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Since a young age, I have been told by my mom to keep what things you need and to be careful not to throw out useful items. Actually, she didn’t so much tell me this as she demonstrated it by keeping cottage cheese containers, grocery sacks (paper and then, over time, plastic), magazines of every vintage, papers and rosters from Sunday School class both she taught and I attended, and plastic planters that those little annuals would come home in before being neatly set out in rows in the flower bed. We kept it all, and when I would ask her where to put it, she would always tell me, “just set it X and I’ll put it away later.”
Overtime, those unfilled, untossed, unorganized, unused items piled up, and it was often my responsibility to help my mom collect the like items into one place so that they could then be “sorted” and put “away.” But “away” had little meaning in my child’s mind, unless one meant into the teaming cabinet, the filled cupboards, or in a box stacked to other boxes on the floor in the basement, on a pallet in the garage, or on a metal shelf that was expressly assembled for document storage. There was a stable or growing amount of excess. But at all times, excess. Never just enough.
Now that I’m 36, I am no longer living in her house, no longer directed to put my belongings away while hers piled and awaited some future moment of perfect organization. I am now an adult and a year shy of her age when I was born. And now I have my own collection of unfilled, unorganized, unused items that seem to amass. I have my own future time of perfect organization where all these useful, precious items that are a result of my labor and represent my generative mind. But I don’t have stuff: I’ve moved too often for that. What I have are notes and ideas: scraps of paper that match a moment when I was seized with a brilliant thought that had potential. I have computer files and sticky notes coming out of library books. I have excessive underlining of academic texts. I am a blocked writer.
To discard these thoughts is, somehow, to betray my mom’s dream as well as to annul those years of stuffed anxiety about the future of those useful, unfulfilled things. Choosing not to write on a topic would be a snub. I don’t know how this cross over of mom-hoarding and writing-anxiety works. It would seem personal history is one large ocean, and the mind pulls from its memory banks the detritus left on one shore and washes it up on other, more distant shore. It is like the anxiety about the accruing, homeless items is connected across a great body of water to my expectation of assembling the best, most luminous details from a text in an self-explanatory order of pristine argument. It is like my lack of confidence to let some ideas go, to not explore them, has at its root my mother’s exhausted voice, “just put it over there, I’ll get to it later.”
My friends have counseled me over the years to throw things away in the dark of night. “Surely she won’t notice, she has so much stuff!” But I never did: she noticed everything different, from my hair, to my choice of clothing colors (why don’t you have anything colorful? She said when looking at my black and beige clothing palette?), to how many times I got phone calls from friends or boyfriends. I think she wrote down what mail I received up until when I moved out of the country—and even then she saved it and dated it. I could never throw away these things that my mom had decided to keep. Her authority was powerful, her memory unassailable, and her passion for her project of personal organization like a hungry animal that paces and snarls relentlessly. There was little true rest in that home—and little rest in my graduate program. It seems I picked out a pet from my mom’s litter.
I’ve been putting this slowly together that I struggle with assembling thoughts on philosophy and theology because of this family pattern of hoarding. It has been a long journey of making these connections but it is coming to the end. I am starting to imagine drafting papers and having other people give me comment on them, no longer afraid that their comments will sting like my mom's sharp authority. I am also beginning to imagine that throwing away items is a way of telling others what to pay attention to--what is worth one's attention.
I dreamt last night that my mom’s house was nearly empty and that there was only 24 hours before the electric company shut off the power. I looked around and imagined my voice echoing in the space. It was almost time to leave and the rest of the things that were there would just wait for someone else to deal with. The biggest stuff had been moved and what remained could just be handled by someone else. Turning to my dreams and interpreting my past does not instantly solve my concerns, nor does it make me an excellent writer. I frequently feel confused--and I procrastinate a lot out of fear of putting myself on the line in my arguments and making myself vulnerable to others' criticism. What the dreams and the past do offer, however, is a trace of the thickness of life and fear. They challenge the self-help strategies and boot-strapping attitudes of well-meaning but impatient people who promote capitalistic success and who say life is transparent and simple. But what my dreams and my past give me at this point in my career is yet one more place to practice my interpretive skills and one more example--one small but significant example--that there is no direct correlation to anything. No one action will create one effect. I don't know if I can be healed of my fear of writing by trawling my past or interpreting my dreams, but I can notice that there is power in drawing connections. And that my unconscious past and my history are one among many places to pull at the associations I see in the world. The perfect time of absolute answer--either in organization of stuff or in idea--will never be and so I practice in this space of these associations of past and present anxiety, mother/daughter inheritance. It may be overstatement, but after a lifetime with too much stuff and no where to put it, I am making a new world where the people in it find joy in having less and hoarding very little.
