![\"Soles\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/r9f.352.myftpupload.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/Soles.jpg\")
<\/a>It\u2019s time. Past time, actually. Emma is 26 and has been living in Brooklyn for the last 18 months. She\u2019s graduated not just from college, but to full independent living, not counting\u00a0the occasional Trader Joe\u2019s gift cards I send her. I do this when I become too anxious that trying to make it on $12 an hour in the Big Apple may force Emma\u00a0into dumpster diving. (Possibly it is not the threat of starvation that might drive her to this, as you will see.) Also,\u00a0Emma’s\u00a0still on our Verizon family plan. I am convinced that when the stages of human development are revised for the current era, getting your own phone account will replace marriage, mortgages, and having children as the signposts of adulthood. \u00a0Still, aside from these minor caveats, Emma\u2019s grown up. Gone.<\/p>\nHer stuff isn\u2019t gone, though. True, she did a major purge\u00a0to mark her graduation from college. But I might have been a tad too optimistic when I chronicled<\/a> the demise of Emma’s\u00a0hoarding days. She really just scratched the surface. One thing unearthed during that earlier excavation was that I am a hoarder by proxy, and I didn’t demand that Emma\u00a0dig deeper. I believe that closets and basements were invented for hanging onto things until we are ready to let go.<\/p>\n Apparently, I haven\u2019t been ready. Although I\u2019ve professed a desire for a guestroom for years, Emma\u2019s partially denuded bedroom has retained its status as part shrine, part dumping ground. The one thing we did get rid of after she left is her loft bed, so now even nimble guests (or returning daughters) have no place to sleep.<\/p>\n My husband and I finally got a new mattress, which provided the impetus to move the old one into Emma\u2019s room and turn fantasy into reality. It is not quite the guestroom of my dreams. In fact, it bears a striking resemblance to a dumping ground with a bed in the middle of it, surrounded by junk. Emma\u2019s junk.<\/p>\n I wish I were the kind of mother who could just start tossing, confident that the appropriation of kids’\u00a0former space no longer induces trauma once they are old enough to fall off your health insurance under Obamacare. But I can\u2019t. I\u2019m an enabler.<\/p>\n It would probably be better, I think as I riffle through high school term papers and ugly glass figurines, to adopt a version of Don\u2019t Ask, Don\u2019t Tell. Don\u2019t tell Emma about that mysteriously disappeared fake hand we got for Halloween one year, and she won\u2019t ask. Or care. Or even know! But perhaps I have never gotten over the box\u00a0of stuffed animals my mother tossed. More pragmatically, I regret that the baseball Jackie Robinson autographed for my husband when he was a boy did not survive a major move\u00a0by his unsentimental (and financially unsavvy) parents.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t want to make such mistakes, or make\u00a0Emma’s\u00a0decisions for her.So I hit upon the brilliant idea of taking iPhone pictures of stuff, then sending them to her\u00a0so she can decide. Plus, if I succeed in the time-honored trick of substituting photos of stuff for the stuff itself, we\u2019ll already have the photos! Cyberspace is such a vast new wasteland\u00a0to clutter up, our humble collection will barely make a dent.<\/p>\n Hopeful, I arrange scarves, trinkets, purses on the bed, and send off my first batch with the subject line \u201cKeep or Give Away?\u201d I am careful to avoid the word \u201cdiscard,\u201d which sounds so dismissive and final. Maybe \u201cgive away\u201d \u00a0might stimulate some deeply buried philanthropic urge.<\/p>\n \u201cSave!\u201d Emma emails in response, the act of hoarding itself apparently\u00a0a rescue operation. This is not working. But then, a different response to\u00a0one of the four pictures arrives: I am allowed to get rid of\u2014sorry, give away–two hats.<\/p>\n So I send another photo, this one containing a pair of shoes and a pair of cowboy boots with holes that the Marlboro Man could ride his horse through. I\u2019ve appended a message: \u201cHUGE holes! Be brave!\u201d<\/p>\n Emma writes back, \u201cI really like the strange compositions of these photos you have been taking! But unfortunately I will have to ask you to retain this pile (it took me so long to find cowboy boots\u2014I will get them resoled).\u201d<\/p>\n And I will need to get re-souled into a different kind of mother, if I ever hope to have a guestroom.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Where are you on the spectrum from minimalist to hoarder? How do you deal with your grown kids’ stuff? How did your parents deal with yours?<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s time. Past time, actually. Emma is 26 and has been living in Brooklyn for the last 18 months. She\u2019s graduated not just from college, but to full independent living, not counting\u00a0the occasional Trader Joe\u2019s gift cards I send her. … Continue reading