A woman told me something not long ago that I haven’t stopped thinking about.
Her children are in their forties now, and she still has every school paper they ever brought home, packed away in her closet. Then she added, a little sadly, that her kids don’t care about any of it.
I smiled when she said it. Then I stopped smiling, because I knew exactly where my own boxes were.
Up in our attic closet, there are three plastic bins, one for each of my children. (I could find them in the dark.)
They hold baby shoes, report cards, crayon drawings, and a Mother’s Day card made of macaroni. That card has been losing noodles for a very long time.
I never meant to keep so much. But every paper felt like a little piece of them, and how do you throw away a piece of your child?
That’s why these boxes are so hard. They don’t feel like clutter to us, because they’re full of love we can hold in our hands.
Still, I didn’t want my kids to open those bins someday and feel the way her children do. So this fall, I finally sat down and figured out what to do with childhood keepsakes, gently, one child at a time.
One Question I Asked About Every Keepsake
Before I opened a single bin, I made myself one simple rule. Each child would get one box.
Not three bins. One box, about the size of a shoebox or a small file box, and whatever fit inside was what I’d keep.
That rule scared me a little at first. But it made every choice easier, because the box decided how much was enough, not my guilt.
Then I picked one child to start with. I carried their bin down to the kitchen table on a quiet afternoon, poured a cup of coffee, and took things out one at a time.