I Love My Kid, But How Long, Exactly, Am I Supposed to Keep His Baby Teeth?

Decluttering kids’ stuff is emotionally loaded. / Illustration by Tara Jacoby

My sister and I are crouched on a cold cement floor in my parents’ basement, combing through a pile of small plastic horses. They’re from the early ’80s, these My Little Pony toys, and the years haven’t been kind to them. The cutesy symbols on their flanks have rubbed off, and their pretty pastel manes are frizzy and fried, destroyed by years of bathing in the water from the dehumidifier my parents keep running down here. The one with the shooting star on its side has lost its tail entirely. Even now, the ponies are splayed out haphazardly on the floor as if the whole herd has been tranquilized, or simply dropped dead from years of abuse.

“Smell this one,” my sister, Ali, says, and so I do. It smells of our childhood, a slightly sweet and probably toxic mix of vanilla and plastic. My mom plucks the pony from my hand and tosses it in a grocery bag.

“It’s yours now,” she says. “Take all of them, or I’m going to throw them out.”

“Do you girls still want this stuff or can I pitch it?” my dad calls from the other side of the basement. He’s holding up a bin of our old dress-up clothes. There’s the pink and green sequined leotard Ali wore in a dance recital when she was three; there’s the yellow tutu I wore when I was five, the tulle now disintegrating; there’s the cream negligee we wore on our heads like a wedding veil.

“WHAT?” my sister and I shriek.  “You can’t throw that out!” The prospect is horrifying.

Well, my dad tells us, we can take the tutus, along with the ponies, the American Girl dolls, the small lidded box I made in sixth-grade wood shop, the throw pillow Ali made from her old field hockey uniform, our binders of CDs, our elementary school report cards, our kindergarten art projects, and all of our yearbooks. My sister and I look at each other in disbelief. It’s clear what’s happening.

Our parents are trying to get rid of us. 

“We’re not trying to get rid of you,” my dad sighs. “We just don’t have space for all this stuff anymore.” He’s lying, of course, because we are currently in a storage room located off their main finished basement, and there is still some space here. Outside this room, there’s a cedar closet; upstairs, eight more closets. It’s not about the space.

“Girls, this is your stuff,” my mom says as she tosses more ponies into the grocery bag. She’s right, technically — it is our stuff, or at least it was at one time, and in theory your stuff should live with you. But this is more than stuff. It’s the sacred detritus of our childhood. Without it, all of us might forget who my sister and I were as kids. If not for these ponies, how would we remember that we played in dehumidifier water? Don’t our parents want to remember us? 

Plus, there’s the practical issue. Ali lives just outside of Boston in an 1885 Victorian that has loads of historic charm but only three teeny closets and one very scary basement. Now that she has an eight-month-old, her house is crammed with baby stuff, her brain is filled with new-parent stress, and at this moment she just can’t take on a bin of tutus, a box of old artwork, or a pile of ponies. And anyway, the field hockey pillow doesn’t match her new couch.

Space isn’t as much of an issue for me: We lost all of our belongings in a house fire four years ago. When we rebuilt, we made sure there was plenty of storage, but it takes time to fill a house back up, and some of our closets and drawers are still half-empty.

None of this really matters though, because the truth is this: My sister and I don’t want this crap either. (What would I do with my framed college diploma?) We have little kids of our own now, so we’re the keepers of their memories. We can’t also be the keepers of ours. Not yet, anyway. Besides, our parents should want to hold these things close because all of it once belonged to us. And it is the job of parents to be stewards of their children’s memories. Forever.

Right?

This basement clean-out situation isn’t anything new. My parents have tried to offload lots of things from down here over the years: two hutches, a sofa, a Persian rug rolled up like a giant log, mirrors, an antique bird cage, silver sets, end tables, a marble-topped bathroom cabinet left over from their most recent bathroom renovation — a whole host of stuff that was banished after redecorating, or that my mom couldn’t pass up at an antique store. Whenever my sister or I visit, Mom walks us through the selection like a used-car salesperson: That lampshade is silk! This china belonged to your great-grandmother! That dresser is bird’s-eye maple! Don’t you girls want to take this stuff? 

We have taken things. After the fire, I took two dressers and three nightstands. When Ali moved into her house, she took a drop-leaf kitchen table, a lamp, a mirror, a dining room table, and six cane-back chairs. (“So you’re saying that you never liked our bathroom cabinet?” Mom sniffed accusingly as we passed it over.)

All this stuff stresses my mom out, and so we tell her to get rid of it. We tell her that we will never want those hutches, we will never use that clock, we will never need an old bird cage, we’ve taken all we can. But she hangs on to everything anyway, just in case we change our minds. We all know how this ends; my mom reminds us of it often. They will die, and we will be left with a house full of crap we don’t want. My sister and I will need to have an estate sale, Mom says, but under no circumstances are we to get rid of anything that belonged to our great-grandparents or our great-aunt, and we also have to keep all of Mom’s silver tea services and each of her (13) antique clocks. The list is long, as my mom — like so many of her baby boomer generation, it seems — assigns sentimental value to many things. These things evidently do not include our childhood memories.

But of course Ali and I will keep the family heirlooms, because heirlooms have a clear generational journey: Everyone just ferries them down the family tree until some brave soul or clueless cousin dumps them. It’s all the other stuff that is tricky — the lumpy ceramic pinch pots from second-grade art class, the trophies, the macaroni necklaces, the letters mailed home from summer camp, the school pictures.

One of my friends from college, Jess, has a name for this stuff: love clutter. Her mom recently appeared on her doorstep with a huge box of it. Jess’s dad died a few years ago, and her mom was finally moving out of their childhood house, downsizing to a condo. Jess has four sisters, and each was also presented with a big box of childhood ephemera: report cards, bad artwork, old letters. One sister, an interior designer who used to own a decluttering company, recycled it all. Another refused to take it. Jess and two of her sisters accepted the boxes, grudgingly. But Jess knew it wasn’t personal; less space calls for less stuff. And then she sorted through the box.

“She gave me back all the Mother’s Day cards I had written to her!” Jess says. I gasp. The audacity!

And it’s not just Jess. I’m 42 now, and it feels like everyone I know is getting their childhood memories — this love clutter — ­unceremoniously dumped on them. My friend Suzanne’s mom gave her a box of all the Christmas ornaments Suzanne made as a kid. And there’s my friend Michelle, whose dad brought over all of her old report cards and a huge tub of Beanie Babies, which never did pan out to be the gold mine we all thought they’d be. My friend Lauren got all of her school awards; Liz received a newspaper clipping of her participating in a pro-life march in Washington with her Catholic high school. (“I’m so embarrassed about this now,” she says.) Rebekka’s mom sent her a box of old jewelry;­ mixed in with the earrings were Rebekka’s molars.

“So why did you save it all?” I ask my mom one evening. Why did any of you save it?

She mulls it over. “It feels almost sacrilegious to throw these things away. You put your little hands on it and you worked so hard. How could I possibly throw it out?”

I understand this, deeply. It’s why I’ve kept the laminated paper placemats my son made in preschool, his scrawled notes and scribbled drawings, his adorably misspelled Christmas wish lists. These things are not just clutter. They are physical evidence of a life lived.

“But it’s overwhelming us,” my mom explains. “At this age, we’re seeing that our time is limited. And it’s like, what am I going to do with all this crap?”

I hate when my parents bring age into it. It occurs to me that perhaps this is why my sister and I are so affronted by their willingness to part with our love clutter. It’s not that we feel abandoned, or that we so desperately need them to continue storing our stuff. It’s that we’re suddenly faced with their mortality, and this is scary. My dad just turned 70; my mom is 69. They’re young for their age — Mom does yoga, Dad golfs, they travel the world — but who knows?

My friend Christy thinks that there’s some sort of threshold you cross when you hit a certain age. “Every parent’s great fear is that you’re going to forget things. We keep stuff as insurance that we’ll remember who our children were as babies, as toddlers, as kids,” she muses. “But our parents aren’t afraid of forgetting things. They’ve moved on. Maybe they know something we don’t.”

Or maybe, I think more cynically, it’s the thing that Swedes call döstädning — death cleaning. It’s like a morbid remix of Marie Kondo; instead of getting rid of items because they don’t spark joy, you toss them so that your loved ones won’t be burdened by all your shit when you die. There’s a whole book about the process (it’s called The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, by Margareta Magnusson, in case you want to traumatize your whole family). Last year, Amy Poehler executive-produced a reality series of the same name wherein a trio of “death cleaners” help people sort through their stuff.

I suppose death cleaning is courteous. And yet it distresses me greatly that instead of whittling down her clock collection or donating that rolled-up rug in the basement that’s as big as a goddamned felled tree, my mom instead makes room in her life by giving me a bag of my old teeth.

About the teeth: I don’t want them. Rebekka doesn’t want her teeth either, especially because they still have dried blood on them. And my friend Rhiannon also never really wanted hers, but her parents gave her a small sack of them anyway — 20 in total — and Rhiannon kept the teeth in her jewelry box all the way through college, when her horrified boyfriend discovered them. (He married her anyway.) But what else was she to do with them?

“Our forefathers saved hair and teeth because photography did not exist. We now have 400 photos per day of these children’s lives. Throw. That. Shit. Out,” Rebekka says.

I agree with her, mostly. My seven-year-old son’s life is fastidiously, obsessively documented on my phone through thousands of pictures and videos. And yet on the highest shelf of my closet, I have a Ziploc bag of his teeth, stashed in a box with the Tooth Fairy certificates I bought on Etsy. He will not want them, I’m sure of it, but as my mom says, it feels sacrilegious to get rid of them. They were quite literally part of him, just like the lock of hair from his first haircut (lost in the fire) and the blackened umbilical cord clipping that the hospital inexplicably gave me to take home. (I did throw this out, because ew.)

I’ve kept other things too. I have a curated box of items from each year of school: his first book bag, his kindergarten diploma, his artwork, his stories, a single tiny mitten so I can remember how small his hands were, a few birthday cards so he can remember the distinctive lines and loops of his grandparents’ handwriting. I’d have so many more things, but we lost his babyhood in the fire. I can’t figure out how this has affected the way I think about what to save. Am I less sentimental because I know how to live without the things I’d planned on saving forever? Or do I cling to things more tightly because I know what I’ve lost?

One night, I ask Quinn what he wants me to save. His artwork, of course, because he’s very serious about it and surely he’ll want to look back on everything and see how he’s improved? “No thanks,” he says. “I’m good.” But what about his writing journals, his first math test, his lunch notes, the turkey headband he wore at his preschool Thanksgiving party? Nope.

I am flabbergasted. But I will save it all anyway. He’s seven. What does he know?

There are ways to streamline this stuff. You can mail a box of your kids’ artwork to Los Angeles, and a company called Artkive will professionally photograph each piece and send you a hardcover art book. While you’re at it, you can ship your VHS home videos and old photo albums to Arizona, and iMemories will digitize it all. Businesses will turn that pile of special baby clothes into a quilt; apps will create virtual baby books for you.

But none of this is quite the same, is it? There’s something about touching creased construction paper, feeling the decisive indentations of his pencil pressed in paper, holding the smallness of his mitten in my hand. My child has touched these things, he has created them, those are his fingerprints, this is who he was. (For the record, it appears that most kids agree with me. A study out of England found that the majority of children ages three to six were horrified when offered the choice between taking home their original emotional attachment object, like a blanket or toy, or an exact duplicate. Some refused to have their beloved object copied at all; many cried. “It’s as if the children believed their special object had a unique essence,” wrote psychologist Christian Jarrett of the study. I wonder if my shockingly unsentimental son would have cared either way.)

Back in my parents’ basement, I hold a heap of books and stories I wrote when I was younger. My parents tell me that I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was five, but skimming through thousands of my old words somehow makes it real. This is who I was then; this is who I am now. Isn’t life funny? I think I might cry.

My dad puts a hand on my shoulder and picks up one of my stories, and together we bask in the warm glow of nostalgia. “Let me find a box so you can take them home,” he says.

I stand up and sheaves of paper fall off my lap.

“No thanks,” I tell him. “I’m good.”

“Can we please be done now?” my sister begs. We’ve made some progress here. The binders of CDs have landed in the donation pile (someone somewhere must still have a CD player), along with an old doll bed and a bunch of Barbies who also bathed in dehumidifier water. My framed college diploma went in the trash. So did the field hockey pillow, a bin of my sister’s sorority t-shirts, my woodworking project, and our high school uniforms. We’ve persuaded my parents to hang on to all of our artwork, the report cards, the ponies, and the American Girl doll collection. In return, my sister takes her college sweatshirts and I take my entire L.M. Montgomery book collection. 

The back basement doesn’t look any different (“It’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” my dad always says), but we all leave somewhat satisfied. My parents have gotten rid of a few things, and my sister and I have persuaded them to be the keepers of our memories for just a little while longer. No Swedish death cleaning just yet. 

But one morning a few weeks later, my dad texts me: Something’s outside your front door. I peek through the window and see nothing, until I look down. And there they are, three My Little Ponies lined up patiently at my door. There’s the pink one with the ice cream cones on her flank, the fancy one with wings and gemstone eyes, the poor white one with no tail. Each has a front leg poised in the air as if I’ve caught them mid-trot. My dad has driven away already, so there’s nothing I can do.

I guess I just need to let them in.

Published as “The Things Parents Save” in the November 2024 issue of Philadelphia magazine.