CrossRoads Farm

The Mom Syndrome

08 January, 2005 - 10:05 am

The “mom syndrome”….I think I’m wrestling it to the ground. I told you a while back that I walked into my office one day and looked at the mess and I thought, “My God, I’m turning into my mother.” Well, I think I might be able to break the chain.

You see my grandmother is really losing it. It could be your run-of-the-mill senility or alcoholism or undiagnosed mental illness that is getting worse – but whatever it is, she is so hard to get along with that I find it hardly worth it to be around her anymore. It’s tragic but true. The worst of it is that she has these delightfully lucid and wonderful moments when she truly shines through all the depression and dis-ease – those moments now are so few and far between….

My mother, therefore, is on a mission not to be like grandma. And of course we all know from whatever pantheon we take our myths and stories that it is the thing we fear most and so desperately guard against that will turn and bite us on the ass. Wouldn't it just be eaier to be yourself than to go around determined to "not be her?" How exhausting. My mother is so much like Gram it’s a little eerie. And while she has asked us to stop her when she’s behaving that way – well, whenever we do she gets mad.

The are both packrats, and my Dad is a packrat so you can just imagine what their houses look like. Chock full to the gills with – stuff. At Yule when my mother was picking up from the festivities she set aside a pile of little plastic twist ties - they hold Barbie dolls and such in their boxes so they are more difficult to shoplift. She had a pile of them on the dining table, neatly straightened out and ready to be put away. She asked me where I put things like that. “In the garbage.”
She was appalled, “Really?? But you never know when you might need a twist tie.”
I took the bundle from her, pulled one out and stuck it in my junk drawer - the rest in the trash, “Ma, I don’t remember the last time I needed a twist tie.”

Mom, keeps everything.

Mom and Grandma are both also very concerned about where these precious items will go when they die. They are always making promises to give specific things to specific people or inventory their things and designate heirs. This will not happen. And I’m smart enough not to wait for it but I also don’t listen when thy go off on these tangents. “These earring will be for K,” Mom will say.
”Well, Ma, you need to write that down because I’m not going to remember that 5 minutes from now much les 40 years from now.” She always rolls her eyes at me when I say this. As though I’m being unreasonable. Well, I may not be as tactful as I could be but tact seldom works with my family. Come to think of it tactless seldom works.

So this last holiday season after my folks left D and I started sorting through our stuff. I went through all my jewelry. Some of it I have had for 10 years or more and only worn once. Why do I keep it? A few items – fairly valuable at that – I know I will never wear. Antique and valuable? Yes. Pretty? Definitely not.

This is exactly what e-bay is for.

Next I started going through the craft books my mother let me borrow. Yes, of course she wants them back. She has enough craft books to open a crafters library. If she did one project per day she’d never do all the projects that she wants to. At any rate, I looked at the patterned and ideas carefully and instead of picking everyone I thought was cute and “I could do that sometime” - I only chose the ones that I would start “right now if I had the materials at hand.” I chose 8 patterns out of a whole stack of books. Eight.

Then I started on my office. Even in the cold. You wouldn’t believe the pile of stuff slated for the thrift store. How liberating. And while I am on the fence about a couple of things I have up there, I only kept supplies that I could use on a specific project that I have in my mind right now. Which is a far cry from “I could use that for something.”

I’m hoping to break the chain now. I don’t want to turn into mom anymore than she wants to turn into Gram. So, instead of making it a mission I’m just going to not behave that way.

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