It's Just Stuff: Part Two (Where things get ugly)

We moved to my mother's in July of '03. If you remember, it was a hot and humid summer. My mother didn't have air conditioning. My mother would not let us install an air conditioner on the first floor. Things went badly.

Let me explain our living arrangements. The house is a large one. The upstairs was originally finished off so that my grandmother could live there. She never did, unable to navigate the stairs safely and refusing to live "in somebody's attic." The space consists of a large living room with windows facing the river, and a bedroom off the living room. There was a closet which was planned to be a bathroom, but never completed. Installing the bathroom I will save for another post. When we moved in, we needed to finish off an upstairs storage room for the boys to use as a bedroom. This upstairs area was the reason we thought we could make this work; we would have our own comfortable living area and only Anna would be on the first floor in her own bedroom.

The first step was to clean out the storage room. Let me say my mother had not even been in the upstairs since my dad had died and this storage room was mostly full of discarded household items and assorted and varied pieces of junk. There was yet another storage room up there that held stuff from her antique business and family memorabilia. That room was left untouched.

While my mother wanted us to move in, she did not want to make room for us. Every old toaster and lamp was a battle. I have this memory of her sitting on the front porch weeping over a shoe. We got the room clear and thought the worst was over. We were wrong.

After a few months I realized my mother could not be dealt with rationally. She had undiagnosed dementia and was a raging narcissist to begin with. You might be thinking, "Then why did you move in with her?" Well, I'm still working on that. There was only my sister and I to care for her. She and my sister never got along and I was the "golden child." My mother and I had always gotten along and I didn't think things would be any different when we moved in. I was wrong.

I want to write that the stuff was always at the heart of the battles, but the real battle was about control. She wanted all the control, all the time. We thought that because we left the first floor untouched she would realize that we had to have room to live and let us do so. Again, wrong.

While I will be posting more about this adventure at a later date, let me just sum up what my mother taught me about stuff. People and relationships are more important than stuff. Stuff is just stuff, it can't love you or keep you company or help you grow. It's just stuff. It can be replaced, done without, or kept and cared for, but it will never replace people and relationships. She built a wall with her stuff. I chose to do without stuff and chose people, love and growth.