Stock Taking (Again): Notes on Preparing to Leave (Again)

How many Ikea POÄNG chairs have I bought (and then sold or left behind) in my decades of careless geographic instability? How many sets of kitchen odds and ends, how many cups and bowls and sets of cutlery? How many bookshelves (and their contents), kitchen tables, armoires (and their sartorial contents) and beds?

All of them, baby. All of them.

I am both a minimalist and a minimalist’s worst nightmare. I accumulate, purge, accumulate, purge. Slightly different decor each time, quality depending on my income and my commitment to that particular chunk of time and space.

These things vary significantly.

And this time, we have a baby and all the things that babies seem to need (a lot more than I wanted to admit at first).

And we’re flying from the UK, where all air carriers seem to only allow one piece of checked luggage, unlike China’s generous 2 pieces.

And since Thwack is still a lap baby and not yet occupying a seat on a plane, it looks like he doesn’t even get his own luggage allowance even though we have to pay his airfare.

So a lot will have to go. Somewhere.

We have a lot of Thwackery. Everyone we know generously donated bags and bags of new and used baby clothes and blankets and toys and cots and cribs and strollers and wraps. We also spent way too much on Amazon just kitting out the basics when we got here (cloth diapers, cloth wipes, barf cloths, bottles, pump, etc). Gorgeous people spent time and energy knitting hand made sweaters and booties and other awesome things (which won’t be abandoned).

We are replete.

Since we made the concrete decision to definitely leave the country (and it was the right decision, no matter what collie-wobbly reactions my subconscious neuroses and niggling fears of yet another unknown keep trying to provoke), I’ve been looking around our house, so newly moved into, at all the lovely homey touches that will soon enough be packed away into yet another family basement or sold on eBay or returned to whoever leant it to us, and feeling like I’ve been there a million times before.

How I feel about this imminent, familiar purge depends on my mood for the day.

Right now, I’m okay with it. Mostly.

I woke up to a much coveted job lead; I discovered that the Vietnamese have brooms stashed everywhere (hello, bodaceous brooms of Hanoi?); I stumbled upon a few very tantalizing Facebook groups for intriguing artists’ collectives and writers and similar; I studied 3 VietnamesePod lessons and was stunned to find I’d actually retained something from my previous studies earlier in the week.

Me, remembering something from a tonal language!

Imagine that.

So yes, right now I’m totally fine with chucking it all away in carefully measured haste. The end results look good. I’m not going backwards. I’m not stubbornly choosing something my gut keeps warning me about (oh, Shanghai!).

This is going to be an interesting summer.

Again (didn’t I do exactly this last summer??).