Decluttering, Painting, and Preschool
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I’ve been having a weird year so far. There has been plenty of upheaval with the passing of my father at the very end of last year. In addition, not on the same level but still very disorienting, our youngest child is reaching the age where we have to prepare for preschool later this calendar year.
Any of my kids starting school is a major stressor for me, but when it’s the youngest, well, that obviously brings with it lots of baggage. Like, two or three extra checked bags and they’re very expensive because they are all over-sized.
At least by this point, choosing a preschool should be easy. Unfortunately, the small preschool the boys went to, which is located just a quarter mile from our house, was recently sold and there has been a lot of turnover in staff. On the plus side, there are new floors, which is nice.
So it is that we have visited another preschool and inquired online with a couple more. Just in case. I want to get this right. While my daughter has made it known that she is never going to school and that she will be staying home with us indefinitely, I figure we have to be prepared to move on at some point.
Of course, I would be more than happy to extend the carefree days of doll play and one-on-one time with my youngest child for months, years even. While part of me is looking forward to a new chapter, the more sentimental, change-averse part of me is not at all ready to have several hours a day of unaccounted for time for the first time in almost a decade.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I particularly love playing with dolls or doing all the other little things that one does with small children, but it’s weird how we can mourn the loss of things we don’t love just because the alternative is change.
Change is scary. And the only thing scarier than change is the knowledge that there is always more change lurking around the corner. It’s like, ugh, I get it! I have to find a preschool and start taking my child there but isn’t it a bit ridiculous that right after that she has to go to elementary school and then leave me behind for good? Come on, Change! Let me rest for more than five seconds.
When I’m with my kids — playing dolls, doing homework, reading books, watching TV, going to the fair, doing anything, really — I often make mental calculations such as in five years, they’ll be eight, ten, and thirteen…in ten years they’ll be thirteen, fifteen, and eighteen…and so on.
The math doesn’t change from day to day (until it does), but I still do this quite regularly. Another thing I do routinely is sneak glances at the slender wall at the end of the countertop in our kitchen where we measure our children’s heights and imagine where their marks will be next year and the year after that.
Given all this, for lack of a better word, weirdness, it’s probably not surprising that I’ve been feeling a little adrift lately. The house has grown increasingly cluttered as I find my motivation to do much of anything flagging.
I asked my wife recently if she ever felt kind of aimless or lacking purpose. She replied, “Yes, in fact, that’s why I’ve been looking at paint colors to paint the house with. Oh, and I found this 30-day declutter challenge. Look, on Day 1 you’re supposed to…”
I quickly cut across her and interjected, “Because I definitely don’t. That’s for sure!”
Anyway, long story short, I’ve cleaned out three kitchen cabinets and the refrigerator, and we painted several rooms of our house in the last few days. Honestly, it’s kind of typical for how we operate as a family unit. We languish for long periods in comfortable routines and general malaise and then a burst of frantic energy washes across us for some reason and we suddenly trade in our old car for a new one, paint the house, take up gardening, or enroll a child in preschool.
You knew it was all going to come back to the kid starting preschool, didn’t you?
It’s almost as if by throwing myself at piles of debris cluttering our cabinets and table tops or working until my body aches to make our walls a different color, I think I can forestall the really big changes.
I know I can’t, but I can forget about them for a few hours or days. And when the time does come, I understand on some deeper level that the change won’t really be so scary. The anticipation is always the worst part.
My daughter will cry the first day and cling to us, probably. And I’ll certainly cry after leaving her. But a few days later we’ll be in our new routine and it will soon feel like this is the way things have always been.
Even the freshly de-junked junk drawers and gray walls with a slight hint of blue will seem completely familiar. Letting go of the past is necessary and can even feel empowering. Of course, that doesn’t mean we have to go too far.
When we started painting the house, we failed to consider what we would do about the one very special wall. The height measuring wall. What can I say? We did rush into this. That wall is home to more than twenty height marks with crooked initials and barely legible dates.
It didn’t take long for us to decide. That wall is staying put. Even if it’s the only wall in the house that’s brown instead of gray. Even if we have to transfer the marks onto a board and draw them back in afterwards (that feels a bit like cheating, but we’ll see). Painting the house, cutting through the junk, even letting the kids grow up, I can make myself live with all that.
But you have to draw the line somewhere. And in my case the lines are drawn all over one very specific wall.
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