Do I Need More Clothes?

Sure do! I want the shoes, that kitchen, the cute sweater and robot children who follow me with blind obedience and poop out contained pellets that can be planted to grow jelly bean bushes. I won’t apologize for this. I like to dress up, I appreciate a great living space, and I could always use more jelly beans.

I went to church the other weekend and I admired (creepily from afar) another mom’s cute sweater and blouse. I made a mental shopping list to acquire these items.

Then I came home and started going through my closet to pick out my 30 items, thinking it would be so hard to narrow it down.

I tried on clothes, laid out the items I knew I wanted for sure and counted them. I had room for more.

In total I added 16 shirts I knew I would enjoy wearing, not including sweaters. I pulled out my iPhone calculator to determine that I can, on average, wear each shirt twice this month. Again not including sweaters or accounting for the square root of two tank tops.  #mathpro

Yet, I still had more shirts in my closet. Ones I had tried on, assessed in the change room mirrors, rang up at the till and brought home to hang in my closet. I wasn’t even wearing all I had and I still was planning for more!

This exercise in selecting my 30 picks was a visual lesson in having too much. Also a little lecture to my heart that I have more than enough and I can’t keep carrying the weight of these mental shopping lists of things I don’t really need. Even though I totally loved the look of cute church mom, I need to leave it at that. Because, in this case, buying more means I am being less.

So here is one reason I am doing the 30for30.  To simplify by having less and not more.

Now that I am done swelling and shrinking with childbearing, I can start to make permanent decisions in what gets a home in my closet and what gets passed on. I won’t waste the time to solve for X, but I’ll just guestimate it is statistically impossible for me to wear all of the clothes I have now at a rate that makes them worth holding on to.

I hope this will be one step in the long journey to having less ‘stuff’.

How about you? Where do you think you simplify your life by the act of purging or paring down?

Follow me and my co-hosts on Instagram for this season’s #moms30for30