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Princess of the world

The day before her sixth birthday party, I asked my daughter Lizzie to help me clean out her room, which was a mess. On the big day she would want to show her friends her room, wouldn’t she? And she would need space for all her presents. Encouraged by that thought, she agreed. The room was full of drawings, bits of writing, colourings-in, dot-to-dots, cut-outs, paper chains, paper planes, cardboard cars, cardboard spaceships, and so on. Lizzie loves paper.

‘We’ll take all the paper things into my room, shall we, where there is more space’, I suggested. ‘You can make a pile of the things you want to keep, and those you can throw out.’ I left her to it.

Bustling about doing my own chores, I could hear Lizzie talking to herself, as children do.

‘Keep … throw out … keep … ummm … throw out …’.

Twenty minutes later the throw-out pile was enormous, the keep pile a modest collection of the most recent and precious. A successful life lesson had been learned, I thought, complacently, as I hugged the throw-out pile to the backyard recycling bin. One can’t keep everything. And her cleared out room had a whole new look.

But later, on the evening of the party day, after Lizzie had gone to bed, I heard crying from her room.

‘What’s wrong, sweetie?’

‘It’s my room!’

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘It looks different now.’

‘Yes, well, it’s nicer, don’t you think?’

‘No! It doesn’t look the same!

‘But … ‘

Sobs into the pillow. ‘It just doesn’t look the same!’

Fortunately weariness took over and she slept.

For me, the clean up had been an achievement; Lizzie felt it as a loss. Not even the arrival of new toys could overcome her sadness for the loss of her old things.

One day weeks later, as we were walking to the shops together, I suddenly recalled this incident and asked Lizzie again why she had cried that day in her room. ‘It just didn’t look the same’, she replied, and she would say no more. The subject was closed.

Some part of herself had clearly been lost but she could not explain it and I don’t blame her. All sorts of learned people have tried to describe why it is that creating and owning ’stuff’ - including personal records - is so important to so many people. One scholar has observed that the objects we possess represent a mental realm over which we hold sway - an object I own is a thing whose meaning is governed by myself alone.

This must apply to especially to children, for they in particular need to feel in control of their world. An object or record that Lizzie has made herself is something that she knows all about. She knows it completely: she imagined it, made it, used it, showed it off, decided its future, put it somewhere. Even if it gets tossed into the bottom of a box, she knows it is there and she knows its entire history. Much of the rest of the world might be mystifying to her but this object is hers and hers alone. And I, needless to say, violated all that.

So where does that leave her? Obviously she had to start again to make a whole lot of new stuff.

You should see her room now.