Before becoming a parent, I thought I was a minimalist
A story about minimalism, clutter, and how to deal with all the changes that come with a baby’s arrival
“Before I became a mom, I considered myself a minimalist,” a lady quipped in one of my chat groups. I laughed at her message, thinking, “That’s exactly what’s happening to me!”
When we moved to Zurich, my husband and I had inherited some furniture from the former tenant, an acquaintance of his. He had to pay a bulk fee for all the stuff she left behind — two leatherette seats in the living room, a heavy wooden dining table with wooden chairs. A shabby-chic two-seater and table in the kitchen, a low bed in the main bedroom. A couple of pans and plates. Two teaspoons, a small desk.
Priding ourselves on being frugal, we thought, we can do with this. And work with what we had we did — for years, though the couch in the living room was too small to sprawl in during winter movie weekends. So we’d set down our beamer on the bed between us to watch movies on lazy Saturdays.
With time, his desire for a more substantial couch overcame him. And after some searching, we settled on a canvas-covered, gray couch with storage underneath. He sold the old-fashioned cupboard that the apartment had come with. He’d hated that one too. I suppose I hadn’t minded that one — it had shelf upon hidden shelf where documents could go. We sold most of the previous tenant’s furniture, and soon, our home had transformed into a version of our own style — sleek Sixties-inspired, with shades of gray, white, and beige.
Then our baby came, the one we’d been waiting for for years.
It felt as if we had entered a fabulous palace, one that seemed to require many things we thought he needed. Clothes, nappies, a changing table. A baby swing. A Pickler triangle. Eventually, a battery-operated Duplo train set. Then a wooden train set. Puzzles. Books, and books. And many, many cars and stuffed animals.
I looked at my house, and our attic, and I felt overwhelmed and crowded, surprised at how each storage space was burgeoning with boxes of puzzles and a variety of fish-themed games.
“How did this happen?” I thought to myself, one evening, up in the attic.
I stared at carts and boxes piled up, one on top of the other, beginning to hyperventilate. I’d had to buy several sleek, see-through boxes when I realized that my breastfeeding days and my son’s infancy were coming to a close. And that that stage, that seemed like forever, was over, needing to be put away.
Then the toys. I thought we needed those rubber building blocks his uncle gave him, but then one day, he outgrew them. Don’t get me wrong, he played with them nearly everyday for a year or two. But outgrow them he did.
We discovered the wonder of puzzles from a friend’s decluttering donation from her own son’s life. It was then that puzzles for 2 to 3 year olds became all the rage in our home. Later, my boy and his father insisted on more complicated puzzles — I was impressed by how engaged he was with the upgrade. We finally embraced buying a wooden Brio set, and the more trains and buildings we added for birthdays and Christmases, the longer he would play on his rubber mat of colorful tiles.
A talking pen and accompanying books came from his Czech uncle, and how much my little boy loved them. More books in that target language had him reading and using his pen all afternoon. We purchased one in German too, a language he needed for school, but wasn’t our strength, and off he went into his world of talking books in that language too.
I’ve just purchased a few more shelves to hold our growing set of books — mine and my husband’s and our son’s included. I think being able to at least organize all the stuff I’ve acquired since my son arrived will help me have a handle on things.
The point of my story is not so much about the clutter, but about how parenthood changes everything. Including your perspective on clutter and minimalism.
And as I ponder my transition from minimalism to maximalism, I find myself thinking, you know what. All we can do is roll with the changes. And swim with the tidal waves of change that hit us like tsunamis.
We can be aware that that’s happening. Awareness is the first step. Sometimes, we need to grab on to something when all the clutter feels like a mental earthquake. Giving to charity, or asking a friend who just had a baby if they’d like a box of clothes for 6–9 month olds might help you feel like you can breathe again.
And between your occasional decluttering work (selling secondhand baby stuff online) and your hubby’s similar efforts, a day will come when you can stand in the middle of your storage room and feel like you can breathe again.
There is clutter in parenting life. And then there is change, one constantly coming at you in waves, as soon as your child is born. There’s happiness dusted all over it, and we can let ourselves be messy once in a while, and allow the shifting seas to wash over us. Surrender to the ocean and its surf.
