I’ve discovered that my son is more sentimental about the past than my daughter. That doesn’t really surprise me, despite gender stereotypes. He has always been a thoughtful kid, and he is (or at least, was) a “Feeling” type on the Myers-Briggs scale for decision making.
When I involved my daughter in decluttering her room, she kept very few of her childhood possessions. Son kept a lot more stuff, though that might have been because he didn’t want to go through stacks of old school papers in detail.
Daughter’s approach was to toss it all. His was to retain it, though I have since gone through and eliminated all the school syllabi and other papers he didn’t write himself.
As I went through his things, I discovered several treasures, which, of course, I kept:
- The pen I bought him at the Grand Canyon, along with several similar pens from other national parks. He collected them for a while when he was in his middle-school years.
- A photo album a friend’s mother had made for him. Apparently, she attended more of his school functions than I did. Of course, her son, a lifelong classmate of my son’s, was an only child. Still, she worked full-time, and I don’t know how she managed to get to as many middle-school and high-school events as she did. Still, now we have a book of memories, thanks to her.
- Class photos from pre-school through high-school of him and his classmates. It was a poignant reminder that three of the kids who graduated from the 8th grade with him died young. Each a tragedy for their families and friends. He and all of his classmates were devastated in particular by the first death—a girl who died in a traffic accident on her way to her sixteenth birthday party.
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Son’s preschool graduation class. Yellow arrow points to him. - His Eagle Scout pin and a variety of letters from politicians and other famous people in recognition of his award. Even a letter from an astronaut! But more important to me were the letters from family, also congratulating him on a job well done. In particular, a card from the uncle who died last year.
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Clipping from the high-school paper of my son and his forensics partner. This is the skit that made me grasp my chair so I wouldn’t rescue my son as he portrayed a dying soldier. His yearbooks from all four years of high school. I’d forgotten some of the activities my son participated in. His high-school years were sometimes tense, and he didn’t involve his parents in many things. So it was a pleasure for me to see him as he was, almost twenty years ago now.
- His college yearbook from his senior year. The only mention of my son was on the page with his senior photo. And, as I recall, I had to push him to get the senior photo taken. He’d managed to stay under the radar screen in college, which he later confessed was his ambition. He came away from his university days with many good friends, but no extracurricular activities.
From my son’s perspective, the biggest “treasure” I found was his old Nintendo system and a large box of Nintendo games. I remember the year he begged for that system for Christmas. After he got it, he used to spend hours in the basement playing with that thing.
“I would love to keep the Nintendo. For some reason, I thought Dad had already got rid of it! This is very exciting!” he wrote me when I asked him what to do with it.
How he will hook it up to today’s televisions, I don’t know. But that will be his problem, not mine. My only problem is where to stash the box in the new house. But it will be there when he visits.
Unless I box everything up and send it to him. That’s what my parents did when they moved in 1980, when I was younger than my children are now. There comes a point when, treasures or not, a child’s belongings should become their responsibility, and not their parents.’
What do you wish you still had from your childhood?
My son is more sentimental than my daughter, too! He took it pretty hard when he moved out and we converted his bedroom to an office. Still, I kept a lot of “treasures!”