Boxes of old stuff test my sentimental nature | THE MOM STOP

For the last few weeks, a couple of boxes have sat untouched in my formal living room, boxes my mother had handed over to me and said they were “mine.”

She recently moved from the home where she’s lived the last three decades, the house where we moved into when I was almost 12 years old. For many years into adulthood, my old paintings still hung on the wallpapered wall of my childhood bedroom. Clay pots I made in junior high sat on the shelves, and sorority group pictures still hung on the walls, long after I was married and had children of my own.

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So it was not that surprising that my mother still had a couple boxes of “my” things, despite the fact that it seemed she had been giving me boxes of belongings for years.

I was in no rush to open the last couple of boxes.

I’m a sentimental person. I love family photos and much of our furniture has a story — half of it is some kind of family heirloom passed down from a grandparent or parent. My 12-year-old son can tell stories about how the Coca-Cola sign hanging on his wall was taken off a tree by his grandfather in the late 1960s, how the Army trunk at the end of his bed belonged to his great-grandfather at the end of World War II, or how the giant 1950s-era American flag that hangs on another wall of his bedroom was found in his great-grandmother’s bathtub.

In our family, we are the keepers of things, apparently.

But I don’t necessarily want to be the keeper of things.

After my father and grandmother both passed away in 2019, my sister and I were tasked with cleaning out the family home of 50 years, with two generations of belongings inside. My grandmother was a hoarder, and in our dad’s later years, he was, too, to a clinical degree. Cleaning out a hoarder’s house will cure anyone of wanting to keep things, apparently. Or almost.

So last week, I finally decided to open the last boxes my mother gave me.

Inside were some questionable “learn German” foreign language books and a German=to-English dictionary, which was particularly puzzling since I’ve never taken German. The books weren’t mine. Also inside the box was an Alabama Heritage magazine from 1988 — definitely not mine, since I was 7 at the time — a T-shirt printed with a family photo on the front of it and given to my grandmother sometime in the late 1990s. Also in the box was an acolyte schedule from church from May 1999. The latter was technically mine, but definitely not something I needed to keep, 25 years later.

Also in the box were photos, mostly from my childhood, but also an entire shoebox filled with photos of my firstborn daughter. As my mother explained, she just had too many to keep. I guess that's what happens with the first grandchild.

So I offered the German language books to my son and threw away the acolyte schedule and the old magazine. I tried to get rid of the T-shirt until my 8-year-old daughter found it in the trash can and announced she wanted to keep it. And then, I grabbed a stool and tucked the shoeboxes of photos up to the top shelf of my closet, so I could look through them later.

Something I’ve realized is that I don’t want to burden my three kids with boxes of random things they have to decide what to do with later in adulthood. I hope my own experience bars me from following the hoarder-like genetic tendencies I apparently am predisposed to. I don’t want to burden my kids.

Though that’s not to say I won’t one day give them a box of their old artwork and Ziploc bags filled with baby teeth. I am sentimental, after all.

.Lydia Seabol Avant writes The Mom Stop for The Tuscaloosa News. Reach her at momstopcolumn@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Boxes of old stuff test my sentimental nature | THE MOM STOP