Sometimes, the route that seems the most cruel is the most direct path to kindness.

I have a habit of starting most mornings before the sun.  I like to move through the house in the dark, avoiding artificial light as much as possible, slipping outside to watch the stars before the sky begins to lighten, then returning indoors and sitting in a chair beside the window as the last of the lightning bugs show off their final blips.  But it is the morning after Saoirse’s glorious return from summer camp.  And my Odyssey through the dark is polluted by stumbling over her gear.  My bare feet are assaulted by plastic shards that have snapped off Ula’s toys.  I kick aside piles of juvenile detritus to clear a path to the door, then kick away more as I come back inside and shuffle through it to my favorite chair.

As I sit down, I begin to meditate on the counsel of the camp directors who debriefed us parents when we arrived Saturday morning to retrieve our children from their wilderness week.  They advised us that our sons and daughters would experience a form of culture shock returning to their normal world.  They encouraged us to find ways to make special time to enjoy the wilderness with them.  Maybe take a camping trip.  Maybe find a quiet spot in nature to sit and observe.

There is a decided aura of strength and confidence around Saoirse upon her return.  And I want to honor that growth.  But as I sit in the dark and attempt to meditate on this new maturity, I feel as though I am about to be swallowed alive by all the kid crap.  My throat is constricting.  I feel pressure building up behind my eyes.

I hate stuff.  I hate clutter.  Bob and I have made every attempt to raise our children to be non-consumers, but our house has filled up in spite of our efforts.  Sometimes I think being a “non-consumer family” makes us bigger targets for crap.  With the best of intentions, folks casting off their own belongings assume my children will appreciate hand-me-downs,…that they will find creative uses for discarded fashions, or old dolls they are cleaning out of their own attics.  They assume (rightly) that the art supplies they never used will meet with joyous fingers.  Or they will want to indulge my daughters with some new and glorious treat, knowing that their curmudgeon parents are less likely to part with dollars for the whims of childhood.  It seems the more Bob and I resist consumption, the more the picked bones of consumerism pile in our doors.  And it comes in a malignant form.  If the crap in our house came from a big box store, bought without thought or care, getting rid of it may come easily.  But everything in our house is cursed with a precious story…a hand-me-down toy that was a beloved childhood favorite of a dear friend (who no longer wants it).   Craft supplies that were gleaned from the discards of a thoughtful aunt.  Treasures purchased new by Grammie and Pop Pop, sacred by association with great memories with grandparents.  Saoirse and Ula may be liberated from a certain degree of materialism, but there is a powerful emotional attachment to all this stuff.  They see the piles of crap as tokens of love.  Meanwhile, Bob and I are asphyxiating.

I’m familiar with the parental debates surrounding the decluttering process.  I’ve heard friends and family members bemoan the cruelty of mothers who stood before them and discarded favorite stuffed animals, who brazenly donated to Good Will buckets of plastic sandbox toys, baskets full of Transformers, action figures and other precious objects.  To ameliorate the trauma, in years past, Bob and I have exercised a Dawn Patrol regime.  We plan a time when the kids are sleeping down at the farm, and we work through the night, fueled by coffee and fury, then sneak the garbage bags out of the house before they come home, presenting Saoirse and Ula with newly refreshed spaces upon their return.

That trick worked when they were younger.  But they’re on to us.  They’ve come back to us countless times: “Where’s my giant stuffed dog from Uncle Sean?  Where is that pop-up book from Auntie C?  Where is my plastic castle?”  When they leave the house now, I am certain they take a mental inventory.  Then, if they come home to cleanliness, they begin running through their checklist of objects.

I remind myself as I sit in the dark that I am supposed to be contemplating my daughter’s connection with wilderness.  I’m supposed to help her be in touch with her inner earth goddess.

Interestingly, whenever I talk about my own inner goddess, Bob’s eyes tend to grow wide with panic.    We once walked into the office of an energetic healer who stopped in his tracks, looked directly at me, lost every bit of new-age softness, and said “Holy shit.  You’re a human personification of Sekhmet.”  For those of you who aren’t up on Egyptian mythology, Sekhmet is that wrathful goddess with the lion’s head.  It was said that her breath formed the desert.  In one myth, Ra sent Sekhmet to Earth to destroy any mortals who conspired against him.  She went on a murder rampage, and her bloodlust was so powerful that, in order to stop her, wine was poured in the streets.  She confused it with blood, drank it, and finally got drunk, ending the destruction.  I was pretty insulted when the healer made this observation.  And a little frightened and ashamed.  But over the years I’ve grown to accept her, and the fact that unleashing my inner goddess incites fear and terror.  And on this particular morning, drowning in the flotsam and jetsam of childhood, I need her to rescue me.

By the time Bob comes down the stairs to make coffee, I’ve begun dumping piles of toys in the center of the living room floor.  I think he can see Sekhmet’s aura above my head.  Maintaining a careful distance outside my reach, he adopts his gentlest, most placating tone, making sure not to wake the girls upstairs.  “Ummm…don’t you want to wait until they’re down at the farm?”

“I don’t care anymore.”  My words are sharp.

And it is true.  I no longer care if I am being insensitive to my children’s feelings.  I no longer care if I am making them feel powerless by depriving them of their possessions.  I could choose to honor their feelings and their sense of power by tolerating the mess.  But with that choice I will be an embittered, angry mother, lashing out at them constantly to clean up, or for anything else that annoys me slightly, because my fuse has grown too short. Tolerating the clutter one day longer will make me passive aggressive.  On this day, in this moment, ruthless cruelty is my most direct route back to kindness.

“Did I mention I needed to get to the farm a little early this morning?”  Bob’s voice comes out in a slightly higher register as he backs away from the coffee pot.  “But I left you some coffee…”

He is gone by the time the kids are up.  And they see the bloodlust in my eyes, too.  “You have two choices,” I keep my voice even.  “You can help, or you can go down to the farm and swim for the day.  But you CANNOT stop me.”  Ula nods obediently, the way she does when she knows she’s in big trouble.  “I want every toy in this house on this living room floor,”  I direct.  There is a method to my madness.  If they have to see the entire pile all in once place, they will recognize the enormity of the situation.  Plus, I’ve learned I can work a lot faster without having to move around the house, hunting down objects.  And a LOT more gets tossed when it is all visible.  Ula jumps at my command and begins the work before she even starts her breakfast.  Saoirse narrows her eyes at me, an open challenge.

“I can sort my stuff on my own,” she says slowly.  I feel the daggers.  How dare I ruin her glorious return from wilderness camp with a cleaning frenzy?

I don’t look away.  “I want all of it.  Down here.  On the living room floor.” With my toe, I trace two circles with 18 inch diameters on the rug.  “When we’re done, you each can keep enough stuff to fill one circle.  I will decide which legacy toys can be kept for your own children, and they don’t have to count in the circle.  And there will also be a small section for toys related to homeschooling.  That’s it.”

“I’ll just sort in my room.”  Saoirse says defiantly.

“Here.  I want you to see it all first.”  And then I add “Or go to the farm and leave me to it.”

“We’ll stay,” they say in unison.

“The minute I catch either of you cheating, you’re fired.”

Ula makes a pretty fair effort for an eight-year-old.  She dutifully helps me create the massive pile that fills our living room.  But once I begin sorting every item into either a thrift store bag or a garbage bag, she begins to panic.  I notice her squirreling little objects into her pockets, then surreptitiously slipping upstairs to hide them.  Saoirse is taking a different tack.  She is leaving objects in her room, assuming I won’t go up to check.

“That’s it!”  I think there might be foam around the corners of my lips by this point.  “You’re both FIRED!”  My hot breath flies through the house, threatening to smote the entire pile and turn our home into the Egyptian desert.  “Get into the car!  Now!  You’re going to the farm!”

Ula runs for the car.  Saoirse doesn’t move.  She stares me down.  With confidence, I am reminded, comes the inner strength to disobey.  “I’m staying.”

“You will not.  You’re cheating.”  She follows me out to the car.  From the back seat she meets my gaze as I speed down the road to the farm.

“You’re not being fair!”  She screams at me.  “You can’t just take away our stuff!  We need those things!”

I slam on the breaks and gaze back at her through the rearview mirror.  My voice is suddenly calm.  And in that moment, I see where a week of wilderness camp plays into all of this.  “You just spent a week living outdoors.  The only toys you had were a four-inch knife and a borrowed soccer ball.  Do you mean to tell me you still need everything that’s on that living room floor?”

There is silence.  After a few moments, Ula recites a short list of what she hopes to save: some stuffed animals, the Barbies, one porcelain doll, some modeling clay.  I pull into the driveway at the farm.  Ula gets out and runs to the safety of her grandmother’s arms.  Saoirse stays behind, daring me to kick her out of the car.

“I can do it,” she says softly.

I am no longer angry.  “I can’t live with it, Kiddo,” I tell her.  “But I won’t make you be there while I go through it all.  It’s too hard on you.”

“Mom.  I can do this.  I want to do this.”

I assent..  She gets one more chance.

We turn around and drive back up the mountain.  At first, she cannot physically put the objects in the bags.  She pleads a few times, but when I look up at her with my firey gaze, she backs away, moving herself to the far end of the pile, choosing to read aloud to me from her newest book, rather than witness the exodus.  Her story is interrupted with each bag I haul out the door.  We stop in the heat of the afternoon, strip off our clothes, then run outside naked and spray ourselves with the hose.  We make ourselves two iced mochas in the blender, then sip them on the screen porch while she recounts more stories from camp. Caffeine, I’ve found, is a powerful enabler for discarding.

We return to the pile.  This time, she sits closer to where I work.  A few more times she interrupts, then quickly looks away and shouts “No!  Just do it.  I don’t need it!”  After one such interruption, she disappears with her knife and a block of wood.  When I peak outside the window, I see her sitting on the edge of the deck, carving herself a spoon.  When she comes back, she hands it to me.

“Can we keep this?” she asks.  I smile and nod.  She sets it on the kitchen table and launches into the remains of the pile to help me finish up.  By the time we are done, her  personal toys fit into a picnic basket.  She is perched on the back of the couch beside an open window, her face pale and dripping with sweat.

“I feel like a tornado victim,” she says quietly.  “Something suddenly blew through, and now I’ve lost everything.”

“But you’ll learn what you can do without,” I reply with cheer.

The next day, Ula comes home, and Saoirse’s despair has melted into pride.  “Look, Ula!  Look how clean and nice it is!”  She leads her up to the loft where her few toys that have been granted permanent amnesty have been arranged.  Ula is so absorbed with her simplified surroundings, suddenly able to immerse herself in play (rather than looking for things), she doesn’t notice Saoirse disappear.  I am in the kitchen fixing supper when she passes through, headed up to her own room.  As I chop vegetables, I hear her drawers opening and closing.  A few minutes later, she comes down with an armload of clothes.  “I don’t need these anymore,” she tells me.  Then she carries them away.  And I see in her a new pride… one that comes from knowing what she doesn’t need.

The job is not done.  The next day, we target craft supplies.  The task is so enormous, I decide that it must be divided into three days.  Day one is for paper and anything that touches paper – from markers and crayons, to scissors, paintbrushes and glue.  The girls are given a choice once more, to stay or to go.  They both choose to stay.  And we work into the night, sorting pens, discarding old drawings, testing markers.  We chatter and laugh, and by bedtime, for the first time in our family’s history, we know where every pen, every colored pencil, every coloring book and every pair of scissors lies.  And my inner goddess, having slaked her blood thirst for another day, is able to sleep happy….Until tomorrow, when we begin sorting through all the sewing supplies…