We’ve moved into a new place – and an attic’s worth of clutter has come to light | parents and parenting

We’re in that stage of the move where we’re enjoying the new space but wish it wasn’t littered with boxes. Navigating the place still feels a bit like writing with my left hand, and I haven’t reached for the right cupboard in 10 days. We were in our last flat four years and it was only last week that I realized where the pizza cutter went. It’s lost now, as are several very important objects, documents and wires which I can remember putting somewhere, but might as well have thrown directly into the sun.

There’s something fantastically, almost ecstatically, frustrating about knowing everything I own is here in front of me, and yet discover that your mental Rolodex only extends to the last eight things you touched. Why did I think that I, a man who routinely forgets what day of the week it is, and twice last year used the light on his phone to help him find his phone, would suddenly have the visual memory of a savant when it comes to the vast clutter that encompasses his life?

And what a clutter. I tried to be ruthless. One thing that’s truly hard, even hurtful, about moving is all the shallow, stupid lies it reveals about your person – the things you’ve hidden away, tucked into whatever crevices and crannies the space affords, over the years. Our small flat didn’t have much storage space, but it did have an attic, which I hated. Crawling through its tight spaces last week, I felt like I was wrestling a bear made from fiberglass insulation and cobwebs.

I thought this revulsion for the space had made me avoid the attic, but on clearing it out, I discovered I’d put 80% of the objects I’ve ever touched within its claggy, close environments. I’d told myself it was just a handy place to put a few bits and bobs, but I now realize it was a gaping cave of denial. Mountains of baby clothes in vacuum-sealed bags long since exploded, spilled bibs and mittens everywhere. Suitcases, broken prams, standing fans, lamps, objects which were surely larger than the attic itself, were thrown to the landing below, and in such mass that when I descended for air I found the pile of disjecta reached to the fourth rung of its rickety ladder.

The day after our move, we were saved by my sister Maeve, who took our son for the day so that we could get the place ship shape, and he could follow Ardal and Nora around their house, gawping at his elder (four and six respectively) cousins ​​with delight.

He’d spent the first hour in their house ferrying furniture from one Sylvanian Family cottage to another in a toy truck, rather putting the lie to our belief he’d not being paying any attention to the ordeal we were making out of what had been , to be honest, a mostly happy move.

When we went to pick him up, he grabbed the two houses he’d been playing with, so he could bring them home ‘to move house’. We laughed, he burst into exhausted tears, and we did our best to console him. It has, indeed, been a moving experience for us all.

Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78

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