As the school year draws to a close this week and next, piles of stuff keep coming home with the children. The artwork, the text books, the term papers, the special projects that took them weeks to prepare.

“Hello, garbage can,” is all I can think about when my son brings home a sculpture that’s half his size. But when he looks up, carrying this enormous monstrosity, and says to me earnestly, “Do you think I should put this in my bedroom?” I am overwhelmed with guilt. “Sure,” I say, “it will look great in your bedroom.” The one you share with your brother, that is already cluttered with last year’s projects and this year’s birthday gifts.

What are we city dwellers to do with our children’s masterpieces?

I know, I know. Get out the camera, take a picture of each creation, and put the pictures in an album and the projects in the garbage. Does anyone really do that? I, for one, cannot imagine having the time or energy.

“Sounds good,” says a friend of mine. “Sticking the damn thing in the garbage sounds better. So what if I feel momentarily guilty? I feel guilty about so many things anyway – what’s the difference if there’s one more thing?”

But throwing out your children’s artwork is a dangerous business. The trick to paring down your children’s keepsakes is to make sure you are never, ever, ever caught in the process of whittling down the treasures. If you are caught – even once – with the project in the garbage, your children will forever be suspicious of your interest in their artwork and develop a hyper vigilance regarding the safety of their creations.

I know this because, of course, I was caught red-handed by one of my sons.

“Where’s my pipe-cleaner project?” he asked innocently enough.

“I’m not sure. Check your room,” I told him. I knew exactly where it was.

Unfortunately, I happened to be doing the dinner dishes as he asked, with the garbage can open, right by my side.

Before I could implore him, once more, to check his room, he looked down into the garbage and saw the above mentioned project, covered in tomato sauce and half-eaten tortellini. Let me tell you, it was not a pretty sight. It has taken me months to live the scandal down.

I keep a file on each of my children in which I put all the things I cannot bear parting with: the first math sheet and the first story one of them wrote about our most recent family vacation. Every six months I go through the files and throw away the things now can bear to part with.

And all of my children have their own special drawers, where they can keep the treasures they cherish most. I go through these drawers as well, but with less ferocity. After all, these spaces are supposed to belong to them.

The ambivalence we parents feel as we size up our children’s creations and try to figure out what to do with them is just one part of a greater ambivalence that overwhelms us this time of year. Our calendars are dotted with plays and recitals, graduations and farewell parties. We say heartfelt goodbyes to teachers and parents, with whom we’ve shared the past few years or even decade, knowing full well that we might never really spend time together again.

And sometimes later that very same day, we go to parties hosted by the schools that will be welcoming our children in September. We put on our best faces, eager – and yet tired at the same time – to meet the new batch of parents with whom we will be sharing the next portion of our children’s lives.

In the midst of this push and pull are our children, also ambivalent about the end of the school year. For weeks now, they’ve been chafing at the bit for summer to arrive, and now that it’s finally here they are anxious about what comes next, whether it is camp, kindergarten, middle school, or high school.

There are times when we wish we could just stop the clock. Freeze the delicious 2-year-old who has just learned to speak a mile a minute. Freeze the 6-year-old, bursting with confidence. Freeze the 11-year-old, still unaware of the adolescent angst that lies around the corner. Freeze the 18-year-old, who nervously has one foot at home and one foot in her freshman dormitory.

During this time of year, we feel the desire to literally capture and hold on to our children’s development more than at any other time. At those recitals and plays and final baseball matches, we can hardly believe how much our children have grown. Which is really, I think, what the ambivalence surrounding the sculptures and term papers and special projects is all about. These masterpieces are a concrete way in which we can mark our children’s progress.

Which isn’t to say you should hold on to the monstrous art projects. Go ahead and throw them out. Just make sure your children aren’t looking.