On Giving Things Up, Parentally Speaking

When you are getting ready to become a parent, you prepare yourself for giving things up, for sacrificing for the sake of this little child you are bringing into the world.  You will give up sleep, you will give up quiet, you will give up time alone with your dear spouse.  You will give up the tidiness of your house, you will give up having a full phone conversation, you will give up wearing a shirt that stays clean for more than half an hour, you will give up eating food while it is hot.  Heck, half the time you will give up even eating food, because that most delicious morsel of sausage left on the corner of your plate is coveted by someone else.  And you do it with joy and with gratitude, because you love these darlings so much and you wanted them with every fiber of your being.  

Now, this next part probably does not apply to a lot of you, because you are probable not big babies like me.  But what I did not prepare myself for was the other things I would give up.  The little things. The ones that don't even matter, right?  My bookmarks that I got when I lived in Oxford for my final years in high school.  I just gave those up.  They were wrenched from the book I was reading and crumpled up and chewed on.  

My toy mechanical train that I played with as a toddler, that STILL WORKED.  They broke the wheel off of it and twisted the handle backwards so it bent the mechanism.  The already pretty decrepit paperback copies of Spike Milligan books, which would make me laugh out loud obnoxiously and annoy my poor, studious my college roommate. Those are now fully separated into thousands of individual pages distributed somewhere among all the other books in the bookshelves. 

The whisk that goes with the beaters, which I hardly use anyway but sometimes particularly need.  It is all bent up and twisted, even though I gave them everything else in the utensil drawer to play with, that being the sole exception.


THESE PEOPLE RUIN STUFF!!!


And then, they cry in wounded indignation when you take it away from them and explain in a very pitiful voice "Almost everything in this house is yours. I have hardly anything. This bookmark is mine, and I just want to keep it." Which is clearly pointless anyway since, as stated above, it's already crumpled up and ripped and soggy with saliva.  

When I got married, I had a lot of stuff that I just kept.  Papers I wrote in college.  The register from my first checking account.  My 4H records.  All the birthday cards I'd been given from ages 1 through 16.  The statements from my old student loan.  My husband has gently and lovingly, over the years, pried my fingers from one little item or another and helped me to eliminate boxes that I do not need. That were weighing me down. [Disclaimer here, I still have a looooong way to go.]   

And I have been very grateful for this, but also more than a little prideful.  See God?  I listen to you.  I know that I don't need material things to make me happy.  I am giving them to Goodwill!  I am throwing out old papers.  Look how good I am!  

I guess it takes a few children to really show you how attached you are to worldly things.  I know it is for my own good.  But come on!!  Can't I just have my bookmark?  Do I really have to give that up too?