Yesterday I stood in our dusty attic, sunlight streaming through the small window, illuminating particles floating in the air like tiny memories suspended in time.
The floorboards creaked under my feet as I watched Matt pull out another cardboard box, its corners soft from years of storage. Inside were stacks of construction paper turkeys, handprint rainbows, and those wobbly first attempts at writing our daughter’s name.
The musty smell of old tempera paint and dried glue filled my nose, and suddenly I was back in our kitchen three years ago, wiping purple handprints off the table while my toddler giggled.
Matt’s words were gentle but practical: We can’t take all of this to the new house. And he’s right. Of course he’s right. But as I held a crumpled Mother’s Day card with “I LOV YU MOMY” scrawled in green crayon, my chest tightened.
Every box we leave behind feels like another piece of evidence that those years actually happened.
The weight of paper memories
Have you ever noticed how children’s artwork weighs almost nothing individually, but collectively becomes this immovable force in your life?
One painting becomes ten, becomes fifty, becomes boxes upon boxes in the attic. Our art corner downstairs, with its low table and supplies stored in old jam jars, produces new creations daily.
My five-year-old brings home folders stuffed with worksheets, drawings of our family where everyone has stick arms but somehow perfect emotional expressions, and those classic handprint crafts that every kindergarten teacher seems contractually obligated to make.
I started out saving everything. The first scribble. The first time she drew a circle and called it “Mama.”
The construction paper chain from her first week of preschool. But somewhere between child one and child two, between moves and life changes, the storage became overwhelming.
Yet each piece tells a story. That painted rock from when we spent an entire afternoon in the backyard, searching for the perfect stones to transform into ladybugs.
The tissue paper flower that took her forty-five minutes of intense concentration, tongue sticking out the whole time. These aren’t just crafts. They’re artifacts of development, snapshots of who my children were becoming.
What we keep becomes who we remember
Standing in that attic, I realized I’ve been treating these boxes like insurance against forgetting. As if without that macaroni necklace, I might not remember the afternoon my daughter spent carefully threading each piece, narrating an elaborate story about pasta princesses.
As if without the stack of coloring pages, I might forget the phase when everything had to be colored purple, even the sun.
But here’s what surprised me: As I sorted through years of accumulated artwork, I found myself remembering moments I hadn’t thought about in ages, even without physical prompts.
The time my two-year-old got into the finger paints while I was answering the door and created a masterpiece on himself instead of paper.
The collaborative collage table project where everyone in the family added something each day for a month, resulting in this chaotic, beautiful mess that perfectly captured our life that summer.
The physical pieces are triggers, sure. But the memories exist independently. They live in the way my daughter still narrates everything she does, just like she did with that pasta necklace.
They show up when my son builds his couch cushion forts with the same determined focus he once applied to stacking blocks.
Making peace with letting go
So how do you choose? How do you decide which finger painting represents an entire year of finger paintings? Which handprint craft stands in for all the others?
I’ve started photographing everything before making decisions. Not perfect catalog photos, just quick snapshots that capture the essence. Then I sit with the actual pieces and ask myself different questions.
Does this one show something unique about that developmental stage? Does it make me laugh? Does it capture their personality in a way that feels essential?
Some choices are easy. The family portrait where everyone is basically a blob but she carefully added our cat? That stays. The fifteenth worksheet of tracing the letter A? That can go. But most fall somewhere in between, and that’s where the ache lives.
I’ve found that involving the kids helps, when they’re old enough. My five-year-old loves looking through her old artwork, telling me stories about pieces I don’t even remember.
She’ll say things like “Oh, this is from when I was little and thought clouds were made of cotton!” She’s remarkably pragmatic about what to keep, often more so than I am.
The art of active remembering
What if instead of keeping everything, we found new ways to honor these memories? We’ve started creating photo books of artwork, one for each year.
The kids help choose which pieces to include. We write little notes about why each one matters. This process itself becomes a memory-making activity, a chance to revisit and celebrate their growth together.
Our walls have become rotating galleries. Instead of storing everything in boxes, we display current favorites alongside a few classics. The fridge features this week’s creations, while the hallway showcases “greatest hits” from previous years.
When visitors comment on the artwork, my daughter beams and launches into the story behind each piece. The art lives and breathes this way, instead of sitting forgotten in a box.
We’ve also started repurposing some pieces. Old paintings become wrapping paper for grandparent gifts. Particularly beloved drawings get scanned and printed on cards.
A collection of nature collages became the cover for a family recipe book. The artwork continues its life in new forms, useful and visible instead of archived and forgotten.
Finding freedom in imperfection
Moving forces these reckonings. It asks us to evaluate what we carry forward and what we release. And maybe that’s not entirely bad. Maybe there’s something healthy about periodically examining what we’re holding onto and why.
I’m learning that keeping every single piece doesn’t make me a better parent. It doesn’t prove I valued every moment. In fact, sometimes the boxes became a burden, a source of guilt every time I glimpsed them in the attic. “I should organize those,” I’d think. “I should make proper scrapbooks.”
But I never did, and so they sat, these boxes of good intentions.
The memories that matter will survive without every piece of evidence. They live in the way my daughter still collects leaves and sorts them by size, just like her first nature collection at age three.
They show up in my son’s careful concentration as he builds, that same furrow in his brow from when he was learning to stack rings as a baby.
Closing thoughts
As we prepare for this move, I’m keeping one box. Not twenty. One carefully curated box per child, with pieces that span their years so far.
The Mother’s Day card with the backwards letters. The first family portrait. The collaborative pieces where their little hands worked alongside ours. A few surprises that made us laugh. Some pieces that show their emerging interests and personalities.
The rest? I’m photographing them, thanking them for their service, and letting them go. Because what I’m really trying to preserve isn’t paper and glue.
It’s the feeling of those small hands working beside mine at our art table. It’s the pride in their voices when they explain their creations. It’s the evidence that we were here, creating together, making something from nothing on a random Tuesday afternoon.
Those things can’t be boxed or lost in a move. They’re built into who my children are becoming, layered into our family story like paint on a canvas.
And unlike construction paper, those memories won’t yellow or crumble. They’ll grow richer with time, even without the boxes to prove they happened.
