"Stories on the Sabbath"

THE QUEEN OF DE-JUNKING!

I hated Saturday mornings!  Why?  Well, let me tell you…. It all started when I was a little girl.  When other children got to wake up leisurely and watch Saturday morning cartoons I didn’t.  When other kids got to go play with their friends all day long (or so I thought) it was just the opposite for me.  Saturdays were our family’s “cleaning day”.  But the problem was, our house NEVER got clean.  There was too much clutter!  I remember one Saturday begging my mother to go play with my friends.  Her words have haunted me ever since, “When the WHOLE house is cleaned, then you can go!”  Talk about an insurmountable task for a little kid.  It must have been at that moment that the change took place in me.  What change do you ask?  The day that I became the “Queen of De-Junking!”

As I walked through every room in the house, all I could see were stacks of junk.  You see our house wasn’t dirty; it was just cluttered with junk.  There’s a difference, just ask my mom.  Dirt is dirt, but clutter, oh with clutter there are so many possibilities.  As I glanced at one particular stack of junk, I asked my mother, “Why on earth do you have so much junk?”  It was then that I was given the definition of junk.  “Honey,” she said as lovingly as she could, “you see, one woman’s junk is another woman’s treasure. It’s not my fault I find hidden treasure everywhere I go!” J

Poor mom, she had to put up with me.  Wait a minute…poor me!  I had to put up with her and everyone else who never cared if there was an end to the “junk” in our house.  It was at that time that I began organizing our Saturday morning work schedule.  I made a chart and gave all the family members a job, including myself and my dad.  You see, giving mom a job was useless, because she had so many other jobs that it would not have gotten done.  I don’t think I was bitter towards her; I just couldn’t stand living like this.  However, after I got the family organized, I was finally able to start watching Saturday morning cartoons and playing with my friends.  Yes, the weekly cleaning jobs got done, but the junk, it never left.  I just learned to clean around it.  That was… until I got older.

As a teenager, I started to get embarrassed with all the junk in our house.  Why did we have to live like this?  I was the baby in the family and most of the other kids were gone by then.  They had lived through it, why couldn’t I?  Even our garage was crammed to the hilt with junk!  I could see that the weight of all of this clutter was taking a toll on my mom.  There were many times that I would go through the house when she wasn’t there and just start throwing things away.  My rationale was that there was so much junk, that she would never miss it.  Boy was I wrong.  It was like she had an indexed card file in her mind of all her junk and where she had it stashed.  It became a joke in our family that when we moved, the only way we would be able to do it was to light a match and walk away!

Sadly to say, that joke actually came true.  On December 27, 1976 our beloved childhood home burnt to the ground.  It was early in the morning when the fire started and interestingly enough, it started in the garage.  To this day we still don’t know if it was an electrical spark that caused the fire or natural combustion from all the junk!  I had spent the night at a friend’s house and so I didn’t experience the immediate trauma, but I have experienced and continue to experience the aftermath of the fire.  It took months for us to wade through the burnt debris. 

Amazingly enough mother was able to find “salvageable treasures” even from the fire.  In 1988, Mom and Dad went on a mission to Australia.  By this time they had moved to another city.  I was married and came to help them “de-junk” again so they could sell their house.  This time their garage was only half filled.  “Mother,” I said with praise in my voice, “I’m so proud of you!”  She smiled a weak smile and then led me to their back room which was filled from floor to ceiling with boxes of burnt books!  I could tell I would be up well passed midnight.

Several years later I took a similar journey to another city.  They had sold their house and my services were needed again.  This time I could tell my mother was starting to weaken.  Yep, after all of these years, I had finally worn her down and she started letting me throw things away with her permission.  “Wow Mom,” I observed with delight, “you’ve come a long way baby,” I said as I sifted through piles of papers, and physically threw them away while she watched.  I was feeling excitement to think that I had finally convinced my mother to “let go” of her “junk”. 

Later that night mother fell asleep while she was sitting on the couch.  What a great opportunity this was for me.  What I did next was strictly out of love for her.  I quietly crept passed her and out into the garage.  There, lining the walls, were the boxes of burnt books that we had been carting around for the past 20 years!  How ridiculous!  As I sifted through them, even the boxes that held the books were falling apart. 

I painstakingly took out each book and tried to decide if it was worth keeping.  For the next 2 hours I made progress.  I kept any church book or history book that might have held memories for mom and dad.  But the recipe books and other secular books found their way to the garbage, some with pages not even readable.  My hands were blackened from the soot on the books, but I felt quite accomplished as I shut the door to the garage and washed up before crawling into bed.  There were only a few hours left before morning and I didn’t dare wake mom up.

The next morning I found mom in the kitchen making breakfast.  “Hi mom,” I said with a sly grin.  “What she doesn’t know won’t ever hurt her,” I thought as I gave her a hug.  She was just as chipper as I.  “Good morning honey,” she said with a smug look on her face.  “Did you have a good sleep?” she asked.  “Yes I did,” I said with a sudden pit in my stomach.  “Mo---th---er”, I said in a long drawn out voice, “have you been up to something?” She didn’t answer.  I ran out to the garbage and found that more than half the books I had thrown away the night before were not there.  I came back into the kitchen and started crying.  The de-junking queen’s crown had just fallen off!

How did I survive you ask?  I took the opposite approach in my family.  I guess you could say that I even became obsessive.  Clutter you say?  Not in my house! As a matter of fact, if you were to put a piece of paper on the counter – don’t expect to find it there at the end of the day.  My husband and children often felt like they had to tie things down in our house so as to keep it safe from being thrown away.  I’ve been told that I don’t have a sentimental bone in my body.  I guess some of that is true.  Okay, so my mom’s got a problem and so do I.  But what do we both do about it?

Several years ago I went to a therapist to help me deal with my obsession of needing to be in control and my problem of throwing everything away.  You’ll never guess what I learned.  She said that I had a blockage from my past.  I had obsessed so much over my mother’s junk that it had transferred to me and was emotionally cluttering my life.  Isn’t that amazing!  As I looked thoughtfully at the therapist I asked, “Then what is the remedy?”  She immediately responded, “You’ll have to emotionally de-junk your life!”  She must have wondered why I laughed out loud.  “I can do that!” I said as I caught my breath, “after all, I’m the Queen of De-Junking!” I figuratively reached down, put my crown back on and said, “Let the de-junking begin!” 

Written by:

Michele Romney Garvin

July 31, 2007