I spent the weekend with my parents (my father’s 84th birthday) and cleared out some of the junk in the garage for them. My mother’s problem is that she is a hoarder. Sometimes the stuff gets in the way of her human relationships, IMHO. So I was in the garage struggling with ancient crumpled wicker that I knew she wouldn’t want to throw out, and cursing her relationship with the material world, and saying boy is she whacked.
Then a line from Janet Malcolm came to me. In Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, Malcolm wrote (I think I have the right book) that the purpose of analysis is to understand that we are all "ordinary." I’d never understood that line, in fact had always protested it in my mind. I would say, I’m not ordinary, and I don’t wish to think of myself as ordinary. And Janet Malcolm isn’t ordinary either. But that is the goal of analysis? Not for me.
Well, while I was hauling the wicker about, I started thinking, Yes my mother really is crazy. But wait, I’m no different, I’m crazy, too, in my peculiar way. And everyone else is crazy too. When you’re adolescent, you single out your parents’ craziness as the Matterhorn of all craziness in the world. Whoa, they are really crazy. But that’s self-involved. Because so is everyone else, and it’s your task to figure out just how your craziness is different and not the worst, but… ordinary. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own special way, right…
I closed the door on the garage and felt better. It looked the same as before I’d gotten to work.
Thanks Phil, Being ordinary is finding the common thread that connects us all. Even our “enemies” are part of us. Sure is hard to love Dick Cheney but somehow he is part of me.
I’m clearing out my mothers hoard of ancient junk. Its harder for me, she died three years ago and I’ve just returned home after a decade abroad.
I was just cursing her craziness in between emotional bouts of remembrance that each unnecessary thing she hoarded would bring.
Thanks for what you wrote here. It puts my mutterings to myself are more in context now.
I meant to say : It puts my mutterings to myself more in context now.
Geez this comments board has no limited time edit option? Even a couple of minutes would do.
Hey, at least you can look at your mothers craziness and size it up and say something. Mine is different, how would you like someone that folds up money in foil and sticks it in bureau drawers? Or, in order to take out the trash needs tongs and rubber gloves up to the elbows? One that takes bathes two or three times a day?
“Hey mom, here’s a wallet – just pick up the trash by the plastic bag – a little dirt never hurt anyone. lol
I totally remember your parents’ house in the Cape. I remember never being able to find a place to sit, and wicker!!!
My mother is 84 as well. I hope your father is well. Last time I saw him, it looked like he was a bit ill. I was worried about him.
If common experiences make you ordinary, then, yes, Weiss, you are ordinary.
I stopped fighting with my mother, a ‘Depression’ baby, who stockpiles canned goods, bits of string and other artifacts of her past poverty to this day. I don’t remember when, but I stopped fighting over such detritus years ago. Probably when I realized that she was no longer capable of change, and I didn’t want to admit I had yet reached that same milestone.
Part of the problem of ‘crazy’ is that we can’t really emphathize no matter how much we think we understand. As frustrating as my mother gets, I think of my old world, Polish grandmother, and I realize how easy I had it as a child compared to my mom.
Mortality makes us very ordinary. Have you had any major illnesses yet Phil.
I had a non-cancerous brain tumor in 96 which through me for a loop. After the recovery an acquaintence (a former yogic monk) asked me “what are you willing to die for”?
I still ask.
I reading of the History of Zionism, I get really profoundly how for Herzl, Weitzman, Jabotinsky, Ben Gurion, many others, they knew that strongly and confidently that their fundamental commitment was right, that they were clearly willing to die for (and more importantly live fully FOR).
The closest I have to that passion is for sustainable society, post-consumerist society, post peak-oil society. Decentral, intimate, regional economy, natural.
My mother is crazy, too. She does not hoard. (I’m the hoarder). She gets bored with her material things too fast and chunks them in the trash or recycles them, but mostly just throws it away. I’ve told her many times to stop polluting the world on a regular interval basis.
I see new vases every month. She changes the carpet every three years. She bought a leather sofa a year ago and is complaining about it already.
But, because my mom is such a spender, she’s also a giver. She has the biggest charitable heart that I know of.