My mom claims it's because her *parents* survived the depression. Come ON! In reality, she has a lot of difficulty making decisions, so she puts them off by saving everything.
Once at my parents' I was looking for a recipe from a recent issue of Cook's Illustrated, to which we both subscribe. I found it in a big wicker trunk crammed with catalogs, magazines, fliers, and crap dating back to 1970. I almost swooned, right there in the living room. For her it's this pathalogical inability to get rid of *anything*.
Ummm, was I venting?
For her, there's also an element of "I gave you this, now I can try to control you by asking you about it/berating you for not having it." She was recently (within the last 3 months) bitching to me about a rug (which she gave to us!)which our cat destroyed and we threw out... in 2000. It was a small rug that matches a larger rug which she still owns, and on the twelfth of never when she sells the big rug, she's now out the bucks for the matching small rug.
It could be worse... she recently attempted to get my brother to take a fencing helmet she bought for him when he was twelve (he's 35 now). He didn't want it and told her to give it away. She pulled out the receipt (!) to show him how much she'd spent on it. He almost just melted down right then and there...
OMG I've totally hijacked here. Where's the bag smiley when you need it?
Once at my parents' I was looking for a recipe from a recent issue of Cook's Illustrated, to which we both subscribe. I found it in a big wicker trunk crammed with catalogs, magazines, fliers, and crap dating back to 1970. I almost swooned, right there in the living room. For her it's this pathalogical inability to get rid of *anything*.
Ummm, was I venting?
For her, there's also an element of "I gave you this, now I can try to control you by asking you about it/berating you for not having it." She was recently (within the last 3 months) bitching to me about a rug (which she gave to us!)which our cat destroyed and we threw out... in 2000. It was a small rug that matches a larger rug which she still owns, and on the twelfth of never when she sells the big rug, she's now out the bucks for the matching small rug.
It could be worse... she recently attempted to get my brother to take a fencing helmet she bought for him when he was twelve (he's 35 now). He didn't want it and told her to give it away. She pulled out the receipt (!) to show him how much she'd spent on it. He almost just melted down right then and there...
OMG I've totally hijacked here. Where's the bag smiley when you need it?
:
I thank the ground I walk on everyday that my mom is 1500 miles from me and doesn't trust the postal service. If we lived within driving distance of her, my house would be stuffed wall to wall with her cast-off crap. She keeps threatening to mail stuff, if only the darn post office would be more helpful.
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