The Mother Load

Happy Mother's Day, Mom. I mean it.

Let’s be real: There are many things I want to write about here and don’t because they involve family members—family members who, sure, deserve privacy, but who also don’t yet understand that families are dysfunctional goldmines for writers.

That ends today.

Why? Because someone—let’s call her “Mom” on condition of anonymity—is about to move. And I, as the oldest adult child, the only son, and the second-favorite offspring, failed to plan a sufficient schedule conflict.

Now don’t get me wrong: when family is on speaking terms, they should help me move. I’ve moved several times, especially between the ages of seventeen and thirty-three, when I moved on an approximately semiannual basis.

But! About half of those moves were to get me back out of “Mom’s” house. Which meant that I usually left with more belongings than I’d arrived with. I was the designated Overflow Dinner Plate Relief Valve.

Yet despite passing me her excess tableware, “Mom” continued to acquire the detritus of adulthood.

Some of it, like the boxes of my childhood drawings, she punted to us children long ago. Much of what remains is … I can’t even rattle off a list that makes coherent sense. She has a lot of napkins and twist ties, I guess? And freezers, plural. Very large flowerpots. More mattresses than bedrooms. A cargo trailer stocked with, I believe, essential oils in wicker baskets.

Nothing I can include here will convey the scope and sheer volume of packing that awaits me this week, all to assist the woman I am, for the moment, still calling “Mom.”

A dramatic rendering of “Mom’s” moving day. Photo by Matt Hanns Schroeter on Unsplash

This is the same “Mom” who used to require me to clean my room.

In fairness, her rooms are very clean. Not packed yet! But clean.

I don’t particularly want to go help. Not because I’m a bad kid. More because I’m not even the favorite kid anymore. Also because all I want to do now is purge my own life of anything less than necessary, excepting books, which are necessary no matter how heavy my brother-in-law says they are every time he helps me move.

I realize this is rich, coming from a man with an avowed collection of empty jam jars. But I am prepared to do what Marie Kondo and Swedish death cleaning failed to inspire in me: I’m going to give them to “Mom.”

She won’t notice!

She will think she collected these jam jars and forgot all about them. She is about to rejoice in that mystical convergence of moving house and age-related memory capacity reduction: that sphere where all her worldly possessions—and some of mine—will appear like new to her in her next home.

I’m just paying it forward for all the plates.

But while I’m shedding my stuff, I’m also gaining a Valuable Life Lesson, which I will credit to my mother so she forgives me for the rest of this piece: I’m learning that I need to never, ever make people move my stuff again.

When I die, and the vultures my sister (the favorite child, we all know it) has picked through my books, I expect to be composted along with whatever is left. No one has to schlep anything anywhere, except my hole in the ground.

I ask only that y’all stick the compost in “Mom’s” empty jam jars. They need, finally, to be put to some use.

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I may need a GoFundMe for my medical bills after “Mom” reads this piece.

So why not get out ahead of the issue and become a full paying subscriber? (Or a free subscriber, if you’re new here?)

New perk: Full subscribers get to fight my sister for my books, because you know I’m a goner.

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Annotations!

This is where I wrote about my jam jar problem!

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A version of this piece appeared in the Abiquiú News.