Mise à jour

Thank you to everyone who posted supportive comments on my previous post. Just a quick update here - everything is going pretty well. I called a professional organizer, who is supposed to come help my mother over the weekend I believe. As for me, I actually arrived in France yesterday for my seven-month stint as a teaching assistant, so I won't be there to help, but I'm excited to hear about the progress they will surely be making.

I'm hoping to start blogging at luciolita.blogspot.com about my time in France soon, if you'd like to follow that!

* Mise à jour = update :)

Entitlement

I obviously took the wrong tack today by attempting to clear up some of the clutter on my own. My mother exploded, citing her rising blood pressure as the reason she wanted me to "just stop right now." She berated me for touching the few things I was trying to sort, sneering, "You're only going to be here for two months, so just shut up and stop." It is clear to me that, while I am left ignorant of her reason for wanting to live like this, she doesn't understand why I feel I am entitled to clean for her.

Why?

Because this is still my childhood home. I grew up in this wholly unsatisfying apartment, because you did not make the choices in life that would lead you to having a real house like most of the kids I grew up around. I spent many formative years here, so I feel entitled to treat it like a normal person treats a home, which you may not understand. I am leaving to spend time abroad in two months, yes, and despite my sense of entitlement toward this place, I would really like to say goodbye to this apartment forever. I should clear out all my belongings and leave an empty bedroom behind, because even calling this place home for the past fifteen years does not take away my resentment of what it has become.

I still hold out hope that my mother can live normally. My compulsion to de-clutter is a counteracting force for her compulsion to keep things as they are. I would be so ashamed and overwhelmed if her hoarding and clutter escalated to the degree of Tracy's mother, who eventually died of a heart attack amid dead animals, an overflowing toilet, and piles of clutter. Without the support system that my own mother so readily refuses, anything could happen. And I, ever the pessimist, simply expect the worst.

I would like to say that, for anyone I know personally who may have come across this strangely revealing blog, try to suppress your pity and your judgment. This is only an outlet. My mother's erratic tendencies may make me question my own sanity, but I do know to ask for help when she or I need it. We had a mixed bag with our first professional organizer, but I think I will have to sacrifice a little more, perhaps on therapy or a full-on intervention, to make sure that my mother gets the help she needs.

ETA: I was surprised to find, a few hours after writing this, that the skin on my throat had broken out in slight hives after screaming myself raw into a pillow. Not sure if this was the stress, the physical increase of blood flow to my neck, or something in the pillow. This has never happened before. I need to retrieve peace.

Your Values Are Right!

What is the best way to deal with this? The feeling of having retreated five years, when I hated and judged my mother blindly for whatever series of events led to my losing respect for her (read: probably just adolescence). A conversation with her about fulfillment left me with more understanding about how she thinks of her life, but still no satisfaction with that understanding on my end. Brooklyn Book Lover says it's all about the disease, my frustration comes from the disease my mother has of not seeing the world for how we see it.

But "not seeing the world for how we see it" sounds oddly like the meaning of a disability, and you are supposed to be so accepting and open-minded when interacting with people who have disabilities - the definition of which term could cause a ruckus of its own. That is, disabilities is a hazy category, but we have to understand that everyone may see and interact with a world that is different from the "expected," like a so-called person with disabilities is said to do. But then, who is to say that our expectations are the right ones, or even that the majority of society's expectations are the right ones? I grew up in a middle-class, predominantly white place, and let's face it, middle-class white people are full of themselves. I do mean that in a sort of terrible, racist way, but also in a hopefully forgivable, neutral way - i.e. that people in such privileged groups are confident in the rightness of how they live and think. Truthfully, this should be theoretically true of any ethnic or socioeconomic group. Be confident! Know that what you think is good! Your values are right!

The problem arises when you impose your own thoughts about what is good on other people who are not necessarily the same kind of thinkers as you. I don't mean that race divides us, because my so-called objective, liberal education tells me I should reject the idea of race or socioeconomic status as any kind of divider, negative or otherwise. But I guess I really need to take a look at how I see the world and finally put into practice that simpering, thoughtless principle that I thought I lived by but don't: treat everyone as an individual, because it is in their individuality that their value lies, not in your eyes or anyone else's.

The problem I face now is of how to acknowledge my wrongness in a delicate way that is not so delicate as to erase all the true feelings I expressed in our conversation earlier. What a tiring challenge I did not expect to face today!

Holiday Getaway

Luckily, no news is good news here, as they say. I haven't updated in a while because emotions haven't been particularly high and I've been spending my time having myself a proper summer. Although I am a self-proclaimed homebody, I have certainly learned the hard way over the years that spending all my time in the house is no good for me. Nor is it for anyone, I tend to think. It is, of course, a comfortable place, which makes it feel so incredibly good and safe, but we can't possibly live our lives and find inspiration or creativity by keeping ourselves in these modern comfort pods all the time.

I spent a wonderful weekend out in Sonoma county exploring nature and being taken under the wing of a whole new family for a couple days. My time was spent swimming in the river, walking the dog, playing board games, eating ice cream, baking a pie, reading, catching up with an old friend, and appreciating the blessing of doing new things. As simple as they may be, the delights of lighting my first-ever sparkler and baking a gluten-free pie crust for my friend's father were refreshing and sweet.

To offer a brief update on de-cluttering though, I should say that my room's transformation is fairly complete - after the junk haulers took my bed, we moved our foldout couch into my room. I am in love with the fact that I can pack up my bed every day and instantly gain an extra five to six square feet of space. I now have plenty of room to practice the backbend I'm trying to perfect by the end of the summer. (Hey, I'm not getting any younger, and it's good yoga practice!) Plus, moving the couch freed up considerable space in the living room. I'm hoping to rearrange our bookcases better in that area soon. Oh, the thrill of homemaking!

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.