Hoarding mothers
Spoke to a friend last night who is going through the same issue with her mother – hoarding. It’s a syndrome that cannot be cured and that is very difficult to handle if only that it is the manifestation of deep seated internal issues – things like if they throw one of the things away it is like they are throwing away a piece of themselves, or that they are collecting these things because it is a substitute for love in their life.
I lay in bed last night watching the whirring blade of the ceiling fan and thought that here I am at 48 years old and my mother was around this age when my father died. I thought she had the opportunity of a lifetime to soar and instead I have watched the phases unfurl in shock mostly – the I am going to dress like Madonna at 50 phase, the I am going to date 30 year old men phase, the I am never leaving the house phase, the I am taking in a crack addict boarder who wound up in prison but not before robbing her blind phase, the paranoid over every incident phase, the I’ve got to be a mother to your sister phase, the heroine during Katrina phase, the alcoholic dementia phase, the almost dying phase and then repeated hurks and jerks of downward spirals and stable and downward spirals and stable phase, and now the hoarding phase begins.
Will this be my life? G said decidedly no since we are both purgers – we throw a lot away and don’t hold onto anything for sentimental reasons or otherwise. But still I wonder at being alone and having no other standing there providing a mirror so that I can see the horror of my own neurosis.