend a party because I simply couldn’t find it in myself to throw it away.
I have boxes full of purses that remind me of all the fun I had in my twenties, shoes that barely fit on my post-baby feet, and old Halloween costumes that automatically take me right back to toddler trick or treating trips.
Like so many others, I watched the Netflix documentary Minimalism, which convinced me that I need to work on my purging.
I need to remind myself that my memories aren’t found in things; they are found inside me. My memories are tucked deeply into my heart and soul and I’m not throwing them away by tossing things. We have worked very hard to build beautiful family memories and those memories are a part of each of us, regardless of what we keep in boxes in the garage and what gets sent out for donation.
My life is chaotic enough, and having boxes of stuff hiding in every storage space in our house isn’t going to ease the chaos.
It’s been a month since we’ve been sleeping in our new bed. I’m not going to lie, I cried as my husband loaded up the pieces of our very first bed and drove it off to the dump. The good news is that my memories are still intact. The better news is that I am no longer cleaning up tiny pieces of faux leather off of every surface in my house.
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