Hoarding is no substitute for community

My mom's suicide, 5 years later

This week marks the 5th anniversary of my mother’s suicide.

There’s not much point in pretending that I’m handling it well, because the fact of the matter is that I’m not, particularly. I’m uncharacteristically temperamental. Most repetitive tasks— those where any progress is rapidly undone by a multitude of muddy hands— feel nearly insurmountably difficult. I’ve gotten the sense a few times over the last couple weeks that maybe all interactions would be more safely navigated with a ‘FRAGILE’ sign on my forehead.

It’s not that I want to talk about it, exactly, because what is there to say? I had a mom, who struggled to be the mom I needed and who ultimately decided to end her life only weeks before I brought her first grand baby into the world. That granddaughter has her eyes. I have her eyes, too, and when I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror I’m sometimes startled by what feels like a growing resemblance to my mother.

In case you were wondering if these past five years have given me clarity, they haven’t. I’ve mostly accepted that there is no version of this story with closure. That doesn’t mean, of course, that my life isn’t happy. I’m unbelievably blessed in dozens of ways on a daily basis, but if you’ve experienced a traumatic loss in your own life, you might recognize that grief doesn’t exactly disappear.

I’ve written about my mom only a few times, yet my short piece about her hoarding disorder remains one of the most-clicked links in my Substack. I will forever and always implore you to ditch the just in case and just for when and just on special occasions junk in your closets and cabinets. I was the family member that had to mourn with a phone call to 1-800-GOT-JUNK, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

I’ve tried, over the years, to give my mother’s hoarding grace. As I wrote two years ago, her worth as a human wasn’t measured by the dozens of butter containers in her kitchen any more than your worth is measured by the designer bag on your shoulder.

And yet it’s nearly impossible to separate my experience of her as my mom from my experience of her as a hoarder. My mom was a first-generation college student, the daughter of a Rust Belt machinist. Although she hadn’t experienced true scarcity in her own life, her parents had, and she carried their generational trauma with her. And this trauma touched everything: It showed up when the neighborhood kids weren’t welcome over for dinner because “we shouldn’t have to feed the neighborhood.” It showed up in her own overwhelm, the way she often had to search for keys or missing bills for hours. It showed up in my own compulsive need to organize my space, because we rarely threw things away. As a child, I could have sworn my mom had written us a ‘good-bye’ note in case she experienced an untimely death; as an adult going through her things, there was no hope of finding the note under decades of accumulation.

One of the things we’ve come to understand about hoarding behavior is that it often emerges from these deep-seated feelings of scarcity, the fear of not having enough. Scarcity can, of course, be real. If you don’t know where your next meal is coming from or are struggling to keep the lights on, scarcity is real. But all too often, we exist in an illusion of scarcity, fueled by comparison culture and clever advertising.

The path out of scarcity— real or imagined— is meaningful community. You will never squirrel away enough toilet paper, decorative trinkets, or long-outgrown kids’ clothes to escape the need for others to care about your well-being too. All of which is to say: Hoarding is the antithesis of— and certainly no substitute for— real community.

And here, when I say hoarding, I don’t just mean what you saw on a literal episode of Hoarders. I also mean when you keep a dozen towels but only use three. I also mean when you accumulate hundreds of hand-me-down toys, but never bother to pass on the things your own kids don’t love. When you keep two dozen hand lotions but only use two. There’s no use in squirreling away things that others could use right now, especially in light of so much economic uncertainty for others, and especially when we were meant to walk lightly on this Earth.

I write— and think— a lot about the ways that my life is better with ‘less.’ Less to store, less to clean. When I’m being optimistic, a smaller footprint on our planet. But the real purpose of minimalism isn’t just about owning less, it’s about freeing up resources— both in material possessions and in emotional bandwidth— for others. And what I think the exercise of letting go of our things does is not just about creating a clutter-free closet; it’s about creating an open heart.

When I become accustomed to giving away outgrown clothes or excess cookware, it’s an easy exercise in generosity. The more I practice this kind of ‘easy’ generosity, the more adept I become at generosity that requires more of me: Generosity of my financial resources. Generosity of my time. A willingness to give the benefit of the doubt, to listen more and judge less.

My husband indulged my obsession with watching NCIS: Origins this week (highly recommend), and one particular line stood out to me: “Have you ever known someone who loved like it was their job? Someone who was a mother to everyone she met?”

As a parent, I— like every other parent— will do an imperfect job on most fronts. But one of the generational cycles I’ve been intent on breaking these last five years is the idea that our resources are scarce. That’s not to say that we always have time for everything we might want to do, but we always have time for dinner with great-grandma. We always have time to drop off a few meals for a new mom. We always have the resources to treat a friend to a zoo day or lend out toys that aren’t in our current rotation. It’s wonderful, exhausting work to be a cycle breaker. But if I can teach my children to love like it’s their job, well, then I’ve done mine.

Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash