原文在此 southwest spirit magazine's article "Clutter" by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
我是在從費城結束出差 飛回灣區的飛機上看到這一篇文章
看完馬上熱淚盈眶 而且是真的有流眼淚
流眼淚的當下馬上想 "我怎麼這個sentimental?! 我該不會懷上了吧?!"
哈哈 結果還真的咧
而這一篇儼然就成為我懷孕的第一個癥狀
很感人 和大家分享
尤其是最後那一段話 每看一次都熱淚盈眶
CLUTTER
Every marriage has its…stuff. I just had to learn to love my husband’s old junk, and my own past, as much as he did.
By Taffy Brodesser-Akner
While preparing to move to Los Angeles in 2005, I did what I always do before a big move:
I got rid of most of my stuff. My fiancé (now husband) awaited me in L.A.,
and I wanted to start our new life unfettered by relics of the past.
My first full-sized bed? Couldn’t sell it fast enough. My college textbooks? Donated to the library.
Those pictures my roommate and I painted of the Manhattan skyline during that lone minute
when we were both single and giddy and feeling creative at the same time?
There’d be no place for them in my life. Everything had to go.
This was a familiar ritual for me. My parents divorced when I was 6,
and I had moved 11 times by the time I left for college, including one ill-conceived year
when I lived on Long Island with my father. Each time we left, for good reason
(like when my mom remarried) or for bad (when my mom re-divorced),
there was what became the process of filtering and disposing of The Stuff.
At every convening of this rite, more got left behind.
Photographs that seemed too voluminous and sentimental, blankies, baby Ts we loved,
old retainers, ceramic ashtrays, bridesmaids dresses that were un-re-wearable.
There was no room for sentiment in the increasingly smaller homes we were moving to.
When the digs eventually got bigger, it didn’t matter.
Moving was an opportunity to purge what we’d become attached to,
as if it were a personality flaw to own something that reminded you of your past
but which you had no use for now.
When I arrived in L.A., I was ready for a new life, a story I would author with the man I was set to marry.
Claude was surprised at how little I brought. And that made me smile.
I pride in my ability to detach from things.
To know me is to know that I am very good at saying goodbye; I am very good at moving on.
We sat in our kitchen that first day, drinking lemonade and talking about the future.
I touched the table, a Saarinen knockoff.
“Did I ever tell you we had this same table when I was young?” I asked him.
“Everybody did,” he answered. “It was 1975.”
“How did you find it?”
“I didn’t. It was my parents’. They kept it for me.”
Why did this upset me? I thought life would begin anew for both of us.
Instead, we were eating off a table that held memories for him.
It’s only a table, I told myself. And it’s a nice table. Still, something bothered me.
I soon found that the Saarinen table wasn’t the only artifact from Claude’s past.
There were boxes of photographs, old newspapers, artwork, favorite novels that would never be reread, journals.
I have never kept a journal. I didn’t understand the point of memorializing a thought
just because you had it. Not everything is worth keeping.
To each his own, I thought. Or at least I thought I thought that.
“Damnit,” I said one day, trying to fit four placemats on the Saarinen.
“How did your mother have guests over?”
“When we had guests, we used the dining room,” Claude answered. “We only needed this table to seat us three.”
“Well, I hate this table. It’s stupid and I don’t want it anymore.”
“But I really love it.”
“It’s not practical for our needs. Why do you have to be so sentimental?”
But I was the one with tears in my eyes.
After several dinner parties at which our guests had to take turns eating,
Claude agreed to put the Saarinen on Craigslist. We have a new table now—long, beautiful, and practical.
But the problem didn’t end there. I quickly found out that
Claude’s mother likes to send him boxes every few weeks,
sometimes filled with things she finds at Costco that she thinks will be helpful,
other times with mementos of Claude’s youth.
And then I got pregnant. As soon as we told my in-laws, the packages started coming more frequently.
Teddy bears missing an eye, jumpers that looked like lederhosen, perfectly intact onesies,
stroller blankets, nursery decorations—all from Claude’s childhood.
“See,” he’d say, pulling out a faded photograph.
“This is me with that bear when I was little. I can’t wait to give it to the baby.”
“It has one eye,” I’d reply, nastily. “Why would you give a baby a bear with one eye?
Doesn’t our baby deserve a bear with two eyes?”
The fact that Claude’s mom has so much stuff to send doesn’t add up to me.
She lives in a two-bedroom condo. Where does she keep it?
Claude’s parents downsized, too. After he graduated from college,
they decided to cash in on the house they built
and go state to state with all their remaining possessions trapped in a four-door sedan.
They gave up all their furniture, except the Saarinen, which Claude requested.
The sedan turned out to be something of a clown car.
I have a large car and most days cannot fit in it more than a couple of bags of groceries.
Still, on an almost monthly basis, we receive packages of the loot my mother-in-law managed to schlep across the country in her Ford Taurus.
Like withholding from a child bites of candy in order to make the moment last,
Claude’s mother trickles out pieces from her museum.
“Remember this?” she seems to ask with each object.
“Remember us?” Conversely, my mother, ferrying around to help out with the five grandchildren that I did not give her,
has never sent me as much as a note. She cannot be bothered to figure out e-mail;
an introduction to Snapfish and how it works might cause her a stroke.
“You’re jealous,” my mother tells me when I call to gripe about the latest package.
“You wish I had kept your childhood artifacts. You wish I sent you packages.
Well, I gave you siblings instead.” Maybe she’s right. Claude is an only child,
whereas I am one of four daughters. My mother calls me by all my sisters’ names before she arrives at mine.
We each have vied for her attention. But as time has gone by, as we have grown,
I am the one who still looks for clues that maybe I’m her favorite,
that she wishes she were in L.A. with me instead of stuck in Brooklyn with my sibs.
But as my pregnancy progressed, I began thinking about my childhood more than I had in years.
All I have are a scattering of pictures that I chose to keep, and a lot of memories, many of which aren’t great.
My three sisters have a tougher time remembering. One of them was very prone to spacing out—
in trying times, among the greatest of gifts—and has only a vague recollection of the hardships of our youth.
One has a coping mechanism so advanced that I believe she can block out events as they’re happening.
The third was not born until the rest of us were well into our adolescent years,
after most of the damage had been done. And so I am the sole keeper of our shared experience.
I keep it in the museum of my brain, a place my sisters rarely visit.
The absence of clutter is the presence of empty space. If no one ever talks about that space,
you begin to wonder if your memories are real. I think about my Cozy—
the name I gave my security blanket. Sky-blue velvet on one side, flowery cotton on the other,
I dragged it everywhere. At times, I wish I could hold it close to my lips like I once did,
to show it to my sisters and remind them of when we huddled underneath it in the backseat of the car,
whispering things we didn’t want our parents to hear.
I think of my older sister’s Bun-Bear, the stuffed bunny she slept with for many years.
I would like to hold it to her cheek and say,
“Remember the nights you told me made-up stories about our teachers doing it,
in order to drown out the sound of Mom and Dad fighting?”
I would thank her for her kindness.
I would hug her until all the memories poured out from her log-jammed hippocampus,
where, despite her insistence that they don’t exist, science tells me they are securely stored.
I think of my youngest sister brushing what little hair her Barbie had left,
and making amends for the mullet I inflicted on it while she wasn’t looking.
I would tell her I was sorry for hating her for just being. And she would forgive me.
As I put the last touches on the nursery for Ezra, our newborn son,
I came to understand what truly bothered me about my mother-in-law’s well-intentioned packages:
If I put up the things that she sent, if I erected the museum of my husband’s youth in the place
where Ezra would spend so much time, he would intuit and absorb the details—the essence—
of how his father came to be who he is. My past would remain a mystery, even if I didn’t want it to be.
Two years earlier, on the eve of my wedding, my aunt, the picture-taker of the family,
made me a collage of my life. Photographs of me when I was an infant,
when I was a little girl, a mono-browed teen, a chubby college kid, all arrayed in a frame.
I look at those images carefully now, not so much for what is in the foreground
but for the details that live in the background. Remember that ugly Benetton jacket I bought because everyone else had one?
See the tin piggy bank I kept pennies in until it was tossed
because I was deemed not conscientious enough about saving?
Look, there’s the vase that was too much of a reminder of his failed marriage for my father to keep.
It was Claude who hung the collage. I thought it was silly and sentimental. “Adults don’t hang collages,” I said. But he insisted.
“We can put it in the office, somewhere people won’t see,” I compromised.
Claude ignored me and gave it pride of place in our hallway. “Here, everyone,” it says.
“This is who I was. This is how I got here.”
Ezra is 3 now. He is like me in his nature, not attached to objects. No blankie for him, no preferred stuffed animal.
No fetishized sippy cup, no favorite shirt. At first I admired this in him. What a survivor, I thought.
Only the unstable and poorly adjusted need objects to cling to.
But when I feel my husband’s fondness for his teddy bear, when I think of the joy I deprived him when I insisted on selling that table,
when I think of my distant and memory-starved sisters, I realize how important the stuff of our history is, and I worry for him.
I don’t want Ezra to end up like me, unable to settle in, to create a mess, to make clutter.
I want him to be able to plant his flag wherever he goes and say, Yes, this is where I belong, and I will put down some roots.
I find a blanket a friend of ours made for him when he was born and decide to take it up as a cause.
I attach it to him, put it in his stroller, in his car seat and crib.
This is your blanket, son, don’t be afraid to get used to it. Give it a name. Love it.
This stuff, these objects, they are important. They provide context.
They will eventually prove that you existed long before you arrive at who you’ll end up being.
Your past has value.
We will look at this blanket, years from now, just you and me and our cherished old stuff,
and we will remember when we were each other’s biggest fans.
Before there is disappointment, before there is separation, before there is strife.
Before there are girlfriends, before there are grown-up problems, before there are grandchildren.
So please, little boy, get attached. When you need the comfort only I am able to provide,
we will pull this blanket out, we will touch it, and we will remember.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner has written essays for The New York Times,
The Los Angeles Times, O: The Oprah Magazine, Self, Salon, and The Daily Beast.
She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Claude, and her sons, Ezra and Haskel.
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