The same principle motivates me to refuse to accept everything that she buys for me. I don't have unlimited space, and I have a hard enough time decluttering as it is without adding more clutter. I'm as polite as possible-- I'm grateful that she thinks of me, buys things for me... but I will not take them if I won't wear or use them, and I'd rather tell her straight-out than take them and donate them to Goodwill. And yes, sometimes I wonder why I bother, because it's not like mom ever takes anyone else's feelings into account. When I was little, it wasn't uncommon for her to throw gifts back in my face and lecture me about how I had bad taste and selfishly didn't, when choosing a gift, think about making the recipient happy. In the realm of mom's role modeling that I had to unlearn, developing a minimal level of tact was not a difficult thing to do. Developing an ability to throw things about or give them away, on the other hand, I still struggle with.
And so this weekend I struggled. I once again cleaned out my closet, but not as thoroughly as I know I should. "Baby steps," I tell myself. This time I was able to toss into the give-away bags things I couldn't bring myself to part with last time around, and as I did, I thought, "why did I ever take this? I remember in the case of one garment trying to talk my mom out of giving it to me. It didn't fit well at all-- but mom and I have very different concepts of "fit"-- and it was decades too old for me (as well as decades out of style). But while I had the wherewithal to reject things she'd buy at discount department stores, I have a much harder time rejecting things that were once part of her wardrobe. She's very persistent when she wants me to take something... and, sucker that I am, I don't actually like to hurt her feelings.
But having that stuff in my closet, much less wearing it, hurts my feelings. It's a dignity issue-- I shouldn't have to even think about choosing not to wear things that are too big, too eighties and too in-one's-fifties. And not (only) because it brings back memories of my mom's not buying me clothes as a child or teenager. I got family friends' hand-me-downs, and we shopped at thrift stores and deep discount department stores. I don't remember how old I was when this first struck me as absurd because we weren't, at that point, that poor, but I remember one particularly painful experience, where one summer we drove around to various thrift stores to find a swimsuit for me to take to summer camp. There was one I didn't like, that didn't fit; mom said she'd alter it. I can't see now how my mother thought the hours spent on this-- and I still have a memory of the grueling nature of that shopping trip-- could have been worth it. Eventually she gave up, sucked it up and spent $15 at a local department store. I'm not above thrift stores-- far from it-- but I think sometimes it's worth it to go ahead and buy new clothes. My mom, to this day, rarely does. Unless they're from the clearance rack of A.J. Wright.
Even when I was in grad school when my mother criticized me for buying a new suit for interviews, when we could have just gone to Salvation Army. It was just over a year ago that she expressed incredulity at my having bought socks; don't I know, after all, that she has plenty at her house? Just today, she was waxing poetic about a yard she'd come across. She said, "one could furnish one's entire house with the wares at that yard sale," an implication being that it would be foolhardy, greedy, even overly picky to want to choose one's furniture to one's liking, rather than pick from what's dirt cheap.
Remember Gary Shteyngart's moving essay about how his immigrant family wouldn't spare sixty-nine cents for fast food:
My parents didn’t spend money, because they lived with the idea that disaster was close at hand, that a liver-function test would come back marked with a doctor’s urgent scrawl, that they would be fired from their jobs because their English did not suffice.
I can appreciate the trauma behind my parents' mentality. Especially because they did their best, deliberately or not, to instill it in me. I do wish it wouldn't lead my mom to stock up on a bunch of crap she doesn't need, just because it's dirt cheap, in case she needs it at some point. Because that's what she does, and her house is chock-full of it.
So I felt guilty as I sent mom's old work clothes to the giveaway bag, even though that's their rightful place. While I'm determined to make her understand that in some areas of my life, i.e., my career, I'm going to make my own choices and do what's right for me, when it comes to the contents of my closet (and the contents of the giveaway bag), I'm happy to let her believe that she's saving me from the financial folly of buying new clothes.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment