You're probably asking yourself: isn't she 13?
Yes, she is. Actually, she will be 14 next month. And yes, sometimes I still have to purge her room of all the things that make her a prime candidate for an episode of Hoarders.
When she was younger - because I never really lived with her when she was little, just younger - and after she came to live with us full-time, I would clean her room about every other month or so. Somewhere towards the end of that six week time period I could no longer live with the tiny bits of paper on her floor or the piles of dis-robed Barbies or the 824 Littlest Pets that were living in every nook and cranny in her room. When I was working full-time, we'd all pitch in and clean the apartment on Saturday - Uriah and Abby did their parts while I worked Saturday morning, and then I got my chores done Saturday afternoon while Uriah worked, sometimes enlisting Abby's help, depending on what she'd done with Uriah in the morning. Usually her task was to clean her room, because for the most part, she contained her scatter to her own room.
We lived in a small apartment, which I love to this day, and even though we haven't lived there for years I still sometimes get homesick for our first little nest. The three of us were crammed together in two bedrooms, one bathroom, a living room, and a kitchen not much bigger than a closet, and I'm sure I would have lost my mind a million times if her mess was everywhere. It still managed to trickle its way down the hall and onto the kitchen table or into the living room, but she learned that those messes in the "common areas" had to be cleaned up before she moved on to something new. She could usually get by for a few days by telling me that she had a game going with her Polly Pockets or Littlest Pets and that was the reason for the urban sprawl on her bedroom floor. And I usually let her get away with it for a few days. But at some point, she needed to clean up her room (usually by Saturday afternoon), and that usually involved her shoving all manner of papers, pencils, markers, books, toys, broken crayons, and dolls into her closet, into toy bins, and under her bed. I think her goal was to shove her stuff anywhere she could get it out of my sight, but still hang to each and every small scrap of paper, nub of crayon, dried out marker.
There always came a breaking point, usually when I'd open her closet only to be bombarded by the most awful smell and an avalanche of crumpled paper pieces and all-around junk. That's when the big black garbage bags came out and purging began the crying started. She would sit in the doorway and sob over every little piece of paper, every broken game piece, every item of clothing she had out-grown.
It took a few years for me to really wrap my mind around why she holds onto things with such a tight fist. When she came to live with us, the decision was immediate. There was no taking her back to her Illinois home and packing a suitcase or her toys; she got in our car and we drove to Kansas City. She was wearing a pink and orange dress and sandals and I hung that dress in the back of her closet and she never wore it again. Of course, when we got to our apartment, she had her "Kansas City clothes" and her "Kansas City toys," but up until that point those were kind of like special things because she didn't get to play with them that often - really only twice a month. The clothes weren't her regular clothes - her "Illinois clothes," and the toys weren't the ones she'd grown up playing with and had to leave behind. It was a long time before we got a box with any of her belonging. She was so happy when that box finally, finally came years later, I think she had anticipated something like that coming for her for so long, but I could tell she was disappointed when she opened it; she'd outgrown everything in the box and I think the feelings she had about that stuff were mixed. Good memories and bad memories equally wrapped up in Barbie clothes and books and smells from a past life. While she was an every-other-weekend kid, we'd refer to her "Kansas City home" and her "Illinois home," two completely different lives that she'd had to balance between. It took years before we were able to stop differentiating between the two and when she talked about "home," we knew she was referring to us.
So when I was cleaning her room and throwing away garbage bags of paper pieces and crayon nubs and pencil shavings; as I loaded up bags with outgrown t-shirts and shorts that will not fit next summer, I had to breathe deeply and remind myself how far we've come. The stuff in her room? It's just her stuff and most of the junk is there because she's a teenager and she can be really, really lazy (What? Take that piece of paper to the garbage can all the way across the room? Nah, I'll just shove it here, under my bed.). And while she's certainly no longer worried about being pulled from the life that she has, old habits die hard and she still hangs onto things - because then she can say she has something from when she was little (which, for all intents and purposes, is 4th grade). I know it pains her a bit when she asks what her first words were or when she learned to walk. I don't have those answers. But I can tell her that she's been head-strong for as long as I've known her. I can repeat the "I am an American and I have rights" story until we are crying from laughing so hard. It's funny now, and I can see so much of her strong personality already bubbling up when I look back on her childhood with us - short as it has been. (For the record: I was not laughing when she asserted her "independence" not long after moving in with us and that was her argument for not having to listen to me).
She's well-adjusted. She has plans for the future and when she talks about where she'll spend her holidays when she's in college (less than 4 years from now), I have no doubt that she'll come home. I will even help her clean out her dorm room at the end of her freshman year. It will probably require lots of big black garbage bags and that's okay.
Certainly not the oldest picture I have of Abby, but pretty close. The first Christmas cards we sent out as an every-other-weekend family, November 2007:
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