The Po Show

Boxes

We spent a lot of time over the weekend packing. I hate how you spend hours packing, and fill many large boxes full of stuff, and then you look around and it looks like you haven't done a damn thing.

Being masochistic, we started with the three most scary rooms: the kitchen and the kids' bedrooms. Packing and unpacking the kitchen is always so difficult. There are all the cabinets, secreting away the millions of items from everyday sight. Then when you start taking things out of the cabinets and putting them into boxes, it's like some Saturday Night Live skit in which a character is pulling things out of a cabinet and another character, as a joke, is putting things back into the cabinet from the other side. Plus so much kitchen crap has to be wrapped first. Plus I couldn't just empty out cabinets; I had to selectively take and leave things, since we do have to use some stuff in the next week and a half.

Tessa's room was a pain, with all the toys and clothes (plus, she does need some stuff to play with and wear), but it wasn't too awful. I made a lot of executive decisions about what was staying and what was getting thrown out. That is the one good thing about moving. You're given an opportunity to purge, and otherwise you'd drown in Happy Meal toys.

Matthew's room, on the other hand, was much harder. He needed to be an active participant in decision-making on whether things were kept, donated, or thrown away. It was a long process, especially when he continually paused to play with the toys he was pulling out of his toybox. He kept getting tired, and wanting to quit or take yet another break, and I kept having to say "Okay, your choice is that you decide what you keep and what you get rid of, or I decide what you keep and what you get rid of. And you can't get upset if I get rid of something that you wanted to keep." Given that choice, he kept wanting to participate.

So we have all these boxes, full of our stuff. Some of it is old stuff, some of it is new. Some of it predates our parenthood, some predates Tessa, some of it even predates our couplehood (very little of that, considering Ross and I have been a couple for 18 + years!). And there is still a TON of stuff yet to be put into boxes. It just sits around the house, like it has for almost a year now, like we're not going anywhere. This house went from unfamiliar to familiar, and now we're about to leave forever.

I have such a hard time with the finality of moving, that all of your stuff gets cleared out from the places it has sat. The memories are portable, but they lose focus as they lose the site of their original occurrence. The place that you live forms a palette for your life; the things that happen need a place to happen. I'll miss the place in which this year happened.