Should it stay, or should it go now

I have read countless magazine articles, blogs, and books about how to liberate oneself from one’s belongings. I have watched lots of episodes of Clean House (but I’ve never watched Hoarders) and I know that I am not the only person who has trouble letting go of stuff. I also know that things could definitely be a lot worse. Things could also be a lot better.

We have some big things to get rid of, like a huge armoire that used to hold a TV and a funky metal and wood bookshelf. We don’t use these things anymore, they don’t fit in our house or with our décor, but they just seem so … useful. They are storage units, for crying out loud, so we shouldn’t get rid of them when they can help corral all of our random crap right?

About all that random crap … we have so much stuff in this house. The problem I am discovering is that most of this stuff is not actually mine. I don’t have a problem getting rid of my stuff, most of the time. I get rid of my stuff all the time, or more accurately, I don’t seem to acquire a lot of stuff tor me. Instead, my house is filled with papers, artwork, books, toys, stuffed animals, ill-fitting clothes, and random do-dads that are important to someone else.

This leaves me two choices. I can make an executive decision about the fate of other people’s things, and suffer the consequences it brings, or the better choice … they can do it. The problem lies in making them make the right choice, which is of course, the choice I would make. I do use the executive decision method a lot of the time. I have thrown away tons of papers and little junky toys and amateur artwork that no one has ever missed. I can’t do that with everything. My kids are at an age where they can decide what they feel has sentimental value or is “special to them” and they want to keep.

Unfortunately, they feel that way about a lot of things. Sometimes these feelings are really misdirected, like the time my daughter cried when we threw away a broken shower head, but most of the time, they want what because they want to remember certain events or certain people and I don’t think I should tell them they can’t. I still have a shoebox full of notes that friends wrote to me in middle school. I still have my prom corsage and Rubles from a high school trip to Russia. I have boxes and boxes of my kids’ artwork, particularly cute clothes they wore as babies, hair from their first haircuts, and practically everything they touched in the hospital when they were born. I understand wanting to keep things for sentimental reasons. But how do I help them understand that they don’t need to save all of it?