I’ve spent the last fortnight in an evangelical Kondo haze, yet the house looks like it’s been hit by hungry burglars. In the last four days, I’ve dropped-and-smashed three precious items of crockery, done a full supermarket shop before realising my wallet was at home, sweatily hurried the children from school to a swimming lesson which wasn’t on this week, and watched through a mashy haze of exhaustion as the baby found a piece of crumbling polystyrene and entirely snowed the ground floor under. My brain is melting, and oozing into my clumsy joints.
I’ve discarded - after saying my careful thank yous - more than 75% of my clothes, seven binbags of children’s outfits and more than 500 books. (So many books. So. many. books.) We held a weekend book sale in our front garden that the infants manned; a teenage girl, brought by her father, hates Ian McEwan and I just kept pressing books on her, Free gift, just take it, and this one, oooh, and this is brilliant too, and oh! you must have this. Joyful.
I’m now on to paperwork. Despite the fact that it spreads through the house, I’m reasonably good at this, having monthly clear outs of the drifts on my desk. But this is by far the hardest section yet. My birth notes from the last labour, with handwritten messages from the midwife on the front. Three different leaving-card books from beloved colleagues. The recipes I’ve spent years collecting. There’s a bubble in my chest and my throat, and I want to cry more than I thought possible, these days. But when I actually look at them, the bubble shrinks, then dissolves. That birth is in my memory, and always will be. The colleagues I loved then I still see now. The recipes, if they haven’t been made by now, sitting in plastic wallets in a file in my office under the box of photos, are unlikely to ever be. They all go in the bin.
I wonder if it’s just rude to throw my father’s Orders of Funeral Service away, or the newspaper notice of his death. Would the kids ever want to see it? What secrets do they hold that we haven’t told them ourselves?
But others are strangely impossible. I give up at the calendars I’ve kept at the end of each year. I thought they would be the least sentimental items, but they are thick with changing identities and coded references. When M is 9 months old, I am still going out at least once a week, every single week. When F is born, he gets simply an understated set of his hours-old initials against the date. Friends I didn’t think I was ever that close to pop up almost daily after each baby is born, bringing me magazines or bread or hand-me-downs. The grown-up meetings as I start freelancing. And in those days they weren’t family calendars - J and I had a colour each, and the babies fitted around whatever we fancied doing; now they get their own columns in a grotesque display of a pint-sized calendar coup. But the tearing, biting wind of time makes me feel like a savaged teenager again, aching from an inexplicable gut-punch nostalgia.
M comes in to the office to tell me she has to write a poem, that it should rhyme, shouldn’t it? Does it start with a capital letter? Is there a comma at the end of each line? I show her this. It lulls us both, in the piles of papers and the bags of rubbish. I can be nostalgic later.