Trying to
develop a meditation practice has me thinking about the chaos in which I grew
up.
The chaos wasn't purely environmental, but that's the part I thought about most as a child, the part I remember in detail, can easily describe. My mother was chronically messy and attached to possessions as if
they were beloved children. She treasured printed information and our house was full of stacks of phone directories (city, church, sorority, professional organizations, this year's, last year's, likely more from the years before), Time and Newsweek and all the women's magazines, catalogs, and clippings, in baskets on shelves, on chairs, on the floor. Side tables and desks were covered in newspapers, knickknacks, notebooks, pencils
and little pieces of paper. There were always laundry baskets in the family room, unless the cloths had been folded, in which case, piles of them were placed on the sofa, the tables, the floor. Because
she was an only child and the oldest cousin, all the family pictures and dishes and vases and memorabilia came to her. She was quite sentimental, but not good at decorating, and so their display - various children's chairs from the
thirties placed here and there, holding dog-eared teddy bears and
old books and toys - just added to the clutter.
About the time we moved – I was eleven, my sister and brother ten and seven - our mother upped her game past clutter and mounted an unwavering resistance to the tyranny of cleaning up after herself in the kitchen that persists even now. Maybe it was the arrival of a fourth child; maybe it had always been there and we’d just been too young to notice. We arrived home from school most days to find the detritus of breakfast, lunch, snacks, and baby food sitting on the counter. Making my tea in that kitchen drove me crazy. Once, I surveyed the mess and asked her, so, who is supposed to clean this up? She looked at me in annoyance and said, I'll get to it. Sometimes I cleaned up after her, passive aggressively clanging and banging in irritation and she would tell me, I was going to do that. Later, when I was an adult and bringing my children to see my parents, I would clean up after all of us, willingly this time. Oh, honey, I would have done that, she would say. But she never did. It was left for whoever washed up after dinner, my father or sister or brother or me.
(She must have at some point, as her older daughters left for college and her son rebelled and her husband traveled for work. She must have loaded a dishwasher, wiped down a counter, scrubbed a pot and put it away. Right? I remember cleaning up the mess myself. I remember, more often, not cleaning up and waiting to see if she would. I remember seeing my sister, unable to take it any longer, cleaning up. I remember holing up in my room and ignoring it. I remember the state of the kitchen after dinner - a day's worth of dishes and food and crumbs, the smears of jam and peanut butter on the counter, the litter on the kitchen carpet - and heated discussions at the table about who would clean the kitchen. I remember the kitchen being cleaned by every possible combination of my sister, brother, father and me. But I never remember my mother stepping in.)
We had a cleaning lady,
an older woman named Mrs. McKay, who came every two weeks or so, for many years. We adored her. She was gentle and kind and
soft-spoken and brought homemade bread, but best of all, left our house in a
sweet, graceful order, like everyone else's. Mrs. McKay was known for putting
away any clutter left out. My mother often complained about this - "put
things away before Mrs. McKay comes," she'd warn us, "or you may
never see them again" but the house was so full of things, we knew we’d never miss anything. Our treasures were already hidden away to save them from
being swallowed in the mess.
Whenever Mrs. McKay left, my
sister and I would walk around the house in a kind of ecstasy, breathing in lemon and order. I would bring my book into the freshly tidied, vacuumed, dusted living room and feel such peace. Now that it’s clean, I
always thought, it should be easy to keep this way. But my mother must have been uncomfortable
with such spare surroundings, because it never took more than a few hours for
the magazines and clippings and laundry and mail to reappear. Soon there would
be cold cups of coffee scattered through the house, a loaf of bread left on the counter amid crumbs and coffee rings and a stick of butter.
I've read about artists
who thrive in a certain amount of environmental chaos. My mother was not an artist,
but at some primal level, she needed that chaos, that clutter, her stuff. My
sister and brother and I, at the same primal level, needed order and its absence hurt us in ways it took us years to articulate. We each had our own room
and spent hours there, wrestling with how to create to create some order of our own.
As we got older, my
sister and I experimented with Big Cleaning – everything, the kitchen, the bathroom and all the
common areas - whenever we wanted to spend time at home or have friends over, knowing our work would be undone
nearly immediately. We tried detaching from the mess. I tried stealth cleaning - scooping up
magazines and sliding them into the garbage on my way to school, stacking piles
of things behind boxes in the basement. I was never caught, but new things always
took their place. Although she would deny this, apparently, there was a certain optimal level of clutter my
mother preferred and naturally maintained.
I was angry, those years. My mother was strict about her children doing chores - mostly dinner dishes and bathroom cleaning. I thought her lazy and deeply unfair for requiring us to do housework that my she wouldn't do herself. I was angry that the clutter, the magazines, her need to leave crumbs and coffee and butter knives on the counter, were more important than her oldest children feeling comfortable at home. I didn't know anything about mental illness back then. I didn't know the term "hoarder."
I still have some anger around this but now I also realize how off it was and I wonder, what would our lives have been like if my
father hadn't accommodated her? I have watched the show Hoarders and
shuddered. The houses on the show are infinitely worse than the one I grew up
in, but the difference is in degree, not in kind.
What if we hadn't had
Mrs. McKay? What if my father hadn't done the bulk of the housework when he
was home? What if the three of us had never learned how to clean? What if my father, so respectful of my mother’s opinions in almost every
area, hadn't insisted every year or so that they clean out the garage and
storage areas? What if, with no spare room
for storage, the boxes and stored memorabilia and old furniture had crept further and further
into the living areas? Would the chronic untidiness have drifted into filth and vermin and dog shit? How close were we to sliding over that edge?
I'll never know. But it's something I'm thinking about as I try to bring some kind of peace and order to my insides, how much crazier and sadder and weirder my childhood was than I realized at the time.
My sister, brother and I
now keep homes than range from tidy to fastidious – look in my brother's cabinets and you will see four of everything, nearly aligned, as if the house were staged for sale. In his garage, there is one set of
shelves with a few boxes and a pegboard with nothing but a beautiful display
of fishing gear. Two of us married and eventually divorced people who were untidy. I can't blame clutter for the failure of two marriages, but the anxiety it provoked in me, the miasma of disregard it implied, can't have helped.
After my dad retired, he took over the housework completely. Hoping to sell the house and retire to a warmer climate, he cleaned out what he could and hired organizers to help my mom with her stuff. Mom and her organizers slowly got rid of things; the rest, they boxed and labeled and stacked neatly in the storage areas. My parents went through this process year after year. Dad finally realized Mom and her stuff would never be budged, and he settled into a contented retirement in their hometown.
Picture a decade's worth of things a community-minded man like my father donates to a charity sale - trucks full of furniture, sports equipment, household goods, tools. Picture four or five well-meaning organizers over that same period of time, working with my mom for months, toting bags and boxes off to the Rescue Mission. Picture removing enough furniture and personal belongings from that home to fill a two bedroom cottage in a retirement community. What can be left?
A lot, it turns out. A houseful, in fact. A few weeks after my parents moved, my father's cancer worsened, and we all decided to fly in for Easter. Someone decided that, with four of us all there, it was the perfect opportunity to clear the house out so it could be sold sooner rather than later. We'd expected this for years - my sister and I had talked at length about the likelihood that we'd be saddled with this at some point, and we'd both researched several estate liquidation companies in town, the kind that will come in, survey your belongings, sort, sell and dispose of everything that doesn't sell.
But that was vetoed - my parents didn't want anything sold. They wanted us, their children, to do the sorting, deciding what to keep, donate or toss. So the last few days that my sisters and brother, my sons and nieces and nephews and I were in the same city as my dying father, we spent going through a full house's worth of shit. Some boxes of our own, a few things of my dad's but mostly things that belonged or were handed down to my mom. Paintings, china, old cake decorating sets, unfinished crochet projects from the 70s, empty photo albums, random serving dishes, a dozen bins of high school graduation announcements and senior pictures and retirement cards belonging to people who died before I was born. I chose a few things of my dad's for my kids and I took a set of bins of my own - baby books, scrapbooks, teenage letters - to my hotel to sort. There, I pulled out a few pictures and some ancient ballet slippers, and threw the rest away. The cards people sent my parents when I was born, my first lock of hair, my graduation memory book, all the letters my friends and I wrote to each other - in the trash at the Garden Inn. Because, although I could make an easy case for their sentimental value, I have never felt more done in my life with shit than I did at that moment.
I started this post in one place, talking about the chaos caused by my mom's love of things and need to surround herself with them, by her need to have all the things around her and visible. But I've made my way somewhere else, to that ugly moment a few months before my father died, where the management of shit, the needs of shit takes over a family's life, when the shit you love so much trumps children and grandchildren spending time with their dying father and grandfather, where ancient china and yarn and retirement cards sent to someone long dead are more important than the living.
But in the end, I have ended up where I started. The values that privilege things, stuff, shit over people are wildly disordered, literally, out of any sensible or defensible order. And isn't that what chaos is, laid bare? Not just uproar and havoc, but things, steps, values ordered wrong.
