If I Had Any Trouble with My Mother When I Was Growing Up, It Was in This Area:

Having grown up during the Depression, my mother had learned to save everything. It was instilled within her that anything could be used somehow, sometime, somewhere by somebody. To throw anything away was not only wasteful, but also evil, in my home.

Our house, up until the day my mother died, was rendered useless as a place to live by all the "junk" (my definition) that my mother packed into it. Or, at the very least, it was a very time-consuming place to live. In some of my younger years, after my father built shelves and drawers throughout the house, our junk seemed fairly organized. But it didn’t stay that way for long. Even though I grew up during one of the most prosperous times in our nation’s history (I’m a "Baby Boomer"), I still watched my mother save everything. She may have thought that at the end of the world she could single-handedly save everybody. At any rate, we surely saved more than we could ever use, and slowly, the house filled up entirely. As all the children grew up and moved out, the stuff my mother saved would take over the space each child left.

This was all very frustrating and embarrassing to me growing up. The main problem I had with it was that I didn’t feel comfortable bringing any of my friends to my home. Our house was always a disaster area. I also got in trouble sometimes for ruining her stuff. I remember one time when I was cleaning and relining my parakeet cage, I used some old newspapers that were in a wastebasket in my mother’s sewing room. What I didn’t know was that the wastebasket was where she was storing the newspapers and that she was planning to cut articles out of them to give away to people and to put in her children’s scrapbooks. It was rather ironic, I thought, that I should be punished for using old newspapers from a wastebasket. But, boy, was my mother ever mad at me.

My mother’s obsession spilled over into other areas of conservation as well. She would stop the washing machine after the wash cycle and reuse the water. She would dip out all the wet clothes, put them in a tin pail and then put in the next batch of clothes. She would start with the white clothes, then the colors, then the darks. When the water finally got too dirty to use anymore, she would let the washer drain and then fill itself with clean water. She would go through the same routine to rinse all the clothes – first whites, then colors and darks – and then to spin them damp dry. It was a lot of extra work for a few dollars’ savings. I hesitate to admit that I didn’t know our washer could do it any other way – that if I simply put in clothes and turned it on, it would do all the work itself. Hence the name, Automatic Washer. I was actually in college before I learned how to use a washing machine the way it was intended.

Another example of my mother’s overactive conservation consciousness was the way she taught me to blow my nose. It was wasteful (therefore, evil) to take a tissue, blow your nose and then just throw it away. She taught me to blow my nose at the top of the tissue, fold it over a couple of times and then to use it again. It was a bold step indeed when I started discarding my tissues after only one use. You would have thought money grew on trees, judging by that reckless behavior.

Now, as an adult, I can realize and understand that if a person grows up in scarcity, it is a hard thing to overcome. It becomes one’s whole context for living. It is easy for me, who only knew of the Depression from books and movies, to say, "Come on, now. Get a grip."