“For my greatest skill has been to want but little.”

When I read this line in Walden, I repeated it out loud.  I wrote it down.  I emblazoned it across my brain, forged it into my heart, considered tattooing it across my chest.

I was a mother of two by then, but they were young.  And I vowed that more than reading, more than math, more than any other subject I could teach them, this would be the lesson I would instill.  Because to want but little, in my mind, is the key to happiness.  This skill empowers us to take delight from the simple pleasures – a spider scaling a blade of grass; an ant transporting a crumb twice her width back to her home; the last splash of sunlight that lights up the treetops.  But it does more than that.  It empowers us to make changes.  With few wants, our spirits, minds and bodies are free to create and reinvent.  This is the skill that let Bob and me forego paychecks in favor of homeschooling and writing; it lets us forego the new cars, trinkets and clothes in favor of building family businesses or just hanging out in the woods. 

And it is the one lesson I have failed to teach my youngest daughter.

She’s gone to wilderness camp for the week.  It’s a primitive holiday, where the primary activities are romping through forests, practicing knife skills, starting fires without matches, and learning to enjoy the woods for what they are.  It backs up that most prized lesson I hope to impart.

But I’m standing in her room on this sticky morning, mopping sweat from my brow, guzzling water by the quart, sweltering in the steamy detritus of my failure.  I have set one goal for this week:  to clean it.

I shouldn’t be doing this, I tell myself repeatedly.  It was one thing when the kids were little, and Bob and I could send them down to the farm for a night and we could make so much of the clutter disappear.  They’d come home to miraculously recovered spaces and play quietly for hours, rewarding Bob and me for our efforts by taking delight in their tidy surroundings,  picked clean of more toys than their developing brains could inventory and recall.

Or so I thought.  Because inevitably, over the next day or two, their sharp minds would start tallying the missing items.  Bob and I were confronted with requisition lists of missing objects.  We faced down their contained anger over toys we’d bagged up for Goodwill, stammered and defended ourselves while they attacked the garbage cans, seeking to recover what we’d stolen from them.

So as they became more cognizant, I stopped cleaning in their absence.  The process of doing it in their presence was far slower, but I considered it an opportunity to advance this critical skill of “wanting but little.”  By coaching them through the process of setting themselves free from their objects, by letting them revel in the bliss that reduced ownership imparts, I entered into the next great phase of my master lesson:  letting them experience the weight of consumerism, then the joy of untethering themselves from it.  

But. This. Room.  It is like nothing I’ve encountered before.  Ula devoted several months to trying to keep it clean and tidy of her own volition, but couldn’t part with anything.  So she packed every trinket ever given to her, every special stone she ever found, every scrap and shred from every project she tackled deeper and deeper into the recesses of her personal space.  When all those spaces were filled, the work of tidying became impossible, and her creative chaos exploded onto the walls, the floors, under the furniture, and is spilling out into the rest of the house.

The work of cleaning it is now beyond her abilities.  And the mess, I realize, is largely my own fault.  

Because packed into this room are layers and layers of love for her mother.  She has saved every gift I’ve ever given her (since the last time I made her throw things out), deeming them too sacred to part with.  Indeed, everything that has ever been given to her by every person she’s ever met is too sacred to part with.  

But it is the presence of gifts from me that imparts my woe.  My greatest skill has been to want but little, were noble words for an articulate bachelor in the 1800s.  It’s just totally different for a mom living in a culture that is impoverished by its own wealth.  

For as much as I want to teach them to take joy from wanting nothing, I wince and muddle my way through every birthday and holiday, denying this truth within me, pushing it down and succumbing to this great American tradition of consumptive gifting.  I take no pleasure from it.  In truth, when I knuckle under the gifting culture and present an object, I inwardly wince in guilt — Not just from the consumption, but from the fact that I am burdening the recipient with yet another thing freshly polluted with sentimental value.   

In my mind, however, there is such a thing as a perfect gift:  It is something that brings pleasure to the recipient while she makes it go away.

But this room is packed with less-than-perfect gifts.  And my daughter can no longer find clean underwear, she can no longer paint at her desk, and she longs to disappear into any electronic screen she can find, because it organizes her attention.  By contrast, this room only throws her attention into disarray, increasing her anxiety levels.  

This, I have decided, is a gift I must give her.  Sentimentality clings to everything like an oil slick for her, and she cannot clean her way out without an intervention.  I need to make the hard choices, so she doesn’t feel the guilt of parting with something someone gave her.  She may be sad for a spell.  She may be angry with me.  But I can take on the guilt  for her and let it wash off my back.

It takes me three days.  I lose track of the garbage bags of stuff I remove for the trash, for Goodwill, or store away into what Bob calls our “toy detention center.” I am intent on winnowing down her possessions to the point where they enhance, rather than destroy her world.  During the week, I fret about her wrath.  Saoirse and Bob join in on the final day, helping me finish the project.  When Saoirse sees me periodically shudder at the confrontations I’m dreading, she makes a joke, preying on Ula’s tendency to live in the moment.  “Let’s just tell her we didn’t do it,” she says.  “She might believe us.”

I’m working at the cafe on the last day of camp, so Mom goes to retrieve her.  On the way home, Mom divulges  to Ula that her room was cleaned in her absence.  She greets me with a powerful hug upon arrival; but as soon as business slows down, she pulls me onto a stool at the espresso bar.  She needs to have a talk.

“Did you clean my room?”  She’s trying to keep her voice soft and loving.  She’s trying not to lose her temper with me.

I open and close my mouth like a fish.  I knew this moment was coming, but I never worked out how I’d deal with it.  So I fall back on Saoirse’s coaching.

“No.”

“You didn’t clean my room?  Grammie says you cleaned my room.”

“You cleaned your room.  Remember?  You picked it up before you left.  I just vacuumed it.”

“I did?”  Yup.  Saoirse is right.  She’s just about swallowing the whole lie.  I see her trying to remember her final days before leaving for camp, trying to piece together how and when she might have done this; trying to reconstruct the deceit I’ve fed her into a fact.  Her brows pinch together and she takes to studying the countertop at the coffee bar.  “The room that cleans itself?”  she mutters.  “I could make some money on this.”  A customer walks in, calls her name, and she launches off her stool and roller skates over to give him a hug.  Truly, that child lives in the moment.  I am off the hook. For a moment.

But there is silence when she comes home and takes it all in.  Then the inventory starts.

“Where are my books?”

“Where are my Tassie fairies?”

“Where are my canvases?”

“Where are my paints?”

I accept the inquisition and give honest answers.  After a while she shrugs and plops down on the old couch we keep on our screen porch to tell Bob, Saoirse and me all about her camp adventures.  But later that evening, as we get ready for bed, she comes and finds me.

“Mom?  I was kind of upset when Grammie told me you cleaned my room, but when you told me you didn’t, then I was even more disappointed.  I realized I was really hoping you would.”  She pauses, then adds “Thank you.”

Her gratitude means the world to me.  Cleaning was a gift I needed to give her, even though she didn’t want it.  Her acceptance is an even more powerful gift.  

“I’m going to go enjoy my room!”  She effuses, and dashes off.  

She works late into the night, doing what, I’ve no idea.  But two days later I visit the room.  To my despair, Saoirse has “gifted her” some new cast-off clothes, and they lie rumpled on the floor.  She has gone and purchased herself a new rainbow loom with her tip money, and those annoying rubber bands are scattered everywhere.  

It’s starting all over again.  I sigh heavily. The gift of my time has been completely wasted. 

 But then I have to remind myself of the perfect gift:

It brings pleasure while the recipient makes it go away.

And on Ula’s desk is a brand new painting, rich in color and captivating.  I want to claim it, to hang it on the wall, a permanent reminder to me about the importance of letting gifts be ephemeral.  But I walk away.  It is her gift to pass along as she chooses.  I got to feast my eyes upon it, and in this moment, I am full of joy.    And my greatest skill must be to want but little.