When school ends, my child brings home the physical remains of her past year in bags, boxes, and piles of papers carted from lockers and school rooms. Art projects, text books, notebooks galore, and papers of every description overflow the hallway, dining room, and all the space in my daughter’s room until I box up the mess and hide it away in a closet or the basement.
Then what?
That’s my dilemma.
This is different from the days when my girls were cute, little creatures and I cherished and preserved every squiggly drawing and unrecognizable sculpture they made. I have boxes of clay blobs splattered with glaze and sheets filled with the first letters their once small hands created that can still make my heart feel too big for my chest.
The piles of high-school scribblings and copied handouts, though, have no meaning for me. I’d be happy to put them out with the recycling next Tuesday, but I’m worried there are things buried in the piles that might be significant to my daughter, if not now, then someday.
Of course most of her school assignments exist somewhere on a laptop but what about the hard copies, returned with comments from teachers, perhaps some special words of praise or encouragement? What about the notebooks with doodles and secret thoughts about classmates or life? Are these things important to preserve? Will they have meaning to my girl at some moment later in life? Will she ever go looking for them?
I’m definitely the family archivist, keeping photos and select memorabilia from family vacations or events. The remnants of a school year, however, don’t fall into the realm of collective memory. These things are more personal, private to my daughter’s experience. Should I take charge of preserving the physical record of her life?
One of the many limitations of adolescence is the inability to think clearly about the future. My 16-year-old can’t even anticipate plans for this evening. How can she manage to look through her stuff and know if she’ll ever want to look at her 10th grade paper on “The Great Gatsby” or page through the physics notebook she spent hours working on? Either she will want to keep it all or throw it all away.
At the same time, how am I to know what may have significance to her at some future time?
I know parents who put their kids’ papers in a bag and wait six months — if no one’s asked for anything, the whole bag gets tossed. I appreciate the simplicity of this system, but it feels too absolute for me.
There certainly should be something left from a whole year of school, at least a few sheets of paper, a book or two, a project she worked on particularly hard. I’ll have to sift through the boxes, giving it my best shot to whittle the contents down to a manageable size. Someday she may throw it all out, but I’ll at least have given her the chance to make that decision for herself.
