It came slowly, sneaking across surfaces

I don't remember exactly when my mother's strict cleaning schedule stopped and her hoarding started. The hoard crept up on us, as a family. I think it was always beneath the surface, but that our house was initially large enough to accommodate small "savings." I do remember that I got my first mall job and that my mother's father died during the same year. Which seems to provide, in hindsight, a loose time frame and speculative rationale for some of my mother's changes: my desire to be free from parental control and her lack of ability to deal with the loss of a parent. i was 15 years of age, which made my mother 50 years of age.

Mail started to gather on the entry table. Newspaper clippings of obituaries began to appear in plastic bags, preserved from fingerprints and "messy hands.' Then, newspaper articles revealing obscure information about famous people my mother liked, faraway places she wished to see, recipes she planned to try, and crossword puzzles she intended to solve started spilling across surfaces. Eventually my mother lamented "lost information" and started to save entire newspapers to prevent the "destruction of something important."

Around the same time, food appeared en masse. If my mother saw a sale on jar olives or artichoke hearts, she bought double--sometimes triple--at a "discount" and "for a savings." We didn't eat olives or artichoke hearts. We didn't eat most of the sale food my mother purchased. Instead of using what she bought, my mother stored it in paper grocery bags and hid them under the kitchen table, in the family room, in doorways. Eventually my father, the Facilitator, felt forced to build a wall-to-wall and ceiling-to-floor unit in the basement (5 shelves measuring 2' x 12' x 2'), a place to store my mother's already overflowing stockpile of food and a real attempt to reclaim the house from that stockpile. On those shelves she built a formidable army of tin and aluminum cans, organizing them in pyramids and forbidding anyone to touch her "things" or "mess up" her "system." Despite the shelving unit, my mother started collecting boxed easy-bake goods and stored them in cabinets around the basement.

Many of the cans are still there, along with the boxes, faded and dusty. Some swollen and some rusted, but all unopened... nearly 3 decades later. In league with those now poison-loaded cans are packages of crackers, peanut butter, jelly, snack foods, drink mixes, salad dressings, condiments, boxes of pasta, jars of sauce, and glass bottles of soda. When I ask why she never used those foods before their expiration dates she tells me that much of it is "still good" because it was kept in a "cool dry place." I don't worry that my mother will suddenly decide to eat a jar of outdated olives with a side of artichoke hearts because those things have been on her shelves for 30 years; she hasn't eaten them so far, and I doubt she'll eat them any time soon. But, the fact that they're there, taking up space and completely unsafe, leaves me angry still today.

That my mother chose to invest her energy in a cleaning schedule, a newspaper clipping schedule, a coupon schedule, and a food collection schedule, instead of a childcare schedule, a daughter-hugging schedule, a playtime schedule, or a spend-time-with-the-family schedule leaves me angry. That she chose to spend my father's hard-earned money on things we neither needed nor would ever use leaves me profoundly offended. That she chose a course creating so much waste, while I had very real and present needs which could have been tended had she not squandered resources, leaves me deeply wounded. The piles of newspapers, the bloated and rusty cans, the enormous storage unit, are symbolic of my mother's insatiable obsessions and her excessive greed. They resemble her lack of respect for my father, her lack of interest in family, and her rejection of both me and her role as my mother.