Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
Dear Cary,
My wife and I have been married for 11 years. We have been through an apartment, two houses, three kids and innumerable life changes. We have managed to maintain our senses of adventure, humor and love for each other. But ...
She's a pack rat. I long for the days when everything I owned fit in my car. I look at the basement and see, in what was to be the kids' playroom, boxes and boxes of mementos. And I'm not just referring to the occasional letter from Grandma, long since deceased, which even the striver for a state of Zen nothingness in me recognizes as having legitimate sentimental value. A partial list of box contents: Garfield calendar from 1983; Christmas cards from paper route customers, same vintage as calendar; posters that once graced dorm-room walls, now torn and faded; notebook containing list of caterers, photographers, halls and so on considered and rejected for our wedding. And so on. Stacked floor to ceiling, approaching wall to wall.
If I ruled the world, or even ruled the house, these things would be at the curb immediately. To her, they are all linked to memories. Intellectually, she admits that just as the map is not the territory, neither is the item the memory. But since intellect and emotion are not the same, and since we treat the marriage as a partnership in which consensus is required, the playroom remains a warehouse and I remain frustrated.
We've talked it over and over, at low volume and high. Concessions have been made -- for example, the mug collection she amassed as a teen, boxed and untouched for years, went to the Salvation Army recently. But the outflow remains less than the accumulation. I don't want to be one of those elderly folks who are crushed by a stack of newspapers in their dining room!
Too Much Stuff
Dear Too Much Stuff,
Allow me a moment to sigh in solidarity and also in fear, because stored objects have an awe-inspiring power to sap the will, to turn the mind inside out, to stupefy you and make you go weak. I have both the pack-rat tendency and the desire for a house of clean surfaces and a few well-placed things.
There are lots of ways to think about this, and lots of practical strategies. For some reason, reading that book "Your Money or Your Life" was useful because it stressed taking an inventory of all your possessions and putting a monetary value on them. I don't remember if it explicitly said to compare the monetary value of the object with the value of the space it was taking up, but that's one thing that happened: As a result of inventorying all my junk, I realized that I was paying many times more for the space it was occupying. Your house, after all, is valuable space. It isn't free. Every cubic foot of space has value. (And if you live in San Francisco, that value is profound and, in itself, awe-inspiring.)
And what about this fear of what will happen if the thing is gone? I found it very liberating, actually, to cast some stuff off and realize that nothing happened. All that happened was we suddenly got more space ... for free!
The war against objects can never be completely won, but if fought hard and consistently, it can allow you to achieve some balance. Practical strategies include carting the objects to a storage facility and paying the bill for storage every month. The idea there is to win in stages. First the stuff goes into storage. That means it's out of the house. That deprives it of some of its power, because she won't be happening upon those items and having unexpectedly wistful moments. Then after the stuff has been in storage for awhile, there might come a time when you visit the storage facility to get rid of some of it.
Because it's easier to throw things out when you're in a neutral, public space than when they're in your home. Or there may come a time when she looks at the bill for storage and it suddenly seems like a waste of money, and she may reconsider what's in all those boxes. True, she may decide that you've got lots of storage space at home, and why not save the money and bring that stuff back into the house? But it's worth a try.
Now, some things do have actual sentimental value; they express someone's personality or vividly evoke a particular time and place. Things that contain images, such as old dorm-room posters, seem to me to be perhaps worth saving, while caterers' estimates do not seem evocative.
And while you're at it, don't just try to solve this problem for yourself. Try to see how the objects fit into your wife's world. Try to see the good side of this pack-rat mentality. It may represent a profound love, a feeling for her kids and her life much deeper than anything you experience. You may underestimate the power of her passion; you may underestimate the depth of her love for the lives and moments that are passing right by you. Tread lightly on her stuff, because you may be treading on her dreams.
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