Where did it all come from

I think I had what would be called a panic attack today.  Shaking, wanting to throw up, wanting to scream and yell all the words that are saved for my darkest times, crying at the feeling of disgust I felt welling up in my stomach.  The cause?  Well, we have a room at the back of the house which is generally the children's toy room but also serves as a lovely warm sunroom in cooler weather.  I have a beautiful old miners couch against one wall so I can sit with a cup of tea and some knitting and look out into the back garden.  It's a quiet place to rest sometimes when the children are having an afternoon sleep.  Being a toy room it also, as one would expect, has toys in it, along with a bookshelf and cupboards to store our home-ed materials - workbooks, drawing books, art supplies, all that sort of thing.  It is a small room and tends to get messy quite often which is annoying (to put it mildly) but I usually manage to organise a team effort to tidy up, sometimes it seems easier to do it by myself or some days it seems to work best if I just close the door and walk away.

Today though, the three older children were having a sleep while the youngest one stayed up with me.  I haven't put my head in the back room lately.  Mainly because there is something behind the door that means I can't open it fully - a fair indicator that things are not going to be good  if I do go inside.  I've managed to avoid going in there or thinking too much about how bad it might be.  Today though, it was really the only room Marta and I could be in since it was raining outside, the sewing room was not a room I wanted to be in with an inquisitive 13 month old at that particular time (read: when I didn't want to have to bother about what she was getting into and stopping her from ripping my beautiful and much treasured craft books) and David was asleep on the couch in the loungeroom.  So off to the back room we went.

Well, I couldn't get to the miners couch, and even if I could have, there was no room on it to sit down.  The floor was covered in cushions, more cushions, toys, toys, toys and an odd assortment of ....well......, rubbish.  Plastic containers that the boys had purloined from the kitchen to hold collections of boy treasures were strewn about, most of them empty (the contents, it seemed, were mostly on the floor) along with papers, bits of Lego(even though the Lego has supposedly been packed away for four weeks because it was still not packed up after repeated (like, ten) requests last time it was out), wooden blocks, cast off clothes, a special handmade cloth doll I had bought Marta for her first birthday only a month ago..... Actually, that is when the panic attack started to kick in.  Seeing Marta's beautiful doll that I had given her to be her 'particular' doll, left on the floor by her big sister who had been playing with it, under a pile of cushions was like a smack in the face.  The whole scene just screamed at me that my children do not value what they have.  And that was another smack in the face because it means that I have failed somewhere in teaching them this.  I know that I am often saying to them that we must look after what we have but that message is very clearly not being taken in.  I am obviously not modelling that behaviour well enough myself.

So I began to pick up more cushions to make a clear space on the floor so I could see the level of damage.  And that is when the second wave of  panic overtook me.  Toys, bits of toys, things they had really, really wanted at one time or another, pencils, textas with lids off, a 300 piece jigsaw puzzle started but scattered across the floor after maybe 20 pieces were joined.  All of it just left there, with absolutely no thought for looking after what they have, and indeed, all piled over with cushions.  It was this obvious excess that filled me with disgust and literally had me wanting to throw up.  When it is all packed away it doesn't seem like so much but having it spread all over the floor made it clear just how much stuff we have in that small room.

With assistance from Marta (she found all the lidless textas for me!) I started sorting through it all, throwing a lot of things I would normally have just put away, into rubbish bags.  Every time I find myself on my knees tidying up this room I tell myself "I am not going to do this again". But of course I do.  Today, when I said it, I meant it.  This stuff was going.  I ended up with four shopping bags that went straight into the bin before prying eyes could inspect them.  A lot more things went into a big box destined for the op-shop. At some point I put Marta to bed, made myself a cup of tea and sat down to review the situation.  There had been several waves of panic throughout the time it took to sort out everything into rubbish bags, op-shop boxes and a smaller pile of things that would be kept and put back in the shelves, or packed away for awhile.  It was such an incredibly uncomfortable feeling, so much so that even now, some time later, when the panic has subsided, I still feel close to tears.  Why do we have so much stuff?  And they are constantly asking for the new this or that which, of course they seldom get, but still, we have SO MUCH!!!!

Then there is the nagging thought that Christmas is very near and well intentioned aunts and uncles will give the children more toys, more stuff that will end up in pieces on the toy room floor.  I even started composing a letter to them all explaining that really, the children have enough toys and could they please not buy more this Christmas as it is quite overwhelming.  I don't know how well that letter would be received.  And in truth, I would have to send the letter to myself as well since I am just as guilty of buying Lego kits and similar sorts of things around this time of year and at birthdays.

So what is the answer?  Allow the children fewer things?  Impose stricter discipline about how much they may have out at any given time and watch them like a hawk to make sure they pack up each thing as they finish with it?  Ugh, that second option just sounds miserable.  I have read a few articles about a movement called "Simple Living".  This is one I thought was particularly good, from a couple of years ago.  It sounds funny to call it a movement but there you have it.  These are the times we live in.  Perhaps I need to read about some more experiences of it - about people just living with a whole lot less stuff.  The stories I have read have mainly been about people without children.  How do we raise children in this age of consumerism, in a way that teaches them to honour what they have and to actually want less stuff?  It's one thing to impose that kind of rule on them but to teach them to want less is another thing altogether.  Maybe it comes back to modelling the behaviour, which is where I seem to have gone wrong.  Agggghhhhh, it all seems like there is so much thinking to be done about how I want us to live, what values I want the children to grow up with and model all of that more consciously.  Otherwise I'm just adding to the problems of overconsumption that we, in the Western world are so guilty of.  I'll let you know how we get on.