We had parent-teacher conferences last week. I used to get kind of nervous for these things—are my kids doing OK in school? Are they sharing embarrassing personal information from home? Are they as messy in school as they are in their bedroom?

I no longer get nervous. The answer to all of these questions, particularly the last one, is yes. (Yesterday, Lucy got called back after the last bell to attend to the ring of debris that always orbits her desk. She’s practically her own solar system.)

But I do sort of dread one aspect of these things: the huge pile of your kids’ work that you have to take home.

Part of me feels like I should keep it all. The other part of me knows that every nook and cranny in our house is full of artwork, half-written stories, and assorted announcements the kids have posted on doors and walls.

For example: THIS IS THE KIDS OFFICE NOW. KEEP OUT, PARENTS. This becomes more comical when you know it’s posted outside my closet and refers to the space below the bottom shelf and underneath the slant of the attic steps. It is approximately the size of a microwave, and they’ve filled it with pillows, flashlights and snack foods. Entire days have been spent inside this little child cave, so they must be working on something.

Anyway, school is not the only source of kid memorabilia that you wrestle with when you’re a parent. It starts when they’re born and they attach the tiny, plastic ID bracelet around your kid’s wrist. You have to keep that! Your names are on it—together! It lists the baby’s weight and length, as well as the all-important birth date!  And if you’re the mama, you got a matching one in a larger size!

Over the years, other stuff piles up. Scribblings, then drawings, then notes, then baby teeth. My sock drawer is an anthropologist’s dream. I can see the field notes now:

This was, we believe, a savage civilization. Note how the mothers stored baby teeth and nearly illegible notes by the dozens in the very same, small wooden compartments in which they store their ritual undergarments.

We guess they used these teeth as tokens of their fierceness. The notes, meanwhile, are more difficult to interpret. I LOV YOU MOMO ... perhaps this MOMO was some sort of primitive god. Meanwhile, to “LOV” was clearly some form of worship, perhaps combined with child sacrifice practices so gruesome, only the milk teeth remain.

Either that, or this particular human was a serial killer with hoarding tendencies.

It’s probably really gross that I have so many baby teeth rattling around, but it feels wrong to throw them out. And at least it’s not quite as macabre as the ashes of my dog and cat, which I also can’t bring myself to disperse.

I also don’t know what to do about all the notes: to the tooth fairy, to me, to the Easter bunny, to the house gnome. I have stacks and stacks of them. They are adorable individually. Collectively, they are, perhaps, a fire hazard.

And then there are the sentimental items of clothing. I have a pair of blue sneakers Lucy wore when she was a baby and had no need for blue sneakers. And I have the gold shoes Alice picked out at a sidewalk sale when she was three and wore every single day until they were scuffed and dull but shaped exactly like her tiny, tiny feet.

I have necklaces they’ve made me, strings and strings of mismatched beads. I have clay holiday pins shaped like pumpkins, hearts, and clovers that, when observed carefully, reveal the tiny fingerprints of their makers. The cupboard is also full of oversized coffee mugs with their baby handprints.

I also have boxes and boxes of their artwork. At one point it was organized by child and by year, but Lucy and Alice were curious about it and unpacked the boxes and now, well, everything is sort of a mess.

It’s not just the stuff that the kids generate, either. I’ve taken thousands of photos. We have quite a bit of video footage, too—almost all unsorted.

And for a solid month in 2008, Adam did a nightly sketch of the girls sleeping. It was all part of an experiment to see if they ever managed to tangle up together in the same way twice. They did not. And now I have a permanent record of the fact that on one night in October, 2008, Alice slept with her leg across Lucy’s neck.

Something has to give. And, after the conference, I did realize what that something was. I spread Lucy and Alice’s work out on the coffee table. Since Lucy’s older, there was a stack of tests and worksheets, all with her grades on top. Even though they were better than I thought they’d be, it was still easy to let them go.

But the stories she’s written and the letter journal we’ve shared? Those will be keepers at the end of the year when they come home. Same with the books Alice is making—I especially liked the one where a whole series of characters juggle assorted objects. On the last page is an unidentifiable creature lying on the ground, surrounded by balls. It says, MISTACK! (Translation: mistake!) Both Alice and I found this hilarious.

The stuff I love best about my kids isn’t their achievements, although I certainly spend a lot of time hoping they’ll have them. Rather, it’s the stuff that shows their individuality. Their humor, their hopes and dreams, the stuff that scares them, and the stuff they believe in.

I think this is true about all of us. The public spaces of our lives might be full of statues and monuments to achievement. But it’s the private spaces--the proverbial sock drawers--that tend to mean the most, even if it’s only to one or two people.

We can’t hold onto to the children, but we can hang on to the things they’ve shed growing up: teeth, locks of hair, shabby shoes, soulful drawings.

These things might never become part of a public anthropological record, but they’re part of a private one that reveals just as much about the layers of our hearts, how we’ve lived, and the little things about our kids we’ve loved in the biggest way possible.