we have too much stuff! our apartment is so cluttered i can't stand it! last week the VOA came and took like 6 or 8 bags of clothes and baby items, and some books and stuff, and we've still got way too much. i just filled another bag this morning, and i've started another. i'm getting rid of all the sabbat trimmings (8 major holidays a year makes for a lot of decorative clutter) including the plastic yule tree and we'll just start over with homemade decorations at mabon. (summer sabbats we celebrate awau from home so thankfully i don't have much clutter from them.) books, craft supplies, fabric, old jars of herbs and scented oils, artwork, kids' drawings, coloring books and toys... it's just too much!!! to make things worse my family is resisting. it's like they've picked up that the marriage is in trouble and they think that by clinging to all the clutter it can make the people and emotions stay. and the most frustrating thing is that that kind of behavior is what's causing a lot of the problems in the first place. there's so many memories attatched to everything, especially the baby's things, but it does us no good to mistake the memory for the object associated with it. i can pass on shakti's preemie gowns to my friend having the 4-and-a-half-pound twins, but i don't lose the memories of how tiny my baby was, and how it felt to finally see her out of the hospital. yes, keepsakes can be wonderful, but we're living in an over-crowded 2-bedroom apartment and have so much clutter we litterally can't put it all away. it's not just cluttered. it's dangerous. we really have a crisis with just too much stuff. the kids have way too many toys, and they leave them, broken and unplayed with, all over the place. shakti is really too young to care as long as she's kept entertained and doesn't actually see anything going out the door, but damie is driving me nuts! he wants to keep every piece of broken plastic, every box his toys came in, bottle caps, cash register reciepts, torn papers...his hoarding behavior is really bothering and worrying me. i think it would be best for him to get rid of a lot of the stuff he never uses, stuff that's broken or outgrown, but he set up such a howl when i threw out a stack of disgusting moldly drawings that had been under his leaky radiator you'd think his little soul was in agony! today i'm just bagging things up and tossing as much as i can into the good will pile, but man, it ain't easy, and considering that one of these days the marriage may be the next thing to go into the trash, it's damn depressing, too. still i want to cast off the heavy mantle of attatchment to useless clutter that i've been carrying on my shoulders and move on with my life. and i want to get back to living my values, and passing them onto my children. neurotic, clingly psychological dependance on clutter and junk is not one of those values!
