Letting go of the Pink Princess Castle
From loathing the setup to loathing the goodbye. Space for what's next.
Before I had kids, I scoffed at parents who lavished all the plastic toys on their children. Honestly, I judged them. I would think to myself: I will never have a house full of plastic toys. I envisioned my children with a playroom right out of Victorian England: wooden blocks, a wooden rocking horse, some Madame Alexander dolls, maybe a metal train.
For my daughter’s second Christmas, Santa brought her a plastic “station wagon” car, a pink plastic kitchen with plastic kitchen supplies, and a plastic grocery cart with plastic food to go in it. Being the first and only grandchild at the time, we were all delighted to watch as she happily played with all of her new treasures. Loading up her babies in the back of the plastic station wagon. Serving us plastic food from her kitchen.
When her brothers arrived on the scene, we added plastic ride-on race cars, plastic swords and shields, and then took things to a whole new level of plastic with…LEGOS.
Plastic also came in the form of polyester pop-up tents, cars, and tunnels. The kind that “sprung” open and then had to be folded down like an origami pretzel to fit back into its thin plastic case.
These polyester domains provided hours, days, and nights of entertainment. Loaded with sleeping bags, stuffed animals, friends, snacks, and covered with blankets, they were forts and secret hideaways.
However, the pop-up of all pop-ups was the Pop-Up Pink Princess Castle. A veritable pop-up kingdom. This wasn’t just a square. No, it was a large rectangle that could fit my daughter and at least 3 of her friends. It had a triangle roof with a Princess flag on top. A second smaller rectangle popped out to make the entrance and to get inside you crawled through a pop-up tunnel. A sort-of pop-up drawbridge. This contraption took up the entire floor space of our family room.
My daughter LOVED this thing.
I LOATHED it.
It never successfully “popped-up.” It had to be forced to hold its shape. Because of all the add-ons, there were additional poles that had to be threaded through the thin material each time which would inevitably rip.
Folding it back down into an origami pretzel so it could be slipped back into its case? Never. Not once.
I was left with the option of just leaving it up in the middle of the room for days on end…which I did occasionally. (Definitely NOT Victorian England.)
Or, trying to tame it down enough to shove in a closet. Every time I opened that closet, I would be greeted by a mess of poles and pink polyester popping out at me like a flock of pigeons being sprung from a coop.
And then after years of wrestling with this contraption, quietly and without even noticing, the requests to have the Pink Princess tent set-up…stopped.
And it sat unused in the closet for years.
Around the time my daughter was in early high school, I was overcome with a fit of spring cleaning and purging.
Her youngest brother was still deep in his LEGO phase so purging those tiny plastic bricks wasn’t an option.
I went for the closet with the Pink Princess tent. I wrestled with that thing just to get it out of its hiding place. The poles scraped the walls of my house as I carried the jumbled mess out to the garage. I shoved it into the back of the car and somehow managed to slam down the trunk door without the whole thing popping out at me.
Once the car was fully loaded, I took off to the dump. No donation center was going to take the jumbled mess of polyester with its ripped seams and poles that wouldn’t fold down.
I backed into my bay at the dump, opened my trunk, pulled the mess of pink out and flung it onto the dump pile.
I stared at it sitting on that dump pile. This contraption I had loathed.
And while I stood there, I felt warm tears slip down my cheeks.
The days of the Pink Princess tent were undeniably over and yet, I felt the urge in that moment to grab that cursed tent, bring it home, and set it back up in my family room.
We’re in the process of moving into a home without any of our kiddos living with us full-time for the first time in many, many years. It’s a new stage for us. While we will be in the same general area, we’re still having to make some hard decisions about what comes with us and what doesn’t.
I have found for myself that the hardest part of decluttering my house and giving away unused or no longer needed items isn’t usually the object itself, but the memories attached to it.
My daughter is now grown up, married, and off making a life of her own. Putting that Pink Princess tent back in the car and bringing it home wouldn’t change that. But when getting rid of it, there was a tinge of sadness in knowing that she would never again fill that tent with blankets and dolls and friends.
Maybe you’re spring cleaning too and having a hard time parting with items that have already fulfilled their role. Not because of the item but because of what or who they represent from a certain stage in your life. I get it.
This week as I pack up our belongings for our new beginning (a real Good. Begin Again. moment), I’m reminding myself of this line from Marie Kondo’s book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up:
“The space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not for the person we were in the past.”
I’m doing my best to let things go with gratitude for the role they already played in my life to make space for the treasured items and memories yet to come.
Cheers,
Carrie