When my parents went into aged care, I helped clear out my childhood home – and realised I need to live lighter | Margaret McNally
In the midst of this country’s housing crisis, my mother has called time on living in our four-bedroom, one-bathroom home of 52 years. The 90-year-old matriarch of our family, who ran the modest Moonee Ponds abode with spit’n’shine precision, will now join my 95-year-old father, who has a two-year head start on life in aged care.
My parents are lucky to afford residential care at a time when financial insecurity can slide into homelessness for so many. They’d worked hard throughout their lives (one for wages; the other unpaid for home duties) to buy and keep the 1927 weatherboard and wood-stumped house above the heads of their five-kid brood.
I lived there until I turned 22. Now, decades older and living interstate, I felt a familial pull to do my bit to clear out the house before settlement. My siblings had been toiling every weekend to sift and sort around our mother. But there was still so much to do: stuff to distribute, donate and chuck.
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With Mum now in care, I had unfettered access to empty the drawers and cupboards from the sunroom extension my father had built when we moved in the 1970s, and from the remodelled kitchen, replete with ceramic cream and mission-brown floor tiles.
In the sunroom, I rediscovered almost every game we’d owned: Monopoly, Trouble, KerPlunk, Cluedo, Ludo, and Snakes and Ladders. I scooped up the coloured plastic knucklebones we played in the game of Jacks; a Tombola set, the bingo numbers embossed in red on circular wood tokens, each one safely stored in a cloth pouch my mother had hand-stitched. Mattel Hot Wheels, Totem Tennis, wrist-bruising Click Clacks, and my miniature sewing machine. I salvaged my brother’s Malvern Star Dragster manual, his handwritten name pressed proudly on the cover. Every item wore the grimy patina of the past.
We weren’t the children who woke on Christmas morning to find stockings at the foot of our beds. There was only ever one present for each of us under the tree. Our parents stretched the family budget to choose that special gift from the circled images of toys we’d coveted in Christmas catalogues.
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Now I’m filling box after box with the stuff of our dreams turned detritus, destined mostly for landfill; the contents of a combined 110 years of sibling life before we flew the nest. Comparing the mass at my feet with today’s conspicuous consumption, I reasoned what we had was enough. We played with our toys perennially.
In the kitchen, battered war-era pots and pans and chipped government-issue dinner plates alerted me to my European parents’ scarcity mentality: we had so little growing up, it’s still good, we’ll keep it. Meanwhile, the silverware and sherry glasses sparkled in the crystal cabinet, unused.
In a drawer bulging with bundled piles of parchment, I peeled away disintegrating rubber bands from school reports, seemingly every card my mother had received, her children’s wedding invitations. There was order among the paper chaos: an accumulation of holy pictures, death notices and funeral service booklets of old people – my husband’s the anomaly among them.
The heaving wardrobes stood as time capsules; our childhood clothes within them the mothballed mementoes – hot pants, school tunics and blazers, a plastic yellow raincoat and hat, cubs and scout caps, scarves and woggles. First holy communion frocks and frilly petticoats.
These representations of our childhood seemed to signal a desire to hold on to the tiny people who outgrew them, too quickly and unstoppably.
Still shuffling my way through the dusty past, I stumbled on newspaper clippings of the royal family, Elvis and Priscilla, Kris Kristofferson. On page six of an Australian Women’s Weekly from 1980, I recoiled at an article on Brooke Shields which proclaimed the teenager as “fast maturing into a glamorous and beautiful young woman” and “growing before our very eyes”.
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In the back yard, my father’s garage is a purpose-built monument to his craft. A carpenter whose domain occupied the width of the block, he housed his car in it and a meaty workbench, above which hung rows of handmade tools. The smell of curled shavings as he drove his plane across timbers to fashion much of our furniture wafted across my memory.
Although now blind, my father could still pinpoint the location of everything in his garage. Before I’d arrived, three generations of males had placed tools into his wizened hands; Dad brailling stories from his life with each accurately identified item.
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With my job done in a few days, I paced the rooms that echoed the soundtrack of a household filled with feasts, fights and fits of laughter, from puberty to P-platers to grownups who eventually left, including now my parents.
The house was heavy with the flotsam of family. But the unspoken need to feel held by possessions resonated loudly. I vowed to return home to begin culling my own belongings amassed over years, some of which, before now, I’d been unable to face: my late husband’s clothes, shoes, his glasses. Inanimate objects that once cloaked his energetic life force.
My attachment to “things” represented a phase in life spent acquiring material wealth. Loss made me realise nothing is more valuable than life. My husband’s possessions were remnants I could still touch, smell and hold. They offered comfort; I was reluctant to let them go for fear he would vanish entirely. But the process of grief has shown he resides in a limitless space within, and in a life that can be short, or long, stuff just weighs you down when you’re feeling nudged to venture forward.
So, it’s also time for me to sell my home, hopefully to a family to fill its vacant rooms, and to start living lighter.