46/52 - Your Kids Don't Want Your Stuff
Here's a newsflash for everyone of a specific age intent on saving precious things to someday give your kids.
Don't bother.
It's not that they won't want something of yours. The point is that they won't want the things you think they will. And they won't even want their own precious things that somehow wound up in boxes in your basement.
When we began the process of downsizing, we realized that we had accumulated a vast volume of stuff, including couches.
This included our very first couch- the first piece of furniture we owned. It was a dual-use "sleep sofa" -- a" Castro Convertible." If Castro had slept in one of these early Convertibles, it would have likely explained his disenchantment with capitalism. Over the years, many guests sentenced to sleep on this couch would emerge the next morning lamenting the curse of the "bar" in the middle.
This sofa had the added benefit of weighing about a thousand pounds. Despite this, and even though we did all of our moves ourselves, this couch followed us like a bad penny over 42 years from our first apartment in Reston to a Cape Cod house (so named despite being located in a Levittown section of Sterling, VA) to our Ryan Herndon House number one and eventually to its ultimate destination at Herndon House number two.
Over the years, it lost its exalted position as the Number One Couch in the main living room. As various couch replacements were added over the years, they went from the living room to the family room and then to the basement. Eventually, they became an auxiliary sleep destination for anyone banished to the basement. This couch managed to survive in our house even as we became a storage facility for random couches that our kids entrusted to our care, with the "promise" (a formal legal contract might have been a better option) to retrieve them "someday."
Lesson learned -- the secondary market for couches among your children is very weak. It's even hard to donate them.
But couches are just the tip of the iceberg. Most of the stuff we carefully accumulate over a lifetime is just that. Stuff. Our kids just don't want it. And if you're lucky enough to do the downsizing yourself (as opposed to having your kids do it "later" -- you know what I mean), you might as well get on with it. It's just stuff. Give most of it away while you can.
Of course, there are exceptions. There are things they will want.
When our friend Karen was clearing out her mother's house in Bethesda, she gave her boys carte blanche to take whatever they wanted. Michael wanted her ice bucket and her gardening tools. Brian wanted her cookie jar. Andy wanted her letter opener. Joey took her religious medals from her catholic schools and the thermometer/barometer that hung in her family room. Daniel wanted a paperweight and a pencil cup. Matt took a bird decoration from the garden and a picture of a grandfather he never knew. These items were precious not to the world but to each of them.
I have a statue from my grandmother that I remember sitting on a shelf in her Bronx walk-up apartment many years ago. When I saw it in my mom's stuff, I didn't know exactly what it was; I only associated it with my grandmother. I recently took a picture of it and did a Google Lens reverse image search. Some lady in Indiana has the exact same statue on sale on eBay for $300, with the description "Ceramic, Sacred Heart of Jesus, Antique." I don't care about that, but I would like to know where it came from (did she bring it from Ireland?) and why it occupied such a central place in my grandmother's apartment. The only other item I remember from my grandmother's apartment was a baseball bat she kept by her bed to ward off any intruders. I wish I had that.
My mother-in-law Nancy was, shall we say, a saver. When we emptied out the house where she and Price had lived for more than 50 years, there was a LOT of stuff. She had her stuff and a lot of her mother's stuff (who died in 1950). She had stuff that had been moved from Dallas when Nancy and Price had cleared out Aunt Nancy's house. Did I say there was a lot of stuff?
Mary Glenn and I started VERY cautiously working our way through the stuff. We quickly realized that if we did not kick things into a dramatically higher gear, we would be emptying that house for years, if not decades. And so we were ruthless for no reason but to preserve our sanity. The things we saved in the purge and find precious are not likely the ones that Nancy would have predicted. A pitcher about which Nancy would say, "We used to get water from the well back in the country with that pitcher." A set of journals from Nancy's mother that document what everyday life was like in the 1920s and 1930s. A picture of Nancy standing in front of a china cabinet whose provenance we had always wondered about, with a handwritten note on the back giving the piece's history. And pictures. Goodness, all the pictures.
My dad was a stamp collector when he was a kid and when I was little, although the hobby faded over the years. He had six big-ass Scott's albums, each weighing about 10 pounds. They probably have some monetary value; I don't really know. After my dad passed away, these albums lived for years, untouched, in some of my mom's various garages. But when we were downsizing my mom's stuff, I wanted one. I didn't need all six, nor am I interested in collecting stamps. But I just wanted one because it was a tangible thing my dad had spent many hours on and something he cared about. I don't know if any of my kids will want it, but it's in safe hands for now.
In my mom's last few years, she constantly wondered why we would want her things - "There isn't anything of any real value." We had a hard time convincing her that particular things had value -- to us -- even if they couldn't be sold. In my mom's things, I found things she had written about the time after my dad died. Beautiful words from a heart she too often kept cloaked in a tough shell. These are things that I wish we could still talk about.
So, for those still wrestling with the "downsizing" question and fretting about what will happen to your "stuff," just relax.
Expert tip: Don't worry about the couches.
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