Mary Poppins, Meet the Keychain

Let me tell you a little story...

My mom had a stroke about a year and a half ago when she was 89. She is now 90. Physically, she has recovered amazingly well, but mentally, she has declined. A lot of her memories live about 15 or 20 years ago, when she was golfing, driving, going places and living a very active life. That part of that life included her big, enormous, Mary Poppins-ish purse.

As far back as I can remember, my mother always carried some version of that purse, and somehow, it always seemed to contain the same things. There was the big checkbook-sized wallet, the cinnamon Dentyne gum I remember from childhood that eventually gave way to mints, keys, lipstick, notepads, approximately 47 pens, and enough Kleenex to get a small family through an entire cold and flu season.

Honestly, I’m pretty sure there were things in that purse when I was five years old that simply migrated from purse to purse over the decades. New purse? No problem. Just dump the entire ecosystem into the new one and carry on. That purse held her life. Until it didn’t.

She doesn’t drive anymore, so she doesn’t need her keys. She can’t see well enough to handle paying for things, so I carry her credit card and take care of that for her. There’s no need for a hairbrush because most of the time I’m the one brushing her hair as we’re walking out the door, desperately trying to convince the sleep-flattened side to rejoin the rest of her hairstyle.

Little by little, all the things that once made that giant purse necessary just... aren’t necessary anymore.Yet, she still carries the purse.

It is mandatory, non-negotiable and ridiculously heavy. Way too heavy for her to carry herself, but I learned pretty quickly that convincing her to leave it at home was a battle that simply wasn’t worth fighting. So the Mary Poppins bag comes with us. It is almost never opened. Nothing inside is actually needed. But wherever Mom goes, the purse goes.

Which means that when we go somewhere, I usually end up carrying her giant purse on one arm and my own much smaller bag on the other. For a while, I tried to fight it. Why are we bringing this thing? You don’t need anything in it. We aren’t even going to open it. Good Lord, what is IN here that weighs this much?

Then one day I realized something.

That purse has always been important to her. For most of her life, it carried everything she might possibly need. It carried her life inside. Maybe now, even though she doesn’t actually need the things in it anymore, she still needs the purse. So I stopped fighting it. I carry it.

So maybe you think that’s the end of the purse story. But if you’re getting to know me a little by now, you know that’s not how my brain works. I obsess. I notice some completely insignificant little thing, and then my brain refuses to let it go until I’ve somehow turned it into a life lesson.

So I’m sitting in a restaurant one day and a woman walks by wearing a cute little crossbody bag, very similar to the one I carry. She looked about my age. I thought nothing of it until I glanced around the restaurant and realized that so many of the women around my age were carrying basically the same thing. Small crossbody bags. Just enough room for the essentials.

Huh. That’s interesting.

Then I thought about my daughter. She has this pile of keys attached to a big wrist strap with a tiny card holder holding her credit cards and driver’s license. That’s it. Her entire financial identity is just out there free-flying through the world, dangling from her wrist. No purse. No bag. Not even a Kleenex for an emergency. As the granddaughter of the Mary Poppins purse woman, it feels almost reckless.

But then something weird happened. I started looking around at girls her age and realized most of them had these huge keychains sitting on the table. No purses. Just keys, a wrist strap and a tiny card holder.

My mom’s generation carried their entire lives around in giant Mary Poppins bags. My generation downsized to the crossbody. My daughter’s generation has apparently decided, screw it, we need three credit cards, a driver’s license and a key.

Suddenly I started wondering if our purses have been shrinking with each generation for a reason. Maybe it’s not really about purses at all. Maybe it’s about what we think we need to carry with us.

My mom’s generation carried everything. They were prepared for anything. Need a tissue? She’s got you. A pen? Pick a color. Band-Aid? Probably. Safety pin? Almost certainly. Need a receipt from a department store that closed in 1997? Give her a minute, it’s in there somewhere.

My generation looked at all of that and said, yeah, we’re not carrying that much crap. We downsized. We kept the essentials, threw them into a crossbody and, most importantly, made sure our hands were free. We still want our stuff. We just don’t want to throw out a shoulder carrying it.

Then our daughters came along, looked at OUR purses and thought, why are you people carrying bags at all? They have a phone, a couple of cards and some keys. Done. If they need something else, I assume they’ll DoorDash it.

I started thinking about how funny it is that three generations of women in my family can almost be summed up by what we carry. Maybe there’s something more to see in that.

Because I think we do the same thing with life. We carry things around long after we actually need them. Old worries. Old expectations. Old hurts. Responsibilities that were never really ours to begin with. Things someone said to us 20 years ago. Guilt over things we can’t change. Rules about who we’re supposed to be that we’re not even sure we believe anymore.

We just keep transferring all of it from one version of ourselves to the next, like my mom moving the same mysterious objects from purse to purse for 60 years ( and if you think I’m exaggerating, I’m really not… she had the OBGYN’s card from when I was born in there!)  We don’t even stop to ask why we’re still carrying it. It’s just always been in the bag.

God knows I’ve carried some crap. But at 60, I think I’m finally starting to empty the bag. I’m figuring out that I don’t have to carry everyone else’s opinions of me. I don’t have to carry responsibility for other people’s choices. I don’t have to be prepared for every possible disaster that may or may not happen. I definitely don’t need to keep lugging around things from my past just because they’ve been with me for a long time. Maybe that’s one of the gifts of getting older. You finally start realizing how freaking heavy some of this stuff is.

When I look at my daughter with her little card holder dangling from her keys, I hope there’s something almost symbolic about it. I hope she continues to walk through her life that lightly. I know she’ll pick up some baggage along the way because we all do. Life has a way of handing us things we never asked to carry. But I hope she learns much earlier than I did that she doesn’t have to keep all of it. She can put things down. She can leave behind what doesn’t belong to her. She doesn’t have to spend decades carrying around other people’s expectations, mistakes, opinions or choices.

I’m not quite ready for my daughter’s free-flying, credit-cards-on-a-keychain lifestyle. Let’s not get crazy. I still need my credit card holder, lipgloss, mints, a little Kleenex, and one lonely cough drop at the bottom of my bag. I’m downsizing, not performing miracles.

Still, it’s funny how much less I feel the need to carry these days, and I don’t think I’m just talking about purses.

Maybe growing older isn’t about accumulating more. Maybe it’s about finally figuring out what you don’t need to carry anymore.

I've spent a lot of my life holding on to things, sometimes because I needed them, sometimes because I thought I might need them, and sometimes simply because they'd always been there. I'm starting to realize there's a difference. I have to say, it feels pretty good to travel a little lighter.

My mom carried her whole life in her purse. My daughter carries hers on a keychain. And somewhere in between the two of them, I’m learning to travel a little lighter.

Plot twist…I’m keeping the Kleenex. My mother raised me better than that.