Parenting Grown Children: What Dr. Spock Forgot to Tell Us

Leaving a Legacy: The gift of clean closets and cleared out basements

Long-time readers know how I've ranted about an important part of the legacy we leave our children. That is, besides the assets and the sense of our values we leave our children, we should clean out the mess of papers and junk stored in our closets, basements, attics and crannies of our house. I have friends who don't want to touch the many storage places in their basement: "Let the kids take care of it," is what they tell me. For them, that's 45 years of accumulated stuff they're asking their kids to sort through and disburse.

I won't rant on. I'll leave it to Carolyn Hax to back me up. A reader--the daughter of a "widowed, healthy, vibrant mom"--says her mom refuses to go through her belongings and pare down the massive amount of stuff and old furniture in her house. "She says that 'someone else' can take care of it," the reader writes. The 'someone else' is the daughter who feels saddled with the enormous chore that lies ahead. "I feel trapped, and I can't enjoy the present with my mom without feeling anger over the future."

Here's Hax's answer:

As long as you’re okay with handing over control of where the stuff ends up, you can hire a company to clean out the house: all the paper, all the clothes, all the toxic cleaning solutions, every stick of furniture. It’s not cheap but can be cheaper than you’d expect, especially if the projected sale of some contents can offset the final price. Get a few estimates — ask real estate agents for names — pull those treasured photos and letters out for yourself, then drop the proverbial match.

The practical answer may help the daughter. But is this what we want to happen to our stuff? Are there treasures buried in a closet or photo album or old letters that should be kept ase part of family history? A lot of meaning can seep into small kindergarten drawings or a large old sofa. Do we really want it all dumped? And if we do, why not start dumping some of it--a bag a day--into the trash now. I have to admit I might not have gotten started on my "'piles of papers" and assorted belongings (from our parents as well as us) if I hadn't sold my house and moved to a smaller apartment with no storage space. That was an incentive to get the job done.

Hax notes that, for our kids, sorting through our stuff after we've left this world--stuff that's suffused with memories of us--and "sending it on a dumpster ride is not for the faint of heart." It is, she writes, "a heavy emotional saddle." We can spare them that.

painting: Picasso, Still Life

 

 

Leaving a Legacy: Clear out the stuff your kids won't want

 

This is a post I wrote several years ago. It's my simple guide to right-sizing or downsizing or just cleaning and clearing out closets that are jammed too full of stuff.  My motivation for clearing my closets (and attic storage) was a move from a house to an apartment. But another incentive was in play: I didn't want my kids to have to clear my boxes of no-longer-relevant papers and artifacts when I am no longer around.

I learned recently that my approach is in keeping with a Swedish concept called döstädning (literally “death cleaning”) that's been in the news of late. Margareta Magnusson explained it all in her book, "The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning."

For those of you who are moving to smaller quarters or just feeling the heaviness of storing too much stuff in the nooks and crannies of your home or want to "gift" your children clean closets, check out Death cleaning or read my post (reprinted below). If I may pat myself on the back, my old post still offers timeless advice without the downbeat name.

Rightsizing: How I cleared my closets and dumped all the stuff my kids didn't want.

“You are my inspiration,” my friend Eva tells me. She’s not referring to anything creative or ingenious I’ve done. The reference is to the method that helped me downsize/right-size from a sprawling 4-bedroom suburban home (where Paterfamilias and I brought up two children) to a tight, two bedroom urban apartment that’s short on storage space. It's a method that would work for anyone who wants to lighten the storage load in their house, whether or not they are moving out or just tackling the untackleable during the corona quarantine.

My inspirational mantra--You won't need to know Sanskrit to follow it--is this: A bag a day.

Prosaic, perhaps. It's not the full Marie Kondo, but it worked. Every day I would fill a bag (the gold standard: a large black garbage bag) with stuff to either give to our children, gift to charity or toss in the garbage. No matter how tired I was after work, I would head for a closet or a file cabinet or a dark recess of the basement and fill a bag—sometimes it was only the bronze standard of a brown paper lunch bag. Consistency was the point: a bag a day.

Sometimes it was easy. I came across file drawers full of old photographs—from the days when camera shops processed your film and gave you doubles of all your photos.  All duplicates in my file drawer were dumped in a bag, along with both sets of photos of the backs of the heads of my children, or a fuzzy focus, or of people I no longer knew or cared about. Ditto for the negatives. Thumbing through envelope upon envelope of old photos was an emotional trip down memory lane but the save/no-save decisions were mindless.

More mindful was the china, glassware, porcelain figurines, silver-plated candelabras  and other objects we inherited from both sets of parents. When our mothers were young women growing their families and enlarging their households, they both collected the same sorts of things. Though one set of parents was more affluent than the other, both mothers had accumulated sets of silverware—8 places setting for one, 18 for the other. The candelabra was smaller for one than the other, which was not only large but had many Rococo branches. (Whenever there was a storm and our house lost its electricity, the candelabaras and their three candles apiece lit our way through the dark evening.) Both mothers had collected sets of hand-painted tea cups that had been displayed on bookcases and side tables in their homes. Both had porcelain figurines—peasant figures playing the flute or herding one of Bo Peep's lost sheep—that graced their bookshelves or sat on coffee tables and end tables.

I’d had these objects in storage in my basement since we inherited them. Would my children want them? I took out my iPhone, snapped a shot of my mother’s gold-rimmed dinnerware and texted it to my daughter-in-law. “Would you like this?” I asked this mother of three of my Grands. Within a minute her ping came back at me: “I haven’t used my wedding dishes yet.” 

For sentimental reasons, my daughter took a few of the hand-painted tea cups but the porcelain figurines and candelabras met universal resistance. I closed my eyes, held my nose (figuratively speaking) and put it all in bags for charities that, presumably, will sell them to pay some of their bills. My one flirtation with "monetizing" these treasures came when I opened a box filled with fur jackets and stoles my mother had amassed. (My father was a furrier.) I went up on eBay to see what the market was for them. The answer: Not worth my time or effort to sell. They got packed up with the porcelains.

It was guilt-inducing but easier to part with the inherited items. What of the things I had collected or amassed? I had written regularly for the Washingtonian Magazine for a dozen years back in the 70s and 80s. I had every issue of the magazine from that time in my basement. I asked myself, Would my grandchildren read these? Would they even look at them? We all know the answer. I tore out a few articles that represented the variety of stories I had written, promised myself I would digitize them for posterity and recycled the rest of it.  Ditto with other clips from my pre-Internet, freelance years: save a few; dump the rest.

Paterfamilias's boxes of law briefs from big cases he had worked on met the same fate. He had to do a lot of shredding, but he made his way through it slowly and methodically.

We started our purge a few months before we put our house on the market so there was no need to rush. Just a bag a day. That held for serving platters, pots, pans, small appliances. I had to harden my heart, but I was amazed at what I could part with once I set my mind to it. Add it felt good to know I was fulfilling part of my legacy to my grown children: clean closets. That is, when the time came and I was no longer around to do it, they wouldn't have a mess of stuff to clear out.

We moved into our apartment nearly four years ago. I have yet to miss a pot or platter or candlestick holder.  Come Spring, what I miss is my garden. But I saved a few pots for that.

photo: P Lemov

painting: Piecemeal Rhythm by Hilary Pecis

Downsizing: Our housing decisions are emotional ones for our children

There comes a time when the kids are grown and the house we raised them in is too big, too much to maintain, a burden to carry or a source of little and big repair bills. The roof might need replacing. The driveway is cratering. The washer and dryer are aging out. Or all of the above.

We were ready to sell the home we lived in for 43 years and move to something easier. Plus, we wanted to try an urban lifestyle.

We were ready to move out and on, but were our children? They have been living far from us with families and homes of their own. So why would we even think they mattered in our decision to sell.

We checked in with them anyway. The house was where they grew up--their story of origin. Even as they became independent and moved to other parts of the country and world, the house was there as a refuge--a safety net. When they married and started families, they brought their children to the house to show them where they grew up, what their life was like when they were young. They took pleasure in showing them a secret passageway between rooms, the hill on the driveway where they practiced kicking a soccer ball. It wasn't just our children who were attached to the house. One of our grandchildren spent enough time visiting us there that she became friendly with the girls across the street and knew every dog that lived nearby.

It would have taken an emotionally persuasive argument for our children to change our minds about selling the family manse. They had no desire to do so. They were behind the move. But a day before we closed on the sale, they both flew home--without spouses or children--to say goodbye to the house and the neighborhood and to reminisce about the riches of the family life we had known there.

This visit happened nearly five years ago, but the memory of it came flooding back as I was reading Claire Tomalin's "brisk and sparkling" biography of Jane Austen. Tomalin wrote about the effect on the Austen children (all of them adults) of their parents' decision to leave Steventon, the home where Jane and her brothers and sisters were born and raised. (Jane and her older sister, Cassandra, still lived with their parents.)

Jane was greatly distressed [by the news.]....[A niece] was told her Aunt Jane fainted. The whole thing was a shock, and a painful one.

All the Austen children were affected by it. The fact that every one of them who was absent and could possibly return to Steventon--[four of Jane's brothers]--made a point of doing so before their parents left--"while Steventon is ours,' as Jane put it--suggests how much they felt it as the closing of a door on their childhood and the end of a way of life."

painting: Edward Hopper

Rightsizing: How I cleared my closets and dumped all the stuff my kids didn't want.

National Gallery, Hannah Steele

“You are my inspiration,” my friend Eva tells me. She’s not referring to anything creative or ingenious I’ve done. The reference is to the method that helped me downsize/right-size from a sprawling 4-bedroom suburban home (where Paterfamilias and I brought up two children) to a tight, two bedroom urban apartment that’s short on storage space. It's a method that would work for anyone who wants to lighten the storage load in their house, whether or not they are moving out or just tackling the untackleable during the corona quarantine.

My inspirational mantra--You won't need to know Sanskrit to follow it--is this: A bag a day.

Prosaic, perhaps. It's not the full Marie Kondo, but it worked. Every day I would fill a bag (the gold standard: a large black garbage bag) with stuff to either give to our children, gift to charity or toss in the garbage. No matter how tired I was after work, I would head for a closet or a file cabinet or a dark recess of the basement and fill a bag—sometimes it was only the bronze standard of a brown paper lunch bag. Consistency was the point: a bag a day.

Sometimes it was easy. I came across file drawers full of old photographs—from the days when camera shops processed your film and gave you doubles of all your photos.  All duplicates in my file drawer were dumped in a bag, along with both sets of photos of the backs of the heads of my children, or a fuzzy focus, or of people I no longer knew or cared about. Ditto for the negatives. Thumbing through envelope upon envelope of old photos was an emotional trip down memory lane but the save/no-save decisions were mindless.

More mindful was the china, glassware, porcelain figurines, silver-plated candelabras  and other objects we inherited from both sets of parents. When our mothers were young women growing their families and enlarging their households, they both collected the same sorts of things. Though one set of parents was more affluent than the other, both mothers had accumulated sets of silverware—8 places setting for one, 18 for the other. The candelabra was smaller for one than the other, which was not only large but had many Rococo branches. (Whenever there was a storm and our house lost its electricity, the candelabaras and their three candles apiece lit our way through the dark evening.) Both mothers had collected sets of hand-painted tea cups that had been displayed on bookcases and side tables in their homes. Both had porcelain figurines—peasant figures playing the flute or herding one of Bo Peep's lost sheep—that graced their bookshelves or sat on coffee tables and end tables.

I’d had these objects in storage in my basement since we inherited them. Would my children want them? I took out my iPhone, snapped a shot of my mother’s gold-rimmed dinnerware and texted it to my daughter-in-law. “Would you like this?” I asked this mother of three of my Grands. Within a minute her ping came back at me: “I haven’t used my wedding dishes yet.” 

For sentimental reasons, my daughter took a few of the hand-painted tea cups but the porcelain figurines and candelabras met universal resistance. I closed my eyes, held my nose (figuratively speaking) and put it all in bags for charities that, presumably, will sell them to pay some of their bills. My one flirtation with "monetizing" these treasures came when I opened a box filled with fur jackets and stoles my mother had amassed. (My father was a furrier.) I went up on eBay to see what the market was for them. The answer: Not worth my time or effort to sell. They got packed up with the porcelains.

It was guilt-inducing but easier to part with the inherited items. What of the things I had collected or amassed? I had written regularly for the Washingtonian Magazine for a dozen years back in the 70s and 80s. I had every issue of the magazine from that time in my basement. I asked myself, Would my grandchildren read these? Would they even look at them? We all know the answer. I tore out a few articles that represented the variety of stories I had written, promised myself I would digitize them for posterity and recycled the rest of it.  Ditto with other clips from my pre-Internet, freelance years: save a few; dump the rest.

Paterfamilias's boxes of law briefs from big cases he had worked on met the same fate. He had to do a lot of shredding, but he made his way through it slowly and methodically.

We started our purge a few months before we put our house on the market so there was no need to rush. Just a bag a day. That held for serving platters, pots, pans, small appliances. I had to harden my heart, but I was amazed at what I could part with once I set my mind to it. Add it felt good to know I was fulfilling part of my legacy to my grown children: clean closets. That is, when the time came and I was no longer around to do it, they wouldn't have a mess of stuff to clear out.

We moved into our apartment nearly four years ago. I have yet to miss a pot or platter or candlestick holder.  Come Spring, what I miss is my garden. But I saved a few pots for that.

 

 

Leaving a Legacy: Divvying up the sentimental stuff

 In the piles of stuff we leave behind, who can say what our children will consider a treasure: the Rosenthal dinnerware for 12 (minor chip on one dinner plate) or the well-worn cereal bowls that were filled with Cheerios every morning while the kids sat elbow to elbow with their Dad and talked about stuff.

We narrowed down our legacy of give-aways when we rightsized our way from suburban house (43 years of family living) to an urban apartment (minimal storage space). We offered our grown kids a pick of the pre-move litter. They wanted no cut glass vases or silverplate candlelabras--items deeded us by our parents and hauled out for special occasions.  They opted for stuff with personal or sentimental value--the piano being Exhibit One and their grandmother's hand-painted tea cups another.

We moved with our favorite pieces of furniture, works of art and two bins of family memorablia. So there is still some sorting out our kids will have to do when we're no longer in charge. (Hopefully no fights will break out over who gets my collection of whimsical cats. See above)

Even though we've slimmed down, we should make a list of the stuff we have that our kids will have to divide up among themselves or give away. Like many of our friends, we keep putting it off. There's the temptation to say, 'Let the kids figure that out.'

"Wrong" is what the financial/estate planning experts say. When we pass away, it's an emotional experience for our kids. The 'stuff" we leave behind may hit a deep sentimental note for one of them or--and here's the problem--one item may mean a lot to all of them. The sentimental stuff turns out to be the more contentious than the "valuables" and has the potential to create nasty divisions among the inheritees.

 When we write our wills, it's relatively simple to divide the monetary stuff--the bank accounts, stocks and bonds, real estate holdings. A simple formula will do, as in: three kids, divide three ways. But the other stuff--the low- or no-value things like needlepoint pillows, rocking chair, cat statuettes: There isn't an algorithm for dividing it up fairly. If son A gets the vase we picked up in Greece, does daughter B get the pasta bowl from Tuscany? Is there something so evocative of childhood--the cookie jar, the kitchen table--that all the grown kids in the family want it?

Some families do the picking and choosing with their children. The Washington Post ran a story about parents who laid out all the tangible items, gathered their grown children together and gave them each $2,000 worth of monopoly money. The kids could then bid on what they would want--when the time came. Says a son, who admits he got into a bidding war with his brother over a  living room chair, "I have had friends fight with siblings over their parents' stuff--not the expensive stuff, but odds and ends that each child wanted." His family, the son says, "avoided this problem brilliantly. Dad was the auctioneer and mom recorded the results."

Friends of ours whose basements and attics are packed with photos, memorablia, two generations of  dishes and artwork,  have taken various non-auction approaches to parceling out the eventual disposition of their stuff.

One is doing it with stickers: Yellow dots under the chairs, rugs and lamps they want their daughter to have; red sticker dots for their son. They hope the stickers stay stuck and that the kids find the distribution fair. As to the accumulated stuff in the basement storage spaces, they're leaving that to their son's and daughter's good will.

Another friend is making a list and using past observations to figure out who should get what. They have seen their oldest son eye the wooden statute in the dining room and their youngest son admire the  landscape painting in the family room. They want their daughter to have the jewelry--the rings, bangles and necklaces handed down by great-grandmothers and grandmothers. There is one  caveat: the  eldest son's daughter (and the first grandchild who's now a teenager) gets an early pick from the jewelry collection.

There may not be a "best way" here. An auction would be fun, but even a straightforward list beats having our kids duke it out when we're gone.

 

 

Grown Children: Are we parenting them or are they taking care of us?

Two years ago, a friend's son advised his parents to stop skiing. As a doctor, he'd seen too many broken hips among his older patients; he didn't want his mom and dad to be among them.  This year he wanted then to stop bicycling.

A number of our friends say their kids want them to buy new cars with lane-change warnings and other driving aids. Or they don't want their parents to take  adventure vacations in less-trod parts of the world.

When we were living in our three-story house on a hill in suburbia, our son had a chat with us.  "You guys ought to sell the house," he said, listing lots of positive reasons why we should dump the house where we raised him and his sister. Then in tones that hinted at the deeper core of his message he said, "Then there's the driveway." It's a long one, steep and curving. It's hard to shovel when it snows and treacherous when black ice pools on its lower rungs. He didn't want us to deal with its dangers anymore.

Our kids are not just coming up with reasonable suggestions, they are starting to "worry" about us--just as we worried about them when they were toddlers or fifth graders. Is there a tipping point when our kids become our advisers instead of us being theirs? We clearly do not yet need them to manage our finances or make decisions about our welfare--we're not old or fragile--but we sense the first tilt in the balance of care.

The shift is a subtle part of a continuum. We've gone from being parents who controlled their lives ("No, you may not put your finger in the electric socket.") to ones relegated to advisory. ("Have you checked with another insurance agent?) That's the role we play as they marry and have  children of their own: Advisory parents but ready to leap to action if we sense danger, disaster or some other set back. That's what parenting grown children is all about: We sit in the back seat until there's a need or request to grab the wheel.

Now comes this tipping point. They mature, become heads of households, have careers and live multifaceted lives. We are aging as gracefully as we can, staying active but retiring from full-time jobs and unwinding careers. We can't quite keep up on the annual hike to the waterfall; we need a hand to get over some of the rocks. It seems in the nature of things that there would be a subtle switch in who the advisory adult is and who may have to take control if we face unexpected danger, disaster or a minor setback in our health or emotional well being. Should we be so surprised that they worry about us almost as much as we used to worry about them?

Even as we gamely send them selfies of ourselves forging ahead on the bike trail, our kids see us as growing frail. When Paterfamilias told his son a supposedly amusing story of how a pothole almost threw him off his bike, our son's face became a study in shock. We had to admit the story wasn't so funny as much as it was a recognition that we weren't the athletic and well balanced bikers we used to be. But we weren't--and aren't--ready to give up our bike rides. Our children (neither are doctors) aren't suggesting that, either--just that we buy hybrid style bikes that are easier to balance than our thin-wheeled road bikes.

We consider ourselves lucky that our children care enough to take notice. But it's a little like being offered a seat on a crowded bus: A relief to sit down but a shock at being seen as eligible for the offer.

 

 

 

Related articles

Parenting Grown Children: We are at our peril when we give advice they didn't ask for

Grandparenting: Being careful what we say to our grownchildren about their children

Grown Children: They feel the pain of our partings--from a house or a spouse.

 

They're grown and flown--living in their own homes with their own set of friends and family. What goes on in the old homestead shouldn't have that much of an affect on them. They've got their lives. We've got ours. Or so we think.

What we learned when we sold the house our kids grew up in is that they did care about the loss of their old home--not morbidly or in a let's-stop-them mode. But they did feel the pain of parting. They even referred to the sale as being like a divorce--from the house.

A recent New York Times story tells us our grown children are never too old to feel the pain of another form of parting. With the climb in the divorce rate among couples 50 years old and older, therapists are seeing a rise in the number of their adult children seeking help.

A woman who started a blog on the topic--after finding herself emotionally undone by her parents' divorce after 45 years of marriage--said her blog readers left comments on her posts saying their parents' divorce left them feeling "devastated," that "the pain of my parents divorce has brought me to gut-wrenching tears."

As is often true with a divorce when children are young, the kids get dragged into the messiness of a family break-up. For adult children no longer living in the home, it's a slightly different drag: the parents may want to share their pain with their adult children--something that's a no-no in therapists' view. Their advice: Parent up.

Beyond the no-sharing, the burgeoning field of therapy for adult children of divorce has some common sense pointers for those parting ways with their children's other parent:

--Don't announce the news by email or text--or even by phone. Do it in person if that's at all possible and if there's more than one child, try to tell all the kids together--even if it casts a pall on a holiday when you're all finally together. 

--As in divorces where young children are involved, adult children still need to be reassured that the divorce isn't the result of anything they did or did not do.

--A divorce this late in the parental marriage often affects an adult child's perception of their own lives when growing up. What clues to unhappiness had they missed? What does a happy marriage look like?

--If there has been a "betrayal of trust"--one parent, say, is leaving the marriage for a new partner--the "sinning" parent shouldn't be defensive or cast blame on others (especially the offended spouse) but ask for forgiveness. Alienation of an adult child can be devastating and long-lasting.

 

 

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The Harsh But True Realities of Divorce

Downsizing: Selling our house brings an unexpected boost from the grown kids

We've been feeling down, Paterfamilias and I. We are selling our house of 40-odd years and lamenting the losses--of so much space to live in, of a house we love, of a viewscape of cardinals feasting at the bird feeder and squirrels romping on tree limbs.

Our grown kids reassure us. We're going to love our 2-bedroom apartment and the new life style of walking to stores, restaurants, coffee shops, the Metro, the library. It's only natural to feel down, they tell us. You're only experiencing the losses right now. You haven't gotten to the gains yet.

To boost our morale--and to say goodbye to the house they grew up in--they've both taken a day off and flown home for a just-the-four-of-us day of togetherness. We are having lunch at the kitchen table (just like old times) and they start talking about all the things that took place in our family at that table. Not just the meals--the table was the center of family life. We read the newspaper here, they did their science projects; we had heart-to-heart chats with them, they teased each other. Innumerable punchlines were thrown at this central point.

"You taught me how to write at this table," my son tells me. "I was in fifth grade and writing a book report. My first line was 'This book was interesting.' You told me that wasn't saying anything. You made me come up with a list of words that described the book. I tell my kids that story all the time."

My daughter talks about all the hidden and hiding places in our house. The closet that goes from one room into another. The bathroom that leads into another bathroom. She loved to read books under a comforter on the top bunk bed in her room--and then jump off. That's why we used to call her Thumper.

A house holds so many memories--their whole childhood and our years of parenting them. So does the neighborhood. We live on a dead off a dead-end street with woods at the end. They tell us how they used to play near the creek that runs through the woods, even though there were times when it had a less-than-pleasant smell. "We were so lucky to grow up here," both our children tell us. But they are also very clear. It's time for us to move on. Time to let another family live in the house and for us to gear into a less car-centered life.

We move out in a few days. We're all saying good bye to the house. They may feel the loss a little, we may feel it a lot, but there comes a time to keep the memories stored in our hearts and head and all the photos we're taking with us. The family who's moving in have a middle school boy who plays soccer and a 10-year old girl who's a ballerina. When they first came to see the house, the ballerina walked in the woods with her dad and told him, "This is my enchanted forest."

Yes, time for a young family to grow up here. We'll miss this home but we're lacing up our walking shoes. And are grateful we have grown children who cared enough about their childhood home--and the turmoil their parents face in leaving it--to spend a day to say goodbye to all it represents and to cheer us on.

Our son reminds his dad, who would rather not move, that many people our age stay on in their homes out of inertia and that doing the same old, same old is to stagnate. We should be bold and try something new.

The shoe is on the other foot: It's always been our job to be there for them whenever they face major or minor turmoil in their lives. Now they're offering us emotional support at a wrenching time for us. Makes all that investment in parenting worth the while.

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Downsizing: Our grown kids are more attached to our house's memories than we think

It has come down to this: the piano. A Knabe baby grand that we bought for our daughter when she was 10 years old and an aspiring pianist. When she played--a Mozart divertimento, a Bach fugue, a Szymanowski song--the gorgeous sounds filled every corner of the house.

As we downsize and purge our belongings -- as paterfamilias and I ready ourselves for a move to a 2-bedroom apartment--a lot of our possessions aren't coming with us. The house itself and much that is in it are painful to lose but the fulcrum of that sense of loss--the touchstone of the collective memories of our family growing up together in this house--has become the piano.

Alpha daughter would take the piano if she could. But she can't. Her house is too small. When she came home last weekend--in part to say goodbye to the house and to see which of her grandparents' or our possessions she might want--she agreed to our selling the piano. It is just too expensive to store for who knows how many years.

As we got that process underway, we shared with her an over-the-phone appraisal of our beloved musical instrument. It was quite modest: there's a glut of piano's on the market; baby grands and grands have almost no homes to welcome them. When Paterfamilias mentioned the possibility of a give-away--if we couldn't sell it--our daughter teared up. For her, the value of that piano was beyond a monetary one. She was shaken by the idea that we might be careless in handing off the piano to someone else. Who would love, cherish and play the piano with as much joy as she had--appreciate its stiff keyboard action and its splendid tone.

So here I am--three weeks from moving with listicle upon listicle of things we have to do to get ready--obsessing over what to do with the piano, waking up in the middle of the night wondering what will happen to it and will it happen on time. I feel sad at the thought of parting with it and the music our daughter made on it.

Why the obsession? In part because the piano means so much to our child. She has--and  rightly so--chosen some meaningful items from the heaps of precious things my mother and mother-in-law had in their homes. I was ready to sell them. "We should keep them in the family," she said. By the time our grandchildren--or her or her brother's children--come of home-making age, they may be back in style. A few symbols of our grandparents' lives should stick around--even if it's in the storage space above Uber son"s garage, which is where the cut glass bowls and gold-rimmed bone china are headed.

But not the piano. It raises the question of how much we owe our children in terms of honoring the possessions they grew up with and grew to love--but can't take with them. The answer: A lot. We can't be negligent with these bases of shared memories.

Two days after her visit here, Alpha daughter called. She will take the piano. She will squeeze it into her dining room--a small room that nonetheless is almost half of her downstairs living space. It will be tight, even overwhelming. But she is overjoyed to have the piano in her house, to be able to feel its touch and hear its wondrous tone whenever she sits down to play.

There's a lump in my throat. I can't speak, except to say, this feels right and that  I can't wait to visit her and hear the Knabe fill a house with music again.

Downsizing: How attached to our house are our grown kids? Is it just the storage space?

 

 "Why are we doing this? This is the question Paterfamilias asks as he sits by the kitchen window, looking out over our still-winter garden. What we are doing is downsizing our worldly goods, dumping the paper trails of our lives and otherwise dismantling our house. We are moving from a 4-bedroom home in a car-dependent suburb to a two-bedroom apartment in an urban setting that has a high walkability factor.

We moved into this house when our children were 5 and 6 years old. Now they both have children of their own who are older than that and homes of their own in cities far from ours.

Uber Son put the germ of selling into our heads. His message: Move while you're still young and energetic enough to enjoy an active life style. Don't let the house--and its memories--be an anchor.

Alpha Daughter, more attached in her way to the house, seemed sad to hear we were taking up her brother's idea, but she did not try to talk us out of it.

It's not emotionally easy to sell a home that's filled with memories of family occasions celebrated, achievements gained and disappointments acknowledged. The process is hardest on us--we get to do the de-cluttering work and page through the detrius of our children's school lives. (It's with a sigh that we toss out their soccer and gymnastic "trophies.")But it also has an impact on our grown children. We have asked them whether they want any of our furnishings, art works or the treasures our parents left with us that we have been storing for lo some 20 years. No surprise. The answer is no. We have also asked what they intend to do with the boxes of their papers (diaries, high school essays, masses of photos). We will not be taking those to our 2-bedroom apartment in the city.

They may have little interest in some of the valuable goods, but Alpha Daughter is sentimental about a handful of items. She would like to have the painted tea cups: They remind her of her grandmother. But, for her and our son, the porcelain figurines, the cut glass candy bowl, the silver-plated candelabras are simply signifiers of a time gone by. Not that we want to keep storing them, but they pack an emotional wallop for us: These were things that lined the shelves and sat on the tables of our childhood homes, that signaled our parents' accomplishments. Clearly, they are less evocative for our children.

But some of the things Paterfamilias and I acquired carry emotional weight for them. The grand piano, the painting over the fireplace, the Korean chest in the dining room. These are things they grew up with, pieces that formed the background of our family's life.

While selling the house is a venture that involves Paterfamilias and myself--we're closing the sale, arranging for movers, and deciding what to sell--on another level it involves our children and their sense of home.

Alpha Daughter and family are coming here for a visit this weekend--in part to say goodbye to the house. We'll see if she's uneasy about the goods we plan to give away--and if she wants to parse out her limited storage space to save some of it for her children.

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