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 But I really have to hand it to her now - today I expected her to fight against donating an old tennis racket and outdated clothes, but she made some very rational decisions and did not resist the way I was afraid she would.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.