Skeletons in the Closet
Dec. 27th, 2015 07:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingMy mother's house is not a bad place, but it's a strange place.
For example, my mother has decorated her spare bedroom in a way that has inspired me and my brother to refer to it as "the princess room." It's a shrine to my mother's fantasy of an ideal girlhood, which she projected onto me. I resented this when I was younger, and now I find it downright creepy. My mother has had all of the furniture she bought for me professionally restored (repainted, revarnished, reupholstered, and so on) and has put out the same curtains and linens she used when I was in elementary school. The outfits I once wore to church are hanging on padded pink hangers in the closet.
I can't do anything about my mother's things, but I still store some of my stuff from high school and college at her house, and I decided – because of that stupid The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up book – that it was high time to dispose of it. As I held objects in my hands, instead of asking myself the question "Does this spark joy," I asked "Does this make me want to die of embarrassment." The answer was, overwhelmingly, YES BURN IT WITH FIRE.
My mother doesn't ever throw anything away, so the disposal of these items became something of an epic endeavor. If I tried to throw anything away in my mother's two outdoor trash bins, she would dig through them and return everything to one closet or another, where it would eventually pop out at me again like a horror movie jump scare. I therefore had to hide everything I wanted to throw away in stashes around the house, sneak each stash to my car when she wasn't looking, and then, when she left, quickly drive to one of the public dumpsters around town and hope that no one would see me and tell my mother what I was doing.
It doesn't surprise me in the least that I'm ashamed of the person I once was. In all honesty, it's much more surprising that I managed to turn out at least halfway normal.
For example, my mother has decorated her spare bedroom in a way that has inspired me and my brother to refer to it as "the princess room." It's a shrine to my mother's fantasy of an ideal girlhood, which she projected onto me. I resented this when I was younger, and now I find it downright creepy. My mother has had all of the furniture she bought for me professionally restored (repainted, revarnished, reupholstered, and so on) and has put out the same curtains and linens she used when I was in elementary school. The outfits I once wore to church are hanging on padded pink hangers in the closet.
I can't do anything about my mother's things, but I still store some of my stuff from high school and college at her house, and I decided – because of that stupid The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up book – that it was high time to dispose of it. As I held objects in my hands, instead of asking myself the question "Does this spark joy," I asked "Does this make me want to die of embarrassment." The answer was, overwhelmingly, YES BURN IT WITH FIRE.
My mother doesn't ever throw anything away, so the disposal of these items became something of an epic endeavor. If I tried to throw anything away in my mother's two outdoor trash bins, she would dig through them and return everything to one closet or another, where it would eventually pop out at me again like a horror movie jump scare. I therefore had to hide everything I wanted to throw away in stashes around the house, sneak each stash to my car when she wasn't looking, and then, when she left, quickly drive to one of the public dumpsters around town and hope that no one would see me and tell my mother what I was doing.
It doesn't surprise me in the least that I'm ashamed of the person I once was. In all honesty, it's much more surprising that I managed to turn out at least halfway normal.
