Too Much

A few weeks ago, while blearily preparing breakfast for my kids, I hit a breaking point. The straw that broke this camel's back?

Ikea plates.

It's true. Pretty, plastic plates drove me insane.
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A few years ago, we got a set of multicolored, plastic, kid-friendly tableware from Ikea. Enigmatic Ikea codename: Kalas. (Which, in case you are ever on Jeopardy, translates to party, feast, banquet, spread, or junket. Good to know).

They do look like a festive little rainbow-hued party, don't they?

Once you get past the fact that they are plastic (albeit allegedly BPA-free plastic, like most things Ikea), they are fairly anodyne objects. Functional. Simple. Unbreakable. The cup is sort of tippy - it's not heavy enough on the bottom to give it much stability - so we've had more than our share of spills. Other than that, they are non-offensive. I had no complaints.


How can pretty, multicolored, reasonably functional plates be responsible for driving a housefrau right over the edge?

Too many choices.

Every morning (and afternoon, and evening) my kids would start off the meal specifying not only the foods that they will and won't eat (and that's a whole other post), but also the exact color of plate, bowl, and cup they will accept. I could be serving them ice cream, and they'd dicker about whether they will accept their Lobster Tracks in a green bowl.

Who on Earth dickers over Lobster Tracks - possibly the best ice cream flavor ever (the flavor my husband and I kept to ourselves for months by telling the kids it contained actual crustaceans - which they've never had but simply assume they'll hate) - because of the bowl color?

My kids.

It's ICE CREAM! Eat it from the green bowl! Without crying! Please? Please eat the ice cream? See how I covered it with sprinkles? It makes the green look blue. Please?

Anyway, on this particular morning, after spending several minutes sorting out which flavor of instant oatmeal everyone wanted (Maple and brown sugar? Cinnamon and spice? Apples and cinnamon? Cinnamon raisin? Peaches and cream? Bananas and cream? Strawberries and cream? Blueberries and cream? Regular?), I set down at the table two bowls of oats and two cups of milk and received - not thanks - but instant cries of dissatisfaction.

"I didn't want the blue bowl! I wanted pink!"
"My cup is green and my bowl is yellow! They don't match!"

Whaaaaat?

Seriously, kids, simmer down. Because:

A. I haven't even had my first cup of coffee - I haven't even made coffee yet - and I'm supposed to process this dissent? And...
B. Sans coffee, I have just managed to correctly deliver the apple cinnamon and strawberries and cream oatmeal to the child that requested it.

How is that not the most important thing about breakfast? How has this near-instantaneous and not unpalatable breakfast not been declared a raging success?

It's obvious how. Not based on the oats. It's those damn plates. The pretty, multicolored, reasonably functional Ikea plates. They made this breakfast - and every other meal I served my children - about something other than food. It's all about the Kalas.

The plates - specifically the variety of available colors - gave my kids too many ways in which to be disappointed.

And, frankly, I've got skills enough to disappoint my kids without the assistance of Ikea and their rainbow-hued plastic plates.
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While we are talking about ways in which I can disappoint my children, can we discuss the upcoming holidays?

Because I am having a hard time getting excited when I know that, no matter how much I give them, there will invariably end up being something I didn't - or couldn't - get.

A puppy, for instance.

And it's going to cast a shadow over everything they do get.
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A few years ago, when my mom sent out her annual holiday letter, she included a note that her grandmother wrote over a century ago when her children (my mother's father included) were ages six, four, and two. It tells of the Christmas gifts she was preparing for her three boys while in the mission field in Korea.

Pyeng Yang, Korea, Nov. 27,1900.

I have been having Christmas on my mind lately, and am trying to get something ready for the children. John wants more clothes for his doll and a little bureau to hold them in, and with the help of an empty condensed milk box, and a native carpenter, I guess we can satisfy him.

William's present has occupied me for several evenings, and has turned out such a success, that big William laughs at me for my enjoyment of it. It consists of a little pasteboard house set in the middle of a shallow wooden box, which answers for a yard. The house is six inches square, stuck all over with millet on the outside, and the roof covered with cereal coffee. Sprigs of cedar stuck in blocks answer for trees, and flowers cut from seed catalogues are pasted to little wooden blocks here and there over the yard. A horse and colt stand at the back door, and a cow, cat and dog are to be added. At the front of the house are a little boy and girl receiving an apple at the hands of Santa Claus, while mamma looks out from the font door. The little windows have lace curtains, and altogether I am sure that little William's wildest dreams will be realized. Will says the first thing will be a fight between the three of them for the possession of it.

Richard's present is not under way yet, but I think a rag doll will probably satisfy the longings of his heart.
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I have to say, it's nice to know that, as much as times changed over the last century, children fighting over the possession over a desirable toy isn't reflective of the failings of modern parenting in general, or my personal parental failings in particular.

Also of note: overuse of the comma may be genetic.
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Each gift was something my great-grandmother had considered carefully and spent some time creating. Something that she fashioned, or commissioned, using materials she had on hand. Items that were being reused. Nothing fancy. But it didn't have to be fancy - or have been made by elves and delivered by Santa - to be appreciated. Santa does make an appearance, though, and he brings apples. Apples.

I try to imagine my the reactions my kids would give to these toys.

Honestly, they would probably love them. My daughter would appreciate clothes for her doll. My son would enjoy a model house or a rag doll. But, having unwrapped these items, they would immediately look around for more.

More. Always more.

There are so many things to want in this world - for both children and adults - that it feels almost impossible to take time to appreciate what we already have. We are barraged with other options, or other choices; the knowledge that, though we have this thing - and it's great - there's something else that we don't have.

And there are a lot of things that we don't have. A world full of possible desires. And the knowledge that these other, desirable, unobtainable things are out there - in the hands of our friends, or in commercials on the television - diminishes our joy in the here and now.

What would happen if I turned back the clock? If I were to limit our Christmas to just a few things? Doll clothes and a dresser to hold them for one child. A doll for the other.

The resulting unhappiness wouldn't come from a failing of the gifts. It would come from the perception that there should have been more. A perception that derives from the culture of consumption that characterizes the current moment in America.

I speak of the unhappiness that would accompany a single, well-considered gift, but I think there is also an unhappiness of multiple gifts that don't truly satisfy wants and needs.

A decade ago, I had the chance to work retail as the holidays approached. With each day that passed, people became more and more harried and less happy. They were desperate not to find the right gift, but to simply find something, anything, that they could use to fill a box. The gift itself was unimportant - just a way to check a name off of the list.

In watching these customers, eyes bright with desperation, I began to wonder what the point of gifting is. If it is just a chore, why don't we just stop?

I don't have the answer, but the pondering brings me back to questions that rise again and again as I write this blog:

How do we live outside our own culture, in ways that are at odds with the prevailing zeitgeist?

And, more importantly,

How do we create cultural change?
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The Kalas are gone.

Starting that morning, I began to pack them up as they came through the dishwasher. For good measure, I tossed in all the plastic cups we have acquired from Moe's and Chili's (another source of discord). Now when we sit down to eat, we all eat from the one set of plates I keep in the house. Each bowl matches every other bowl. Each plate matches every other plate.

And...

For the first time in years, no one dickers about the color of their bowl. It's amazing.

I'm not going to lie, we still have bickering about a lot of things - variety packs of instant oatmeal remain problematic - but we aren't butting heads about tableware. And - given the results of removing the pretty, multicolored plates - we might have bought our last variety pack of oatmeal as well.

Sometimes it is just all too much. Too many things, and too many choices. Having more options than we can ever pursue leads to many, many paths not taken. More chances for regret.

Could we be happier with less? With fewer? Especially if the few were what we really wanted. Could you make do with one? If you really loved it? Consider it material monogamy. Does that help?

Would we enjoy the bowl of ice cream more if the sweet taste of caramel weren't following the salty sting of tears shed over a green bowl?

It seems almost like heresy to say it out loud, since we seem to live in the Age of More, but maybe all this stuff - choices, options, things - maybe it's just too much.

Underneath It All

As winter approaches, the pile of warm clothing adjacent to my front door drifts like snow, heaping against the wall and over the sofa; obscuring every available flat surface.

Faced with these mounds of boots, fleece, and Gore-Tex, I chose to fight back. I decided it was incumbent upon me to contain these fallen mittens and scarves in a manner both organized and accessible.

Problem was, I didn't have a containment system up to the challenge.
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Last year, I attempted to perfect the use of the big plastic box (AKA: BPB). In this scenario, all scarves, hats, mittens, and other warm gear got tossed pell-mell into the BPB, where they jumbled in a heap; intermingling with no regard for ownership.

It was - in almost every way - an imperfect solution.

When a child queried, "Where's my scarf?" I would answer, "Did you check the big plastic box?"

Inevitable answer: "No."

Of course not. Why on Earth would they look there?

One symptom of my kids' abhorrence of organizational schemes is their firm, unfaltering resistance to even acknowledging the existence of such schemes. They are organizational agnostics.

Like a missionary, I attempted to bring them the truth. To show them the light, the way, the mittens: "Well, go check there. That's where they should be."

The child would go off to check, disgorging the full contents of the BPB onto the floor in the process.

Inevitable result: "It's not here."

"If you put it in the box when you took it off, it should be there. Did you put it there when you took it off?"

Inevitable answer: "Uhhhh....."

Further investigation on my part would usually reveal that the scarf was, in fact, in the BPB, or on the floor next to the BPB where it had been disgorged by the child attempting to find it amidst the chaos.

Alternately, the mitten was often declared "lost forever," and the subject of much weeping, consternation, and rending of other garments.

Usually we would ultimately discover the item in the car, or at school, or stuffed into a shoe next to the door, or in a jacket pocket, or on the floor next to the toilet, or in a box of crayons, or frozen into the snow on the front step.

Pretty much anywhere other than the place it should have been.

And, on rare occasions, winter accessories apparently achieved translocation to whatever dimension socks, scarves, and mittens abscond to for vast portions of their use lives.

Which all goes to say that even I - the BPB evangelist - found the strategy lacking. It was just a container for our mess, not a remedy for the mess itself. We needed something better.

I briefly considered buying some new sort of entryway furniture. Target carries hallracks with benches, and there are a lot of things from Ikea that would probably work.

But I don't want to spend more money. Even reasonable amounts of money. And I really don't want to buy more stuff.

We already have plenty of stuff. The drifts of hats, scarves, and mittens, for instance, are stuff. And stuff, no matter how desirable, always somehow requires - through it's very existence - the acquisition of more stuff that can be used to contain the stuff.

It's mind numbing. It's too much. It's driving me insane.

We have so much stuff.

When I thought it through, it occurred to me that one nice thing about all this stuff is that, somewhere amidst the clutter, we probably already had a containment system that would work.

So I looked around my house, to see what might be repurposed.
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When I think about my father working in the garage, I envision him standing at an antique piece of furniture that was central to his work space. I don't know what it's actually called, but "sideboard" seems probable. It has some shelves above an oblong, beveled mirror and a bunch of drawers that he used to hold screws, nails, and wrenches. One drawer was set up with partitions - they were intended for silverware - and was lined with a soft, blue velvet. When I opened it, it exuded that pleasant, oily smell of tools and hardware.

I love that smell.

I have been told that this sideboard was originally part of my parents' collection of living room furniture, which - the story goes - was sort of a motley assortment of pieces. As the current owner of a sort-of-motley assortment of furniture, I can understand my mom's desire to have things kind of match each other a bit, despite having varied origins. She accomplished this by painting her motley collection of furniture white.

Viola! Matching furniture!

In these, the days of Antique Roadshow, it seems obvious that this constitutes some sort of crime against furniture. Leigh and Leslie Keno rail against painting antiques on an almost weekly basis. But back in the olden days of the early '70s, I'm sure the white-painted sideboard and matching shelves looked super fly with my parents' zebra-striped faux-fur bean bag.

I love my father's repurposed work bench so much that, after leaving home, I offered to trade him the piece for an actual work bench. It was a tactical error to ask after leaving home, though, because over the past dozen years I have never had a chance to get it. I can only hope that, one day, there will be a way for it to get moved up to join my current sort-of-motley assortment of furniture. And I have always dreamed that - by that day - I would have acquired the necessary skills to make it something other than white.

Crimes against furniture notwithstanding, I'm a natural-wood sort of gal.

So when I looked around my home for possible containment systems for hats, gloves, and scarves, and my eyes settled upon an old, white-painted, hand-me-down dresser covered in stickers, I saw both a containment system and a learning opportunity.
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If I have learned one thing from this learning opportunity, it is this: It is probably not worth the time, effort, and - more to the point - loss of brain cells it takes to refinish something about which you do not care deeply.

Somewhat conversely, I have also learned this: It is best to start your refinishing career with an item about which you do not care deeply.

In that sense, the little dresser was the perfect first project. It was small, not special or particularly nice, and it didn't belong to someone whose memory I cherish.

My husband and I acquired it in grad school from a guy who was leaving for another program and didn't want to get a U-Haul. A nice guy, but not someone I'm as sentimental about as, say, my grandma.

Over the years, one of the drawers developed a crack and the white paint had been embellished with crayons, markers, and some of those stickers that they give to kids at grocery stores. It was a mess.

I was using it to hold random scraps of paper. Yeah. Really. Let's not talk about it.

Suffice it to say that it was ready to serve a more noble purpose.

So, we purchased a bottle of CitraStrip "Safer" Stripper and some other random scraping tools and I got to work.

The bottle of CitraStrip alleged that it was safe for indoor use, so I figured I'd be good in the garage, which isn't airtight. Given that I've never used anything other than CitraStrip, I can't tell you if it is actually any safer, less toxic, or less likely to induce hallucinations than any other stripping product. What I can tell you is that for about 12 hours after stripping concluded, my heart was racing, I had funny thoughts, and my head felt screwed on all wrong.

This, in my opinion, might be the best reason not bother with too much more furniture refinishing. If I do find a reason to try again, it will be outside, in the summer, on a day with a nice breeze.

Fume high aside, the CitraStrip worked pretty well, bubbling up most of the paint with the first application. Everything that wasn't worked into a nick or crack.

Removal of the paint revealed another truth about refinishing furniture (and a lot of other endeavors): You can spend a lot of time with some stripper, and peel back a lot of layers, only to discover that what lurks beneath isn't all that appealing.

In retrospect, I'm not sure what I expected. It's a little wooden dresser. Not awful, not beautiful. Functional. It'll do. But once I'd scraped it was clear that the dresser wasn't worth spending a lot more time on. The law of diminishing returns pretty well predicted that further effort would not be rewarded with vast improvement. It would still look like an ordinary little dresser.

Like Kenny Rogers says: "You've gotta know when to walk away. Know when to run."

Even buzzed on "safer" fumes, I knew it was time to fold 'em.

I glued the cracked drawer, stained all the visible surfaces, and put the hardware back on. The dresser now stands by our front door, ready to accept our gloves, hats, and mittens. It generally matches my other wood furniture.

Success.
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The kids are dazzled with my mad skills. They can't believe that this is the same dresser they used to draw on. They were excited to lay claim on their individual drawers. Kids always love to feel like something is theirs.

My husband, on the other hand, almost laughed himself into a hernia at the notion that our family would manage to maintain our stuff in our individual drawers.

He's probably right. But, what can I say? Hope springs eternal.
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I realize now that, when I took on this project, I wasn't thinking about this little white dresser, I was thinking about the large, white sideboard in my father's garage - a project I've been pondering for years. It would have taken a lot more (not to mention less "safer") fumes to transmute one into the other, though.

But I now know that, if ever there is a day that I can undertake the task of peeling away the paint on that sideboard, I should enlist the help of someone more skilled in the process than I am. And perhaps that's the most important thing I could have learned from this project: how not to mess up when it really matters.

Knowing is half the battle.

In the meantime, I can get to work in our battle against the drifting outerwear. Will this be the moment our family actually achieves organizational zen?

Yeah. Well... I didn't inhale that much stripper.