Jennifer Horgan: I’m making my attic a manageable past for my children to inherit

My bedroom wardrobes, if they could talk, would tell you how excited they are too. Up until now, my conveniently tall husband has stored everything we possess, from Christmas decorations to suitcases, around the opening of the attic door. Everything else, and I mean everything else, has been stuffed into our beleaguered bedroom wardrobes. Along with our clothes and shoes, those poor wardrobes have had to manage twenty years of memorabilia and souvenirs.

We are both dopey levels of sentimental. We carted piles of papers, ticket stubs, essays, letters and photographs into our marriage. So, you can imagine what we’ve gathered since having three children. It’s verging on the macabre. We’ve kept everything: locks of hair, hospital bracelets, first shoes and, of course, their ‘art.’ The ‘art’ takes up A LOT of space. But it’s all important to me, worth more than the high heel shoes I no longer wear, and the dresses I should never have bought in the first place.

No more! Last weekend, I set about filling up the newly-floored space in the eaves.

As I set to boxing it all away — all the memories — I realised something. What if none of it gets seen again until my grown-up children are tasked with clearing it out?

 But also, most of our keepsakes are really worth the most to us — my husband and me — so we should spend some time with them. Their meaning is rooted in our shared memories of one another and our children as babies. Our children have no memory of their first birthdays or how excited they were about their first doodle, their first steps, or their inaugural nappy-free day. Aged forty, I don’t know if they will have any interest in their hospital bracelets, their own hair.

So, I made a commitment, there and then. I’m going to have attic afternoons, entirely dedicated to reliving early memories of my own life, my husband’s life, and my young children’s lives. Every time I do it, I’m going to cull just a little from the pile. I’m not talking about wiping out our past, far from it. I could bag away a carful of bulge; my children would still have ample memories of their youth — believe me.

But my plan is not only about managing our masses of stuff. I want my attic afternoons to form a protest against time, to slow the inhumane march of it, even when it follows the natural order of things.

Anyone on the far side of forty knows how quickly time passes. It lolls and dawdles through childhood and youth. Looking back, I couldn’t wait for life to happen. Then, all of a sudden, it galloped into some kind of frenzy of a sprint. With every passing decade, I feel like I’m being blown off the tracks by some turbo-speeding train.

I’m going to slow the train for a few hours, quiet the tracks, the birthday announcements, the bells, the whistles. I’m going to plonk myself down to the side of the action, nestle my nicely padded 43-year-old bum deep inside the grasses of the past, and luxuriate in it.

My attic afternoons will likely be Sundays, rainy Sundays, I like to think. I’m going to make a pot of tea, steal some biscuits from the kitchen, and crawl up that Stira. I’ll invite the tall fella along too if I can get him onside. I’ll need a torch and a black bag for the stuff that won’t make it through each cull. I’m eyeing up the ‘art’ already. Maybe I’ll take pictures on my phone so it feels a little less brutal. I’ll make sure to enjoy it, remember it, photograph it and then, yes, if I can get away with it, if an agreement is reached, bin it.

But mostly, it will be about celebrating my own, our own, life. We all spend so much time trying to make nice memories, preparing food, perfecting outfits, for ourselves and our children, making everything special. But what time do we give to re-living it, cherishing the details of it, allowing photographs, cut outs, even hair clippings to bring it all back? Not enough, not enough at all.

I’m setting some time aside to hold the gold of my life, rather than leaving it for the next generation to sift through when it’s been reduced to dust by time and grief. Because it’s my gold, my life.

I wonder what I’ll leave … A friend told me recently that she spent the most gorgeous day sorting through her granny’s attic. She learned so much about her as a young woman, from her diaries, from what she’d chosen to keep. That’s the stuff I want to leave my children. Fragments of themselves yes, but also just a few tokens that really meant something to me. They might have their own children by then, their own hair clippings, their own ‘art’ to contend with. I’d love to leave them just a few small things for them to carry forward along with their own memories.

My attic will become a manageable past for my children to inherit. That’s my intention at least. That’s the plan. Now, it took me over five years to sort the attic so there’s no guarantee I’ll actually manage any of this, but I sincerely hope I do, for my own sake.

In the time I have left, and I know it will fly, I hope I make time to do what another writer, Derek Walcott, suggests. That I will “Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes.”

That I will spend wet Sundays peeling “my own image from the mirror.”

That I will “sit” and “feast” on my life.