Shaucha-Cleanliness or how not to trip all over toys

Before I became a parent, I had a lot of ideas about what I didn't want for our children.  My biggest pet peeve?  Toys all over the house.  Now I may be lumped with all of the fifties moms but I loved the horror story one of my friends told about how her mom would throw away any toys that they left lying about when they went to bed.  For her it was traumatic, for me, it sounded therapeutic.  There is nothing like the silent pain of a small wheel jamming your tender foot in the middle of the night.  If I become sleep deprived enough, I will be an insomniac who rents a big dumpster and just keeps throwing things away. 

 One of my favorite how to parenting books is called "Confessions of a Slacker Mom"  In the book, she tells tender stories of her very practical mom who only saved a few things from her children and kept them in her bathroom drawer.   

 Now, I am very sentimental about the few things that I still have from when I was little, each year we made Christmas ornaments and my mom saved them for us, I have the baby clothes that were just mine, not hand-me downs,  and I put my daughters in them, I have the cool cardboard box haunted house that I made, and I haul out my childhood easter decorations every year, but there are only a few very special things.  They mean a lot to me.  

There are so few toys that remain current and so many children have too many toys.  Having a room, or worse, a house full of toys just doesn't work for me.  

As the little one outgrows things, I give them away.   The nagging question for me however, is how do we maintain the special nature of toys without being overly attached.  For my friend whose mother threw things out, and I, who had mostly hand-me-downs, I think that the lack of new things created a hoarding tendency in us.  I shamefully collect all sorts of things and try to fill my psychological 'not enough' with a physical 'enough'.  

 Recently when we were trying to get our older daughter to share with the baby she declared, "But I don't have enough toys to share."  Where did she get this idea?  

How do I teach my children that what we have is enough?  I want them to equate that being enough is having enough.  As we start to give toys away, I am trying to build a direct relationship to giving a lot as a way of being enough.  

Some friends of mine have close relationships with orphanages all over the world.  As we dedicate toys for those children, so we dedicate space in our own hearts and on our toy shelves.  A clear toy shelf makes a clear heart.

70 square feet and a mule

When the slaves were freed, they got 40 acres and a mule.  When we were freed of the tyranny of suburbia, we each got 70 square feet and a 9 square foot work area.  

We just had our apartment painted.  The apartment that I moved into 22 years ago as a single punk rocker in Manhattan.  It has gone though many permutations.  Now we are four.  Our entire living space is less than 300 square feet, and even double that space sounds like luxury living.  

Sometimes I think, "oh God, we have so much stuff".  For four people in a tiny space we are doing pretty well.  We took out all of the furniture and now I don't want to move anything back. I fantasize about getting a HUGE 700 square foot apartment.  

When we went to visit some of our New Yorker friends who moved to a large victorian in Raleigh/Durham, Todd would introduce several of the huge empty rooms by saying,  'we're not sure what to do with this room yet'.  In my brother's house, they have a "bonus room" that is over 700 square feet.  There are two dining rooms, a living room for adults and one for children.    

My brother's family each have 1600 square feet to call their own if they divide their house up between the four of them.  When his children came to visit, I had planned a hilarious routine in which I would open the door from the bedroom to the living room and say 'this is our den.', then open the door to the bedroom again and say, 'this is our other bedroom.', I would repeat this routine several times and thought I would get a big laugh out of them, needless to say they were unimpressed.  In spite of the fact that they each have space which is equal to more than 5 of our apartments, his children didn't even notice or comment on our amazing ability to crowd into our tiny space. 

I suppose the lesson isn't in the non-coveting of space, but rather the non-coveting of my attachment to our lack of space.