Is it all junk or items for a time capsule?

Have you been holding yourself to your New Year's resolutions?

Apparently my mom has. I know this because I am once again the proud owner of three large boxes of my childhood and high school memorabilia that she recently cleaned out of her closets.

I'm 30 and have owned my own home for about four years now, but the shift in the ownership of these treasures of my youth means I'm no longer officially allowed to move back home. How sad a reality is that? My parents even repainted my old bedroom, repairing the hole I accidentally kicked in the wall while dancing to Wham.

My 27-year-old brother also was a victim. His hockey rink-themed ceiling light, a constant reminder of his hockey-playing years, has been taken down in his old bedroom, replaced with something less tacky and boxed away until he has a home of his own. Some future wife of his will love it, I'm sure.

My parents forced me to take these boxes home a few days ago. I refused at first, but my dad loaded the boxes into my car anyway. Isn't this a form of parental rejection? Besides my photographs in their albums, what other things in their home do they have to remember me by? Didn't my drawings of Santa at age 4 mean anything to them? Why wouldn't they want to keep my prom photos, elementary yearbooks and the painting I created in seventh grade of my now deceased cat and dog fighting over a bone? It was good, dang it. My 8-year-old daughter even said so.

So over the weekend I spent a few hours poring over the only belongings I have left that represent my first 18 years on this planet. It was almost as if I was drop kicked back into the '80s. I studied the pages and pages of scrapbooks I made. It was apparently important to me in eighth- and ninth-grade to document everything Madonna, Duran Duran, Menudo and other bands I liked did -- the parties they went to. Whom they dated. The new hairstyles they were wearing. Oh yeah. I was quite the '80s pop rock historian.

I discovered letters my friends wrote to me when they went on vacation, each one signed "F/F" and "B/F/F." If you grew up in the '80s you'll understand. One friend in seventh-grade wrote at length about the boy who kept "staring" at her while she was at a horse show with her aunt. This was a very big event in her life at the time. Oh yes. I'll be sending this bit of juicy mail to her and her husband this week.

At first as I waded through each box, I figured I'd just toss most everything except the photographs. But I couldn't do it. Not one single thing could I part with. How could I get rid of my third-grade poetry? Notes passed in class when the teachers weren't looking. Even my 1987 Guinness Book of World Records book held a bit of nostalgia.

So in the end, I suppose my cherished junk will end up in the back of one of my basement closets just as it had at my parent's house, a time capsule of the exciting life and times of Jodie Tweed.