Let It Go - Peter Walsh Page 0,44

someone who does.

#4: I’ll disrupt my family’s status quo.

Are you afraid that your downsizing is going to permanently change your family in some way?

The truth is, the underlying situation that’s prompting your downsizing event may indeed affect your family. But I suspect that these circumstances are either entirely out of your control (job loss, death of parents) or were a reasonable course of events for you to put into motion (retirement, better job, marriage).

So yes, your family may see some changes. But any collection of people, along with the relationships between them, is constantly changing. On some days, they change more than others!

If you’re afraid that you’re going to fracture your family or permanently injure a relationship, this is an anxiety. Change is often difficult and sometimes painful, but without change, growth would be impossible. It’s the unknown here that’s causing your anxiety. That’s completely normal.

Reframe your anxiety by telling yourself that you’re now deliberately reconnecting with your family and rejuvenating your most important relationships.

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Contrasting Parents Lead to Different Downsizing Trials for Daughter

Meg Lightbown’s experience with her family’s possessions provides an interesting question. But first, some background.

During a 2-year period in her late twenties, Meg lost both parents. Each went without warning. She hadn’t spoken in years with her mother, who struggled with hoarding behaviors and other challenges. Her father, who had raised her since she was 9, “was my best friend,” she says.

My question to you is this: When Meg cleared out both their homes, whose stuff created more emotional challenges?

If you answered her mother’s, you are . . . correct.

When Meg stepped into her mother’s one-bedroom apartment, the sudden exposure to her life came as a shock. “There was a lot of stuff in a very small area. She couldn’t just have one thing—she might have 10 bottles of air freshener,” recalls Meg, now 34. “It was very difficult to go in there and see all that. It was like she put the stuff around her instead of focusing on her relationship with me.”

As she started noticing individual items, Meg found she was more like her mother than she’d realized. “I was like, ‘I have this, too! I use this! I like that!’ It was giving me the feeling of ‘I have a relationship with my mother through the stuff.’ I think that’s why I kept a lot. I was trying to substitute for the relationship we didn’t have.”

She drove carloads of her mom’s belongings 450 miles back to her home in northern Maine: clothes, inspirational plaques, food (“I like asparagus, she liked asparagus”), candles, and other bric-a-brac. Also, a diabetic cat that needed shots three times daily.

But over time, she found that “When I had it in my house, I didn’t feel good about it. One sign said ‘Bloom where you’re planted.’ I put it up in my kitchen, and every time I saw it, I felt bad. Why couldn’t she bloom where she was planted? You don’t want to feel like that. Eventually, over time, I passed the stuff on to charity or other family members,” she says.

Her father’s home was a different story, even though it was cluttered, too. “I was so secure with my relationship with my dad, and I have such good memories of him. His stuff was just stuff.”

Years later, only a small number of items from her parents remain. She has journals that her mother wrote in and some pictures of herself she found in her apartment. Her father, a social worker, collected barometers. Meg now displays one in every room of her house. (Her husband, Rob, is happy to look at them. He’s a meteorologist.)

“Just thinking of having all that stuff still here, it would have held me back. If you keep the old stuff, you let it define who you are, and you continue to live in the past! I feel like it drags you down if you constantly revisit that past. I want to keep things that just make me feel good,” she says.

“I wouldn’t wish downsizing on anybody. It was crazy. I think the best thing you can do is keep your possessions to a number that if you were to die tomorrow and someone came in, they could deal with it. They wouldn’t be overwhelmed.”

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You’ve been picking up ideas for making collaborative decisions about family possessions, and you’ll learn a lot more in the next section. You’re going to have meaningful conversations that will likely reveal unfamiliar facets in your spouse, adult