The moving truck is gone. The keys are with the new owners. And somewhere in a house in west Kerry, a parent is staring at a mountain of children’s clothing she never asked for.
This is the real story of moving house with small kids. Not the furniture.
Not the boxes of kitchenware. It is the clothes. Bags upon bags of them, donated by well-meaning friends and family.
What looked like generosity at first has become a problem that followed her from one house to the next. “A lot of our problems have been rooted in people giving us bags upon bags of clothes for the kids,” she wrote.
“At first, I thought this was pure generosity of spirit on their part but, after being confronted with a clothing mountain…” She did not finish the sentence. The mountain is still there. The move itself was brutal.
Two children she calls “rapscallions” were no help. Their tiny spines are useless for carrying televisions. They are more hindrance than help.
At their happiest swinging from bedpost to bedpost, they have already destroyed several lamps. “We have lost so many lamps in the WWF antics that, in our new house, we will most likely be sitting in darkness for the next five years,” she wrote.
She clarified: the wildlife federation, not the wrestling organisation. Finding someone to watch the kids while you dive into the work is another problem entirely. The logistics are unforgiving.
Then came the heatwave. Wrestling a flat-screen TV into the car, she briefly considered abandoning it by the roadside.
A television-free existence sounded tempting. What stopped her was the grim prospect of a west Kerry November Saturday — “weeping in a rainstorm.” She kept the TV. The real shame came later.
The clothing mountain did not shrink. It moved with them. What happened here is a story many parents will recognise.
It is not about the move itself. It is about the stuff that accumulates before you have a chance to say no. The bags of clothes arrive with good intentions.
They pile up. You cannot throw them away because someone gave them to you. You cannot store them because there is no space.
You cannot give them back because that would be rude. So you pack them.
You move them. You unpack them. The mountain follows you.
Why did this happen? Because no one tells you that the generosity of others can become a burden. The writer learned this the hard way.
She now knows that a clothing mountain does not disappear because you change addresses. It just gets a new room.
What now? The new house is ready. The boxes are inside.
The lamps are broken. The darkness is coming.
But the real work is not unpacking the kitchenware or hanging the pictures. It is confronting that mountain. It is deciding what stays and what goes.
It is learning to say no to the next bag of clothes before it arrives. The moving saga is a familiar tale of domestic chaos, amplified by the presence of small children. The furniture fits.
The boxes are labelled. But the clothing mountain remains.
It is the one thing that cannot be left behind. It is the one thing that will not be decluttered. And in the new house, it waits.
Unpacked. Unwanted.
Unavoidable.
