Julie Jay: Nothing cures sentimentality like being a parent
Julie Jay: "Every day, Number One trundles home with artwork, some more deserving of praise than others, and as much as we want to encourage creativity, the scribblings pile up quickly."
As a first-time parent, everything was treasured. But the second time around, I have my kids’ art binned at the first opportunity.
In a season four episode of , Rachel Green defends her habit of exchanging gifts with her boyfriend Ross Geller by producing a box full of sentimental keepsakes that catalogued their relationship up to that point.
“This is a movie stub from our first date. This is an eggshell from the first time you made me breakfast in bed. This is from the museum, the first time we... were together. OK, maybe I exchange gifts sometimes, but I keep the things that matter,” she declares confidently, holding up a dinosaur bone.
Ross gives it a beat before pointing to the bone and saying, “I don't know what to say. I'm sorry. Though, you're not supposed to take these.”
At the time, I thought this was incredibly romantic on Rachel’s part, but now I can confidently say having to go to a museum on a date would be my worst nightmare, followed closely by breakfast in bed. Even the thought of toast crumbs on my pillow has me scratching my scalp with frenzy.
Also, with all due respect to New York’s most famous waitress, I do think Rachel retaining a shoebox of eggshells speaks to someone who was fully immersed in a late 1990s melancholy, a person who listened to Counting Crows on repeat and had yet to be subjected to a dreaded March Instagram dump.
I too was once a bit of a Rachel Green and loved hanging onto keepsakes just for the nostalgia factor. However, having been at this parenting lark for almost four and a half years, I can categorically say my sentimentality affliction has been nearly completely cured.
Every day, Number One trundles home with artwork, some more deserving of praise than others, and as much as we want to encourage creativity, the scribblings pile up quickly. As such, I’ve had to leave emotions at the door and whittle down the ones we keep based on Number One’s ability to stay within the lines, like a terrible round of that old '90s board game Operation, where one shaky hand means the dream is over.
Equally, the baby clothes I previously cherished have been fobbed off onto Vincent de Paul, not just because doing so many bedtime routines on my own has left me completely jaded, but also because our house is bursting at the seams with odd socks alone. Usually, my husband hasn’t even finished asking, ‘Is this babygro a bit small ...’ before I donate the item of clothing that was once so loved. Now I see it as the singular obstacle standing in the way of my happiness.
On one occasion, when my husband tried to get rid of something baby-related, I quoted the infamous Charles Heston line at the NRA conference, where he stated he would give away his gun “when you pry it from my cold, dead hands." Given that the item I was insisting on holding onto was a stained baby vest, it’s safe to say it was one of my more histrionic post-partum moments.
Fast-forward four years, and I can’t get rid of the stuff fast enough. A lot of this has to do with the fact that our house is pretty tiny. It is so tiny that I am convinced most rows with my husband stem from our ceilings being too low, and he constantly feels slightly claustrophobic.
As my tolerance for sentimentality has decreased, my patronage of charity shops has surged. When they see me coming with a rake of baby items, they will know that 2020 Julie would probably be trying to guard with her life.
Teddies I once held dear have since been handed down to smaller babies who have not fully grasped the value of having the Teletubbies in their original line-up before LaLa decided to go solo and Po sought refuge at the bottom of a bottle.
I am pretty proud to say I have the baby memories whittled down to one box. Strangely, I thought in the aftermath of my dad’s passing, I would find it harder to part with these little talismans from the kids’ early years, but if anything, his death made me realise that you don’t need a physical souvenir to remind you of times past. The important bit is the memory, and that it got to happen at all.
Though I always fancied myself as a bit of a Rachel Green (I too, was a terrible waitress), I’m sure even she would have changed her mind about keeping the catalogue of dinosaur bones once she became a parent, given as it's a known fact that Vincent de Paul shops up and down the land are crying out for precious artefacts.
Though sadly, our kids’ art isn’t one of them, as much as I’ve tried to convince my local shop assistants that the doodle I’m trying to fob off is an original Jack B Yeats. Save yourself the blushes and take it from me, they’re too discerning to be duped, especially because the doodle is written on the back of a fax paper.
