Hoarding

Laura over at Pick Me! posted about hoard­ing today. I started to respond but it got so long that I decided to make it a post instead of a comment.

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I grew up with a hoarder and I couldn’t stand it! I was always embar­rassed to have my friends over. I wasn’t allowed to throw pop­si­cle sticks or plas­tic spoons away. Not only couldn’t we throw spoons away, my mom would actu­ally bring home her used plas­tic spoons from restau­rants. We had a whole drawer full of plas­tic spoons. We had 5 boxes full of rock salt filled with rab­bit pelts that my mom was going to make into mit­tens someday.

I car­ried those 5 50 pound boxes in two dif­fer­ent moves. I was opposed to them killing the rab­bits I raised, opposed to sav­ing ridicu­lous things we were never going to use, and opposed to the hard, mean­ing­less labor of car­ry­ing the boxes. Grrr… (Hey, I just thought of some­thing I could say in groups when the leader says to intro­duce your­self and tell peo­ple a fact about your­self that would sur­prise them!) We had a whole bunch of USED tooth­brushes. I threw some of these away once and my mom got very upset with me.

If I lived in my child­hood home now it would be fun to do a photo jour­nal of all the strange stuff that we had. Very out of date med­i­cine, old jars of canned toma­toes, piles of fab­ric, boxes of old game and puz­zle pieces, clos­ets full of old clothes, cor­ners crammed with dead rel­a­tives fur­ni­ture, one room just FULL of paper– lit­er­ally piled to the ceil­ing with paper, includ­ing piles of char­ity solic­i­ta­tions with free address labels. My mom would keep all the paper work in case she wanted to use the free address labels or free cards they sent. Then she would send them money before she used them.

When I lived with my mom for a cou­ple years as an adult, I made a deal with her that I wouldn’t touch the base­ment if the upstairs could stay clean. When I got par­tic­u­larly frus­trated, I would throw every­thing that I thought was clut­ter over the ban­is­ter down the stairs. (Don’t try this at home.)

I’ve read that hoard­ing is a reac­tion to loss and the hoard­ers in my fam­ily did have a lot of loss. It adds cre­dence to the the­ory that when my mom got remar­ried she got rid of at least 2/3 of her stuff. It was amaz­ing. It was like she was com­ing alive again and break­ing out of some old tomb and throw­ing off the shack­les of the paper and the unmatched game pieces! In reverse, my aun­tie, who I love, has become more and more ensconced in things since her hus­band died.

I love get­ting rid of things if I know they’ll have a good home. I take car loads and car loads of things to thrift stores. (I don’t shop much so I don’t know how I end up with car­loads of things to get rid of.) I live in an apart­ment with­out much stor­age space, so when I dec­o­rated for Christ­mas, I just bought strings of lights at a thrift store for 50 cents and took them back after the hol­i­days! And I love that no new things have to be man­u­fac­tured when I buy them from a thrift store.

I keep things that are beau­ti­ful, use­ful, and/or hap­pily sen­ti­men­tal. I love that I have dis­tilled the objects around me so that every­thing I see in my room is some­thing I love. (My room­mate is a min­i­mal­ist and prob­a­bly thinks I’m a hoarder, so it’s some­what relative.)

I did learn some good things from my mom’s hoard­ing behav­ior. I learned that ran­dom bits of junk can be use­ful in art projects. I think that thrifti­ness and ecol­ogy was tied into my mom’s hoard­ing behav­ior. She wanted to use every­thing and every­thing has a pos­si­ble use. It’s like recy­cling. It’s impor­tant to me to recy­cle. I love com­post­ing although I don’t com­post right now. (no yard).

I also would never throw use­ful things in the garbage that some­one else could use. I’ve seen other peo­ple throw per­fectly good CLOTHES into the garbage. GASP! No way. Some­one could use that!! So, maybe the basic premise of the hoarder has been passed onto me, I just don’t feel the need to store the objects in my space when there are per­fectly good libraries and thrift stores to do that job for me.

* Some of the flow­ers I bought myself with the flower money my mom sent me this Valentine’s Day with prob­a­bly my favorite col­lage I’ve made n the back­ground. Made at my mother’s house it is com­prised of a bot­tle of glue I was going to use as glue, it was dried out though, so I cut it open and taped the glue and glue bot­tle to the col­lage, which I put in an old frame we had lying around.

Tags: hoard­ing, mom, fam­ily, thrift, recy­cling, grief