Stuff

My mother didn’t throw things away. We hadn’t discovered The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up with the instructions to throw out things to make space. We simply shifted our detritus around. Putting things away meant nothing to the inhabitants of the house, because we didn’t have a system of where things went. Clothes and shoes went in the bedroom closets, jackets went on hangers. Everything else was loose. Toys piled in our bedrooms lacking a toy box, books shelved onto precariously stacked milk cartons and scattered on the floor when we ran out of space. 

Or maybe she was a maximalist. That’s the word people use when they like color, texture and large items in their space. We had a small three bedroom home, but it was furnished for a bigger home. My mother loved her six person dining table in anticipation of the theoretical, but never in praxis, visitors. She loved our large seating areas, perfect for our five person family to watch the news or Jeopardy or Lifetime movies together. 

But the large furniture left little room for children’s playthings and dropped objects. It left little room for trinkets and notebooks and mirrors and curling irons. We just had to rearrange things so they fit.

Magazines stacked underneath the television. Stuffed animals passed down from aunties and sisters collected dust in the media center. Loose legos, mugs, ancient Easter candy, uneven photo albums surrounded the “good china” stacked on top of doilies. Mail covered the dining room table. Hair brushes, BlueMagic and rubber bands teetered on the end tables.

She fussed, more to herself than anyone else, as she moved about the house. “Can’t touch nothing without something else falling down!” As she reached high on a top shelf of one of our limited closets, pulling down a scarf and the entire contents -- dusty books, fuzzy winter hats, single gloves, old stuffed animals, mail she stuck up there to open later but never got around to it, papers, papers, falling down like snow. With a grunt she picked up the objects one by one and stuffed them back onto the high, squat shelf, waiting to fall again.

She fussed if our coats were on the couch (seats are for butts, not coats!) or our clothes strung across the bed frame or piled on the closet floor, (I buy these clothes for y’all and you aren’t even grateful!) or if we did the laundry “wrong”, or if shoes remained in the walkway too long. 

It wasn’t uncommon for my mother to silently go into the kitchen and begin rummaging in cabinets for an unseen item for an unknown task. “No one ever helps!” I wanted to help, and didn’t know where to start. My mother’s hips filled the narrow space between the door jamb and the trash can. I would have to squeeze in to help whatever was happening under that cabinet.  Did she want us to organize it? Look for the bowl/spatula/pot that she was fussing about? Clear the sink? Boil water?

I had no true space of my own, and my residence never felt quite like home. It was the dark walls with tiny windows where between three o’clock and sundown you can see the dust floating through the streaming sunlight. It was the television, constantly on, constantly loud that gave me headaches in these three to sundown hours when looking at the screen, but I couldn’t turn away, because there was nowhere else to be.

And my things were a problem. 

It was my gloves caught between the couch cushions, it was my doll abandoned on the stairs. I ignored the bills stacked on the side table and cigarette butts piled in ashtrays. If you moved a piece of paper, smoky dust ballooned into the air, making me cough. My shoes littered the entryway, and I ignored my mother’s slippers tucked into every dusty corner of our living room. I ignored the overstuffed Lazyboy jammed against the television stand and overextending over the door jamb.

It was messy, I was messy. When I entered our home, my homework went on the already overflowing table because what was another piece of paper? Clothes were piled on the floor because the stack had already been there for three days, what was another pair of jeans?

I truly blamed myself for the mess. 

My messiness was static. When I lived on my own, it would be messy too. I didn’t imagine a space of my own like my friends' homes, I thought my future apartment would be an extension of my childhood home. Dust would remain in the air, clothes would never make it to hangers. 

We never had the cleaning rituals my friends' parents forced on them. Their mothers were adamant about cleaning. Dishes must be washed, floor must be swept and everything put away before the night closes. I desired my friend’s families cleaning routines, Thursday’s was for cleaning their younger siblings room, the bathroom was scrubbed nightly in turn, bedrooms swept on Mondays after school, and the oft-repeated axiom, “if you hear gospel music on Saturday mornings, you know you better get up!”

I longed for that structure. I defaulted to chaos.

But the house wasn’t my mother’s choice. She wanted to manage her feelings about the house and raise children, but it was like trying to merge discordant sounds of an old Natalie Cole album from a brand new stereo and passing street sirens. 

Our house was purchased in an act of desperation. We lived in an old apartment building, and the day my mother saw roaches spill from underneath the fridge was the day she told our father to buy us a house. 

They started looking for affordable property in Toledo. It had to fit our family of five, we  had to own it. That was the end of my father’s requirements. For my mother, she wanted space. Closets, to buy all the clothes that she and her children wanted, counter space, to spread flour, vanilla, sugar and eggs out to mix and beat a pound cake, and separate space to chop garlic, onions and dust a pot roast with salt. Rooms for each of us, and a private bathroom for her.

This house was not it. It was small, the closets were miniscule, meant for people with at most three outfits, not for modern families with summer clothes and winter boots. She didn’t like the way it was “cut up”. Which meant, we had a long and narrow kitchen with no counter space to chop vegetables or host a coffee maker and toaster. There was no entry way, the door opened directly into the living room. Thighs rubbed against the couch as they tried to find a place to sit.

My father said, if we didn’t get this house, we weren’t getting one at all. She would have traded an imperfect house for a cramped, infested apartment. But homeownership didn’t quell her frustration.

She tried to make it work. Putting things away in those squat places allowed her to have the things she wanted, the large dining room table, the expansive couch, and open her mail on her own time, and home ownership and the ability to clean and call exterminators as she needed. However, she never married the house she had with the furniture and items and children she wanted, because we didn’t fit. 

I could have helped, I just didn't have the ingenuity to organize a home full of items with no true place to put them, where we frequently ran out of room. I was the child who liked to do things with the adults, so leaving in a room to clean with an instruction that didn’t make much sense to me (how come the coat can’t go on the couch anyway? And how is my t-shirt taking up more space than your freshly laundered clothes that’s been sitting there for days?)

My few items were miniscule in comparison to the items that did not belong to me in the home, yet it was my shoes, homework and toys that bore the brunt of the frustration.

I wanted to be an orderly person. I wanted to live in one of those homes where everything was in place. Where the side tables had candles and a lamp, free of phone books and pens and nail polish. Where the dining room table always looks ready for a meal with placemats and roses, not pieces of lost homework and unopened mail and uncleared plates. And no one would yell because something was out of place.

That home was out of reach because the overturned dolls I liked, the strewn shoes in the doorway, awaited a shout, and I braced the piercing tones to be put away.

My present home is filled with blank corners next to the couch, dust free baseboards, white countertops glistening with only a vase and fresh lilies picked up on a Trader Joe’s run. The bed is made with pillows propped up, candles lit atop paper free side tables.

Oh, and coats never go on the couch.