Purging my child’s toys saved my motherhood

I am generally not considered a sentimental person, and I do not keep a lot of junk. When I moved to college, everything that wasn’t part of my closet fit into a single trunk. By the time I got married, I had shrunk those keepsakes down to a single box. When I got pregnant, the box had shrunk down to a tiny container I shoved under my bed.

Then we had kids.

The sheer amount of stuff we received from well-wishers was overwhelming. I figured that we needed most of it—babies are high maintenance, right?—and took comfort in the fact that when our child got bigger, we could ditch the bassinet and the bottles and shrink down our lives again.

I could not have been more wrong. The stuff continued to pour in, and it became impossible to throw anything out. Some of it was useful and consumable, like diapers, and some of it was thoughtful and small, like a special stuffed animal, but most of it was simply too much…like the 1,398 toys that began a procession through our lives over the next three years.

It was nobody’s fault. My children have four grandparents, two great-grandparents, and five aunts and uncles within a 20-mile radius. Many of them express their love through purchases. Constant purchases. For Christmas, birthdays, Easter, St. Patrick’s Day, your regular Saturday. There was bound to be a build-up.

The problem was that my children received so many presents the gift-giving itself began to lose meaning. Every time a family member came by the house, my 3-year-old expected a treat.

Related: Please, no more toys—but if you want to give a gift, try this

The amount of stuff piling up in our house started to grate on me, but I didn’t know what to do. My oldest child has the memory of an elephant: the other day he cried because he couldn’t find a specific drawing that he made in preschool 12 months ago. And my family was constantly checking up on their gifts: “Where’s the special bear I gave you, little guy? Do you play with it a lot?” I didn’t want to offend anyone.

Then I had an evening that changed my life as a mom. We went to a friend’s house for dinner; they had young kids too, about a year or so ahead of us. We walked in and I was shocked at how completely their house had been taken over by their kids’ belongings. You couldn’t see the living room floor because there were toys everywhere—not in use but stacked up to the ceiling. They apologized for the mess, and it didn’t seem to bother them, but I was panicking on the inside.

Was this what was in store for me as a parent? Were my children going to accumulate so much that I wouldn’t be able to find my own life under all the mess?

We went home that night and put the kids to bed. And I ransacked. Three years of accumulated playthings, old “special” clothes, and my concerns and ideas about disappointing our relatives, were all ruthlessly sorted through.

If I was going to be a good mom, it would have to be on my terms, and my terms included the right to dispose of accumulation. It included the right to gently but firmly inform relatives that we may not have room for the stuffed bear as big as a house as a Christmas present this year, could there be a special place at their house to keep it? It included the right to shape my family’s values, even when they clash a little with those closest to us.

I love our extended family very much, and I am glad they shower my children with affection, including gifts. But every mom has her own way of keeping her sanity, right? And for me, the key to a happy household now includes the occasional purge, when the kids are looking away, and knowing inside that your family will love you anyway.

A version of this post was published June 24, 2019. It has been updated.