‘Don’t worry about it - you’ll get loads of stuff when the baby comes’ several wise parents told me when I was pregnant with my oldest son. I was pseudo-panicking about all the baby stuff I had to get in the next 10 weeks. This was ridiculous in itself - I once wrote a book in 10 weeks, I could definitely get my hands on a car seat, a Moses basket and a couple of baby grows in that time.
The truth was, I LOVED buying stuff for our first baby, filling up a room that had felt too empty for too long. But I did manage to restrict myself to buying one pack off babygrows and vests and a couple of blankets and hats. After all, everyone said I’d get piles of newborn clothes as gifts - which I did. What I hadn’t factored in were the bags and bags of barely worn - sometimes never worn - clothes I was also given by friends.
I couldn’t believe how much brand-new stuff I was given, with the labels still on, from friends that simply hadn’t managed to get through their own extensive stash of tiny clothes And it kept on coming, at three, six and nine months, a year old, 18 months. Now my eldest is nearly four the pipeline is starting to slow down, although I don't think I've ever bought him more than the odd t-shirt or pair of jeans until recently. But his younger brother is still working through the bags and bags of tiny boy’s clothes that have taken up a massive chunk of real estate in our eaves space for the last few years, the vast majority of which we didn’t buy.
And then at the other end of our endless conveyor belt are all the things the littlest has finally grown out of, the stuff that we can finally clear out of the house… except it's all sitting in a giant pile in the corner of the room, waiting for me to sort it out. It’s a perennial source of guilt that I can never get round to it, another thing I’ve failed to tick off my to do list. Some days my fingers itch to chuck it all in a bin bag and march it straight round to a charity shop. But I know that’s not the right thing to do, the clothes need to be washed again, sorted into piles for the fabric bank, the nice stuff that I can send charity shop or the baby bank without feeling guilty about dumping stuff, the special things I want to pass on to a friend’s baby. But that’s what, a three-hour job? Who do you know who has two small children, a full-time job and a spare three hours? And so, the mountain just keeps getting bigger.
Moving away from the baby grow mountain in the corner of our youngest’s room (which is also supposed to be my office, except I haven't got round to clearing it out yet), are the piles of children’s books in my eldest’s room. He loves stories, so we’ll get through three or four most bedtimes - but even so, we must have a hundred kid’s books now, most of which barely get looked at. My son gets books for every Christmas and birthday, and again, friends give us their children’s old favourites - the ones they’ve managed to keep in pristine condition for another child to enjoy. I should be thrilled at how thoughtful and kind are friends are to do this (because they are) but all I can do it panic about storage space - more stuff to eventually sort.
And then there are the toys. I honestly never - literally never - buy my children toys. This is partially because they’re normally only obsessed with one thing, and at the moment that one thing is one of my earplugs (the youngest) a corporate stress toy my husband got at a conference two years ago (the eldest). But mainly it’s because they get given, and bought more stuff than they will ever play with. Again, friends who are more organised than I am pass down gorgeous, carefully selected toys that their children have already loved and cherished (I can only assume other children don’t show their love for their favourites by throwing them down the stairs). Christmases and birthdays are an orgy of stuff - and that’s even with relatively restrained grandparents and a small family. We’ve just started throwing birthday parties for the eldest, and last year I had to stagger present openings over a fortnight so he didn’t freak out. I then put a bunch of stuff away in a cupboard to play with at a later date and promptly forgot about it for a year - another mismanagement of all our stuff that left me feeling guilty and chaotic.
I know I’ve just described capitalist overconsumption at its worst. The sort of thing that’s killing our planet, making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Participating in this merry-go-round of disposable plastic crap, more clothes than we’ll ever need and endless landfill is making the world so much worse for everyones’ children. But it’s a merry-go-round I can’t get off, and it’s doing. My. Head. In.
I tried toy rotation (for a day, then I got too busy), I tried toy libraries for a bit, until that became more admin to fail at (I kept forgetting to pack the box up for collection on time, we kept losing bits), I have endless clear outs ‘for the charity shop’ but I can never work as quickly as the new stuff coming in (including the Rubik’s cube my eldest was given by the lady in the flipping charity shop this weekend when he went with my husband to drop off a bag of toys). Every surface of our house is covered in stuff, if I see another tiny sock, covered in dust in a corner I will scream, and I haven’t even started talking about party bags and all the crap on the front of kid's magazines yet.
I suppose part of this comes down to domestic load - feeling disorganised and messy and like we don’t have a place for everything weighs down far more heavily on me than it does on my husband, so I spend more time trying to fruitlessly do something about it. On Monday mornings, once the children are in nursery I can’t start work until I’ve attempted to put everything away - the 40-year-old’s version of tidying their bedroom and doing a revision timetable before they open their Algebra book. My husband drops the kids off, goes for a run and… starts work, because he doesn’t have the same running list of other crap in his head.
But sometimes it’s ALL I can think about. It’s like the maths doesn’t add up - how can I spend quite so much time tidying up and putting things away, only for everything to look like such a disaster? I hate that my house, which always looked nice and felt like a nice place to be has become a dumping ground, and when I do get a bit of downtime I find it almost impossible to relax when everything is a mess. Maybe it’s Instagram’s fault - all those pristine nurseries and playrooms and tap to tidy moments make me feel like I’m losing at a game everyone else is winning at. Maybe it’s Marie flipping Kondo’s fault - she reckons you should get rid of anything that doesn’t spark joy in your life, but I’d like to see her prise a large toy Buzz Lightyear with a slightly flat battery out of a four-year-old’s sticky hands.
It’s my son’s birthday in a few weeks, and I’m vaguely considering suggesting doing a toy swap with his friends rather than him getting a pile of new presents. Whether I actually get round to this - or the mountain of old babygrows in the corner - in time remains to me seen. One things for sure though, next time we need to do a charity shop run, I’m going on my own.