Knick-knacks will be the death of me
I just droppped off a whole station wagon’s backside full of goods at the Council for Jewish Women Thrift Shop in West Los Angeles. It’s tough for me to part with my things, even if they make me miserable. This is something I have inherited from two generations of packrat women before me (my mother and my grandmother). There is definitely a component of anxiety/mental illness to the degree to which my female relatives have let trinkets, clothes, and tchotchkes rule their lives, but that is too thorny a subject to cover here.
Considering that I have two children under six and two dogs, my house is somewhat orderly, but only as a result of constant, stressful pruning. I have my own clutter issues. Junk mail piles up, and important items like bills are buried alongside back issues of The New Yorker and invitations to consolidate my debt onto one convenient, low-interest credit card. Once I rescue The New Yorkers, they move for a long, dusty retirement next to my bed, where bits of them eventually get read at 1 a.m. My closet is a monument to all of the personalities and iterations of myself I have tried on or contemplated. My children’s closets and drawers are packed with all of the clothes that their grandmother has sent them in the last year or two, plus the products of my too-frequent shopping forays. The stuffed animals, trucks, dolls, and books from my children’s play area threaten to take over our entire house. My office is being choked with boxes of photographs and photo albums I always meant to assemble but have never had time to. I tell myself that, like my son’s eventual potty training, it will happen one of these days and then I’ll hardly remember the way it was before.
In fact, much of what I gave away today were gifts from my mother. Since I have had children, the pace of her gift-giving, which she can’t afford, has accelerated. But she was always generous to a fault and spends an inordinate amount of time choosing, storing, wrapping, packing and sending gifts for my husband, my children, and me. Unfortunately, these gifts are usually ideal for the person I was a decade or two ago. The complete works of Ray Bradbury springs to mind. Or they are not suited to me at all. Her gifts range from the slight – a knock-off of an Ab Roller, a book on asthma, a bag of salted nuts – to the heartfelt, like the many pieces of jewelry she buys me. In the last several years, I have received modest rings and earrings with acquamarine and pearls. I know that the jewelry is to adorn the teenage daughter with fine taste that my single mother could ill afford. But the nearly forty-year-old real me wishes that she would hold onto her money and buy herself some health insurance or make a few sound investments that would make her retirement less precarious.
A therapist that I saw a number of years ago told me something that helps me as I try not to succumb to my mother’s terrible clutter problem in my own home. I was having a hard time letting go of not only the many gifts she had given me over the years but also the numerous greeting cards and letters in her careful, looping script. The therapist said, “These things are NOT your mother. You are not throwing her away if you get rid of them.”
As I dropped off my bags and boxes full of clothing, unwanted tiny crystal vases, and other artifacts of what either my mother or I thinks of as the good life, a large bag ripped. I had to move quickly to rescue the folded clothing on the bottom layer from dropping onto the greasy parking lot. I grabbed the bag by the bottom and secured it in one of the empty Costco melon boxes. A jewelry box and two plastic animal figures (a white horse and a howling dog) fell out. I opened the jewelry box and was surprised to see a pair of pearl earrings with tiny diamond-like stones at the sides. I must have been in a brutally ascetic mood when I de-cluttered my house last month. I thought for a moment about how much my kids would enjoy seeing their white horse and dog again. I imagined the guilt I would feel if my mother ever asked about the pearl earrings and I could not account for them. Then I took all three and put them on the passenger seat before I dropped off the last bag at the thrift store.
