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Sparkle (4)
Hoarders. Do you watch that show?
Please tell me you watch that show. The fact that I (a) watch reality TV at all, and (b) watch the most spectacular oh-my-god-i-can't-avert-my-eyes kind of car accident primetime television has ever provided, makes me feel a little (okay, A LOT) embarrassed. I'm not alone, guys. Right? Please?
I mean, I'm an educated woman. Shouldn't I be watching NOVA and participating in global chat forums on improving the happiness of humanity?
Well, I don't.
I get my kids to bed, finish the end-of-day clean-up, park my ass on the couch -- Harmony remote in hand -- and watch, slackjawed, while a group of profoundly patient people try to rid a house of all manner of disgustingness and/or improve the life of the person who had accumulated all of that, well, shit.
Wowzers.
Sometime between the end of high school and the beginning of university, I prided myself on being able to fit all of my belongings in a single tomato crate. Now, my house gets purged regularly of all that is too small, too worn out, too unused, or too useless. I do keep file boxes of my kids' crafts. I do have my old hope chest full of mementos, unfinished novels, and photos from way-back-when. We have a few memory albums, cupboards of project supplies, and tens of thousands of digital photos that need to be edited for processing. For me, anyway, life with kids has equaled life with more stuff. And I'm good with that. As long as it's clean.
My daughter? Ohmygod, my daughter loves stuff. Tiny toys, bits of paper, notebooks, stuffies, stickers, stick-on tattoos, activity books, silk flowers, birthday cake decorations, and hundreds of other pretty little things. She also has a tiny bedroom, which makes storing all of this stuff impossible a special kind of challenge. By her fifth birthday, the volume of stuff in her room had surpassed the ridiculous. And vacuuming her bedroom carpet put her into a state of supreme anxiety for fear that one of her useless miniscule precious items would get sucked up into the dust bin.
Sigh.
So, here's where I made the error. Since we have a firm no-hitting policy in my house, spanking is just not an option for us. My daughter has been smacked twice in her life, both times at the end of class-five temper tantrums that resulted in me losing my cool after she screamed and then spit in my face. My kids get strong verbal reprimands (sometimes at, ahem, volume). They get time-outs. They get privileges revoked. And last fall, I decided that one of those privileges would be toys.
You can see where I went wrong, here.
Danica would get the 1-2-3 count for escalating incidents of bad behavior. At "3", a toy would be confiscated and either donated or thrown in the garbage. I can't adequately describe for you the state of pain and fury this brought upon my girl. We progressed between losing the toy forever, to losing the toy for a week, to having her choose the toy to get rid of, and so on. It wasn't working. Her behavior improved marginally. Her resentment improved exponentially. But she was going through such a rough time handling her own attitude and impulse control that I honestly didn't know what else to do.
And then, one night this summer, I looked up from my bowl of greasy popcorn at the horrors unfolding on Hoarders. I saw an adult standing in the one remaining square foot of carpet in a room packed full of filth and TOYS, and very nearly vomited. He said, "My parents always took my toys away. Now I can have as many as I want."
Oh. My. God.
The next weekend, I made plans to clean up Danica's room. All of her toys, papers, art supplies, birthday party favors, cards, pens, her spinny chair, a side-table, everything. I sorted it into piles of things that I wanted to store for later, move to other parts of the house, keep in her room, or throw away. And then she and I spent that morning going through those piles so she could make the final decision about what she wanted done with it. We talked about how small her room was, how she really couldn't use this many toys, and about how much fun other kids might have with them. She told me she wanted more space for playing in
