A Load of Junk

Let me start this off by saying that I am so glad I learned long ago to scream into a pillow to relieve stress. Ironically enough, I think I learned that from my mother.

On the de-cluttering front, we have actually been making a lot of progress. I called 1-800-GOT-JUNK and two guys came with a truck yesterday to pick up a number of large furniture items that were crowding my bedroom (a big desk, a smaller table, and even my bed). I got the idea from - naturally - Hoarders. The company charges a fee based on how much of their truck you fill up, and we paid about $200. Or rather, my mother paid. This was a point of contention that led to an unfortunate series of disagreements over the past few days.

I'll make a long story very short by saying that, after several days of stressful behavior on my mother's part - although I concede that she's not seriously affected overall, she has a few major emotional problems and issues with people - my mother made the questionable decision of allowing the junk haulers to come earlier than planned while I was away at my grandfather's house. I had expected to be home in time, but while I was at my grandpa's, she took it upon herself to (unnecessarily) disassemble all our stuff and put it out on the deck for the guys to collect, which we had not agreed on, and then let them come early because they didn't have any other pickups. She also paid them, even though I had insisted I would pay for it. Then, when I came home, she accosted me and played the victim, having done so much work, and insinuated that I was to blame for her overworking herself and doling out the money.

Although we've already had our argument and I've screamed into my pillow, I'm finding that as I write this I'm getting more and more angry with her behavior. I simply cannot understand the logic of her brain or her actions, and to me, the argument we had tonight was convoluted and only succeeded in showing me that we do not have compatible personalities or beliefs about how to conduct our everyday lives. If this were a random college dorm assignment, I would request a transfer, because her passive-aggressive, borderline psychotic behavior are hard for me to deal with, even after living with some pretty crazy characters in college.

I felt so relieved in getting rid of our junk yesterday and, yes, grateful that she dealt with it in my place, but her self-righteousness is not justified in my mind, and her excessively antagonistic attitude is ruining my own sense of accomplishment.

The Clutter Savior

Today our clutter savior made a visit!

We arranged for her to come for a four-hour stretch bright and early this morning - starting at 9:30. We got right down to business, and although I have to leave two hours in to go babysit, we made a lot of progress in the first half, and as I saw later, even more in the second half. I've found myself gazing around our living room tonight (the starting point and only room we worked on today) with wild technicolor dreams of how it will look when it's complete.

The bookshelves will no longer stand at awkward, claustrophobia-inducing angles so as to block all natural light! Our couches will seat friends and admirers! The sliding glass doors will gleamingly welcome my book and sun hat fantasies onto the balcony!

Things are at a strange in-between stage, because as our organizer said, things have to get worse before they get better. Her basic takeaway tip for today was that you must de-clutter first, and then rearrange things in your newfound space once you have cleared it out. It's simple enough, and I think it's a good principle for us. Everything she helped us do today was common sense, and nothing we couldn't do on our own. But something showed me that it really helps to a) have a dedicated chunk of time to buckle down and de-clutter, b) feel that a stern but friendly Slavic woman is pressuring you to de-clutter, and c) basically have an authoritative, third-party figure help you figure out what you should and shouldn't keep. It's really gotten to the point where that's what we need.

She was the voice of reason today, helping us sacrifice the many duplicates of silly things we have but also conceding that some of the things we own could be kept. I think today was a good investment, and the results show just how much we needed that outside help. The next step before we can continue de-cluttering is to drive all our "donate" and "electronic recycling" bags to Goodwill and the e-cycling place. That we can do as soon as the rearview mirror in our car is fixed... After a wander around Berkeley with friends yesterday, I returned to the car to find the mirror detached from the windshield,  dangling down pathetically. Weird and scary to drive back on I-24 unable to easily glance behind me! The car's at the shop now for some TLC, poor thing.

Sacrificing the Cake

I'm afraid I've lost too much of my sentimentality in my four years of college. Maybe it was the constant packing-up of my life each summer and changing homes again each fall. Maybe it's the fact that I never practiced homesickness and missing people because I kept in touch with my family and friends through Skype and Facebook. Or maybe it was living in New York, where so much more than simple sentiment demanded my attention, and growing into an adult meant learning to take life's hard parts with a stony exterior.

I hardly think my transition into adulthood is complete. College life, with its insignificant tests and grades and ignorance of most things financial, should never be mistaken for real life. Still, I have noticed my own shift toward (or increase in?) stoicism, especially when choosing what to throw out while cleaning. I choose to be unfeeling where sometimes my mom can't (or perhaps couldn't, since under my influence and her own will her sentimentality has now started hardening too). After that first summer of de-cluttering in 2008, it became clear that we didn't have enough physical space to afford being sentimental with our possessions. Even the smallest reminders of my childhood continue to be tossed in the "recycle" pile - endearing drawings of "parnsass jazmin" from Aladdin, countless adorable art projects, knickknacks formerly treasured for some nostalgic value...

I do worry that thirty or fifty years from now, I will regret erasing the things that I'm sure I would have loved to rediscover as an old lady with a family and grandchildren (?!). I've already let them soak in a closet of memories and enjoyed finding them as forgotten treasures at 21, so imagine the warm and fuzzy feeling of nostalgia matured for a few more decades. If a twenty-something smiles fondly at precious childhood misspellings and past obsessions (pages and pages of X-Men stick figures and Ninja Turtles with pizzas, anyone?) I'm sure a forty-something should at least tear up a little. And honestly, who doesn't relish that nostalgic misty feeling?

In fact, I think there is a fine line between the sentimentality and nostalgia of a "normal" person and a hoarder. We always cherish the good times of our past when we think about them. I will admit to even revisiting activities and environments of my past to recreate that comfort zone, reading old favorite books and personal journals or reminiscing with friends to bring myself back. Having physical symbols of that old comfort zone we can keep forever can feel incredibly fulfilling. We attach a lot to mementos, and I have seen firsthand how hard it can be to toss things like drawings from our grade school selves; they can seem like gifts from our past to our present, and discarding a gift can be a hugely symbolic act.

It's difficult and inadvisable to choose between one extreme (saving everything) and the other (discarding everything). I'm grateful that today we have so many alternatives that let us have our cake and eat it too; we can store memories digitally through photos or words while keeping the clutter down. I think even writing words that aren't directly about the things I've let go, words that instead record my emotional processing of the things, can work. Lifehacker did a step-by-step guide to sorting through memorabilia yesterday. For our family's purposes, I think sacrificing tangible souvenirs is the only way we'll get anywhere.

But I'll still have my cake. Just in another form.

Where Credit Is Due

This afternoon I called a local professional organizer, the most affordable one I saw online, but she seems to still be on Memorial Day vacation (?), so I left a voicemail and I'm crossing my fingers that she helps us out.

In cleaning out our hall closet today, and receiving input from my mother, I realized that I may judge her too harshly. This may be a natural result of my years-long, mutually critical relationship with her. But I really have to hand it to her now - today I expected her to fight against donating an old tennis racket and outdated clothes, but she made some very rational decisions and did not resist the way I was afraid she would. Not at all like someone who is "psychologically affected," and certainly not like some of the very difficult parents I saw on last night's Hoarders.

I think my mother is smarter than I give her credit for (that to my own discredit). She has tried very hard to combat the compulsion to hoard, which is obviously a difficult psychological task. I am fairly confident that, once we clear out what needs to be cleared out, she will be capable of keeping things that way, because from what I have seen in cleaning up, the clutter in our home is rarely new acquisitions. Most of it is relics of the past: in the hall closet I found a large box of my mother's school things - papers, notes, projects and drawings - preserved since the 1970s! She'll have to go through that; it's not my right.

I am fairly sure that new clutter in our apartment is the minority, and that part of the reason we have so much junk is our move to this place 15 years ago. In our previous apartment, there was a lot more space, and before that, we had an even bigger place in San Francisco. My mother has always had a lot of possessions, but never the resources to trim them down to a manageable level once space got tighter. Add to that the fact that I accumulated numerous art projects and toys throughout my childhood, and it's easy to see how things got out of control.

It will be another ongoing challenge to remember that my mother is not some random hoarder I can criticize and pity. Hers is a perfectly unique situation that just happens to have a name that applies to many other people.

Reboot

So it begins again.

I had heard of the A&E show Hoarders but had never watched it, figuring it would be a simple mirror image of my mother's life as we knew it, and nothing more. I haven't been much for TV since college started, anyway. But since I've graduated and moved back home - well, a lot of things have changed, some of them for the worse, including my sedentary habits. So Hoarders was on, and I tuned in.

My mother is usually planted in front of the TV as well, and although she watched part of the show with me, she unsurprisingly drifted away from the program to occupy herself with other, less emotionally home-driving things, offering only an occasional "At least I'm not as bad as those people" as commentary on the show.

Reflecting on my own reaction to the filth and psychological disturbance of the people on Hoarders, I saw clearly (perhaps for the first time) just how easily my mother would fit in on the show. Like most television, Hoarders is all about shock value: look at how unbelievably the human race can deteriorate in today's hyper-consumerist and mentally helpless world. Et cetera, "and now buy Hoarders on DVD" (a particularly cruel marketing ploy, I thought). And I thought to myself, "If that were our house on that show, the viewers' reactions would be no different." They would be shocked at our home. Maybe not as disgusted, but certainly surprised at how my mother lives. The word pity comes to mind as well.

So I think it's time to resurrect what has seemed like such a frustrating and unending battle from my post 3,000 miles away. Tomorrow I am calling a professional organizer. It will be a big expense, and I am positive I will resent having to do this, because I am an imperfect person and because I will be the one paying for it from my own funds. But I am clinging to the hope that, if her home improves, my mother's emotional and overall well-being will improve, and she will regain enough motivation to find a job and, at 57, finally begin doing well for herself again.

There is a huge emotional component to living with a hoarder, one that I don't think I allowed myself to recognize when I was just starting out this project and seeing it as spring cleaning times ten. It is eye-opening to realize that there are people out there who have gone through this exact same thing (from what I saw on Hoarders, many adult children like me are the ones dealing with their parents' hoarding). The frustration in trying to fix a habit and a lifestyle that you did not contribute to, which the perpetrator does not feel compelled to fix, is immense. Frustration is the word in de-cluttering, and in controlling the emotion that comes with it. Negotiating with my mother about eliminating objects turns me into much more than a girl with a short fuse - that fuse is a long and continuously sizzling argument. I am literally arguing with someone psychologically affected, and it is a very difficult road.

This time, de-cluttering is not just a fun summer project to blog about, and I am not going to concern myself with being a "good blogger," posting pictures to keep the "audience" engaged. The shallow desire for internet fame is an entirely separate issue of my own that needs to be put aside here. I hope that resurrecting this blog will help me sort through the emotional struggle of helping my mother help herself in the long journey toward a healthy lifestyle.

If you are still reading this, I genuinely thank you for your silent support, because it feels good to be starting something meaningful again.