Lessons From a Hoarder: I learned from what she did and the lack of what she said
My mother used to tape a silver dollar above the front door frame of every home we lived in and on New Year’s Day she would go to great lengths to be certain that the first person to enter our home was an adult male who didn’t reside within. It’s been so long now that I can’t recall the particular superstitions that led to these actions. Surely the coin pointed towards money and the man towards luck or romance, but neither seemed to work as my mother remained single through my childhood struggling to make ends meet and wanting. Always wanting.
She filled our lives with romantic hopes and ideas and filled our home (whichever apartment or house we were renting at the time) with ceramics, dishes, books and untended mountains of pure junk. She purchased and never purged. Flea markets, thrift stores, yard sales. They fed her wants, but never satisfied the hunger.
As a family we were poor, but her childhood was impoverished. An alcoholic father who gambled and drank his paychecks. Her mother, a strong and practical woman, tended and fed six children. My mother, the oldest, spoke of secondhand clothing with mismatched socks and worn, ugly shoes. She tried to fit in with her brother and his best friend but was ignored or teased as boys are apt to do in those early years.
I suppose in her teens she discovered that her beauty and desires for attention could draw the boys to her in ways her brother and friend had been immune to. She desperately wanted and needed love and attention to fill her empty heart and sadly never seemed to find it.
An affair ridden marriage to an emotionally abusive husband and physically abusive father ended in divorce when I was four, the youngest of five kids. She later entered another long-term relationship that would leave her just as empty inside. So, her junk collecting got worse. Where she would occasionally bleach and clean in my childhood, later seemed to give way to never cleaning or sorting in her later years. After her death, when we cleaned out her home, there were trails through piles of junk and discarded items and a reminder on the refrigerator door to “Go To Junk Store.”
If she had known for what she sought, would her choices have been any different? She had this idealistic view of superstition and romance, as if the wanting for riches and happiness would bring them to her. Yet her choices never seemed to support the dreams she imagined. It’s like she banked on this magical thinking that one day this or someday that would come true. All her hopes pinned upon happenstance or chance. Meanwhile, her daily life remained sedentary and unchanged.
How does one win the lottery without playing? Gain without risking? Achieve without going the extra mile? She worked full-time my entire childhood, never calling in sick or taking unnecessary time off. She once cut her finger during a shift. She drove herself to the emergency room for stitches and then went back to work to finish her workday. She was a hard worker. Why then was she never able to achieve any of her dreams or ideals?
She hailed the underdog and bristled at those she thought were unjustifiably advantaged. I never heard her speak of the hard work anyone in a position of power or luxury must have exerted to achieve their status. There were never any lessons on how to be what you wanted because she seemed to believe that you either were or you weren’t — rich, poor, good, bad, lucky or not. But the lack of explicit lessons taught me exactly the opposite.
That if you are lazy, nothing will change.
If you give you will get.
That magical thinking can be fun, but you must do to be.
We live in an if/then world. If you x, then y will follow, or z, or maybe, unexpectedly, q. But first you must x and x is almost always your choice.
My mother passed away more than ten years ago and it saddens me now to think how her life could have been different. She was creative, intelligent, and charming but those things were hard to see through her negativity and self-absorption. Now that it is too late, I can see that those were the mask of her sadness and that her hoarding was an outward reflection for what she was missing on the inside. I wish I could go back to teach her what I had learned.
