This summer, my divorced parents both happen to be downsizing at the same time, and while neither of them lives in the apartment I grew up in, I’ve sneakily/luckily managed to keep a lot of stuff squirreled away in their homes. When they asked me to go through my old things, I was surprised by my reaction…
I didn’t want to keep all that stuff, but I definitely didn’t want them to get rid of it. Closing the Museum of Me?!?! I don’t think so. I dragged my feet, complained, and expressed pretty much zero gratitude to the people who had allowed their homes to be storage units for things that didn’t mean much to them, like the letters I got at sleep-away camp a thousand years ago.
Still, there were some real gems in the mix. For someone who isn’t very handy, I’m surprised that I took shop class from kindergarten through middle school. In the archives was a hinged box I made at the age of five and then lined with purple velvet.
Still proud of this.
“You don’t want this wooden doll I made?” I asked my dad, later. “Even though she has movable arms, braids made of yellow wire attached to a nail driven into her head, and a matching bed with painted roses?” I was serious. He smiled but did not say yes.
A lot of my early art was very, very large. My mom had a 3×5 foot framed painting I did of Demeter and Persephone from when we studied Greek mythology, and my dad had my similarly sized self-portrait from elementary school, notable for the fact that I accidentally put the eyebrows under the eyes.
School photos from when I was three (left) and four. The turtleneck has the words “big enough” printed around the torso, and I wish my parents had kept that!
Even though I’d already whittled down my collection of please-don’t-throw-aways at various points since graduating from high school, the current process was exhausting. I tossed the school yearbooks but kept the school photos. I held onto books I’d loved as a kid and shoved a few boxes of paper ephemera in the back of my closet. Somewhere in that mess is my ticket to see the Spice Girls at Madison Square Garden in 1998 and the diary I tried to disguise as a school notebook by writing INGLISH on the front cover. (Spelling has never been my strong suit.)
Bye, chairs :/
Heading back to Brooklyn, I brought two old kid-sized wooden chairs home with me. But after moving them around my apartment for a few weeks, I realized I didn’t have room. I worked up my courage for days, then put them out on the street and walked away with a real pang of sadness.
When I went to the bodega later, the chairs still hadn’t been snagged, and I almost brought them home again. I somehow resisted the urge, and by the next morning, they were gone. I still miss them, but I like to think that they’re getting more use in a Brooklyn kid’s bedroom.
I took home the velvet lined box (of course!!!) and a goofy paper maché vase that our brilliant art teacher had us build around a tennis ball canister so it could hold water and flowers. I declined to keep my gigantic self-portrait with the under-eye eyebrows, but I still have the memory of my brothers laughing at it over the years. I neither took nor tossed the wooden doll. She is sleeping peacefully in her custom wooden bed with roses painted on it in a closet at my dad’s house. I’m still trying to convince him it’s a collector’s item.
Now, you tell me: if you’ve excavated your childhood bedroom, what did you find? Was anything strangely hard to part with? What did you do with the things you wanted to keep?
P.S. Where did you grow up, and what’s the age gap between your kids?
(Top photo of Gisela Gueiros’s apartment by Alpha Smoot, styling by Kate Jordan.)
