Mother's Day (How it Unravels)

Hey Mamas! How was your Mother’s Day?

We’re you properly praised or pretty well punished?

Here’s how mine unravels...

It starts off alright...

7:00am:

My son wakes me with a homemade card. A triptych of him and his kid brother, with the senior poodle in between.

“It’s beautiful Theodore…”

We hug.

Then comes: “Can I play a game on your phone?”

The day plan is this:

We’ll enjoy a slow start. I’ll get in a long, scalding shower... The kind that dries the skin but feels so good... It will include shaving, shampooing and deep hair conditioning. The boys will scooter to MacDonald Avenue for an 11am birthday party at Kids ‘n’ Action (Chucky Cheese minus minimum wage earners in mouse suits). I will get to sit on my arse, drink coffee, eat powdered donuts and catch up with the mamas, while our kids scramble through tunnels like gerbils. Later, my parents will treat us all to a fancy French meal in Carroll Gardens.

Awesome sauce right?

Here’s how it plays out:

8:00am:

After 2 bites of bacon, Theodore returns to bed with an upset stomach. The moans of a ten year old, deeply resentful of personal discomfort, reach every corner of the small rowhouse. I dread stomach aches, my own and those of others. There is nothing to be done about belly pain: no analgesics, no balms, no band-aides. Even kisses cannot relieve nausea.

“Here,”  I say, handing him his wastepaper basket in bed. “Throw up in here.”

He glowers, turns his backside towards me and sticks his butt up in the air, same as he did a decade earlier, swaddled in his crib. As soon as I leave his room the groans resume and I return, helpless to offer relief, but I return anyway, again and again.

10:30am:

Unwashed and without make-up, I leave the house phone on Theodore’s bedside table and head out to the party with William alone.

Push buttons are problematic. The scooter handle refuses to slide down, so instead of resting comfortably at chest level, the handle nestles under Will’s chin where he grips it,
like a squirrel,
whose just scored a piece of pita,
dumped by a cabbie,
into the gutter,
at the end of his shift.
We set off.

10:45am:

We reach Ocean Parkway—halfway there—I walk the scooter across while gripping William’s hand. Razor scooters are meant to be ridden, not walked. As I reach the curb it swings around and nails me in the ankle. “Dammit!” Pain and anger radiate to my extremities.

I have a choice.

I make the wrong one, though I know the right one: to pause, breathe deeply of the exhaust generated by 4 lanes of traffic, and to carry on. Instead, I take my ankle agony out on my child. No holding back:

“That hurts! That really hurts!! William!!! Why did we bother taking the scooter? You don’t even like to scooter much DO you?? You’d rather bike! Can we sell the scooter???”

His response is justified:

“MOMMY!  You are sooooo mean!!  You ruined my day!!!  I’m not even going to the party now!!!!”

I deserve that.

“I’m sorry William."

“What does sorry mean??? I’m sorry. That’s just words mommy!!!”

Wow. Is this a six-year-old speaking?

He throws the scooter to the ground and plants his short legs on the peninsula jutting between Ocean Parkway South and its service road.

The metaphor is obvious: Ocean Parkway and an ocean between us. Choppy. Vast. Unfathomable. I don’t know how to help my child, or help myself, when he gets like this.

I have a chance to redeem myself.

I don’t take it.  Instead,  I PUSH.

“We’re going to the party William. Don’t you like birthday parties??”

“No. They give you very unhealthy food... like cake.”

“Didn’t you like Molly's party in Prospect Park? Rolling around the grass with Sam?”

“No, I hated it. He almost gave me lice.”

My phone rings. I fish around the bottom of my purse and catch the call just before it swims to voicemail.

“Speak up Theodore.  I can’t hear you. You’re brother is having a fit.”

“I’m feeling really sick.”

“Go to the toilet and throw up. You’ll feel a lot better.”

“NO!”

“Really, it’s the only thing that helps.”

“NO!”

“Okay, I’m just gonna drop William off and run home to you baby. Sit tight.”

No time for bridging symbolic bodies of water with skillful words and hugs; I pull the scooter—and William—the rest of the way.

11:15am:  

Homeward bound to Theodore. I stop at the Uzbeki fruit stand to pick through the “dead produce” bin.  I fill a bag with squishy tomatoes at 19 cents/lb. I fill another with limp celery and sprouted onions.

11:30am:

Things are better at home.  Theodore has thrown up.

“Mom! Come clean up my vomit!”

“Did you rinse out your mouth?”

“Yes. Can I go on your phone?”

High Noon:

One child sick in bed, another at a party, what next?  I pull on debutante-length rubber gloves and clean the fridge—the right way—not my usual smear job. Hot soapsuds and scouring pads. I troll the depths for packets in tin foil, sniff and discard them all.

12:30pm:

Still scouring the Amana, I eat lunch from the fridge door: an open kiddie yogurt and a boiled egg from Easter, rolling around the butter compartment.

1pm:

I dump the Uzbeki tomatoes into a pot, get out the potato masher and make fresh tomato & basil sauce.

This is not the Mother’s Day I envisioned, but my mood is improving.  Mash, mash, mash.

1:30pm:

I move on to making broth. I throw the sad onions and celery in the stock pot with water, whole peppercorns and a bay leaf.

2:00pm:

I remember to call Nana.

“Happy Mother’s Day mom! Sorry, we can’t join you at the restaurant. Theodore is honking like a goose and hacking up oysters on the rug now. He’s too consumptive to travel.”

My parents had really wanted to treat me to lamb sausage and French lentils at Provence en Boite on Smith Street. Instead, they treat a childless friend to my lentils, or maybe she dines on Theodore’s steak frites. Or croque-monsieur. Dammit.

But wait, it’s cool that my parents pivot and salvage an unconventional Mother’s Day for themselves by sharing a meal in sparkling conversation that does not revolve around a ten-year-old’s lackluster piano practice nor his prospects for orthodonture.

2:15pm:

William returns home with three goody bags and proceeds to open and sort them on the dining room table.  I watch him peel the wrapper off a Hershey Kiss.

A wave of gratitude rolls over me. The first of the day.

3:00-5:00pm:

 I cave to gaming. Wii Mario something or other. I go upstairs to pack away winter sweaters in mothballs.

5:00pm:

I hang tuff about not cooking on Mother’s Day (tomato sauce and veggie broth notwithstanding). The Good Taste delivers chicken and broccoli, long-live vegetarian, pork dumplings, fortune cookies, and 2 free sodas: Hawaiian Punch and Diet Coke.  I demonstrate how to use chopsticks and the boys stab away at their wontons like ice anglers after Yellow Perch.

Another wave.

6:00pm:

The evening winds down with an episode of River Monsters on Animal Planet:

‘It’s scary Mommy.”

“Can I hold your hand William?"

“No Mommy, it’s annoying.”

We sit on the sofa, the boys and me, hands to ourselves, googling ghost sharks on my laptop between commercials.

William looks thoughtfully at the TV screen:

“I want to go to the Amazon cause there are lots of mangoes there.”

One more wave.

It’s an atypical Mother’s Day. No pink carnations and no dinners in restaurants with real napkins. It’s a day of stalemates with a six-year-old,  sickness and sacrifice with a ten-year-old. A day of small mouths with loud voices making remarkable observations. A day of take-out Chinese, and a day of vomit.

Actually, it’s a pretty typical day in the life of a Mother.

Postscript:

One week later:

We are walking that same route down Foster. We leave the scooters at home. William holds my hand and I notice he is tugging erratically. I look down and see he’s not walking. He’s skipping. Yes, gamboling like a lambkin in a field of buttercups. Straight out of a nursery rhyme. Theodore starts to snicker and I shoot him a look which says:

Don’t ruin this for us. Give me this mommy moment.

Soon enough the skipping will stop; about the same time Mr. Bear will no longer be needed to nod off to dreamland.

We turn onto MacDonald Avenue and sidestep a forklift, parked on the sidewalk, moving monuments from a truck bed through the open doors of a warehouse. The warehouse: a graveyard of helter-skelter tombstones piled high; all with photorealistic renderings of loved ones etched into the granite. Creepy.

“What are those mommy?”

Explaining mortality to a six-year-old, under the shadow of the el, is pointless.

“Let’s just enjoy this day boys. The next one isn’t promised to any of us.”

A woman, walking briskly ahead, overhears me and nods in agreement.  Without slackening her pace, she ascends the staircase to meet the approaching F.

Extreme Mothering

In celebration of the 100th Anniversary of Mother’s Day, I’m gathering examples of excessive, embarrassing parenting that nonetheless demonstrate our DEVOTION. Where have you gone over the cliff with your kids?

Here’s where I’ve swerved off the road:

In carrying my 10-year-old: “Carry Me downstairs, ” he begs. I oblige, down to breakfast, teetering on the landing, almost dropping him. He won’t be asking for encores anytime soon.

In carrying concealed weapons: I pocket a knife, at all times, on the ready to peel apples for the spoiled six-year-old.

In providing 4 spoons at mealtime: because it’s germy to eat breakfast with any fewer.

In lugging 8 shopping bags of kiddie yogurts and apples on sale 10 blocks home from the C-town.

In sticking synthetic hairballs to the sides of my head and trick-or-treating as Princess Leia with midget Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker.

In cutting up scrambled eggs for the six-year-old:

“Mommy you didn’t cut up my scrambled egg!”

“Use the side of your fork, sweetheart.”

“NO! YOU do it! “

and I do.. sigh..

Where have you gone to extremes in loving your kids?

• Do you cut the crusts off sandwiches?

• Do you tie shoe laces other than your own?  

• Do you rush to the ER for a bad cold?

To all you moms who are public embarrassments to your children, who are still doing for them what they should be doing for themselves, give yourself a hug this Mother’s Day. Give your own mom a hug. Get a hug from your kids, if you can, in private if that’s the only way they’re willing.

Forest Flowers

When was the last time you took a nature walk?  Traded your city sandals for Tevas and stepped out for a small stroll with mama nature? Dropping 40 bucks to scale artificial rock walls at Brooklyn Boulders doesn’t count. This is not an indoors endurance test of you, ridiculous in harness and climbing shoes, chalk on your hands and face.   This is a lakeside walk beside the Boathouse in Prospect Park, or a day trip to Bear Mountain, or a tour around a town reservoir in Westchester.  Just so long as there’s a hint of green and an absence of Hatzolah Volunteer Ambulances. At the end of the day, the worst injury you sustain: a blister or a bug bite.  

As a New Yorker you are already a walker: to the bank, the barber, the bodega, the bakery, the cobbler, the hardware store, the tailor, the pharmacy, the spice shop, the scented oil shop, the school, the subway, and Junior’s 99cents store (You gotta love Junior’s. You just can’t discount the emotional fix provided by a new palm leaf pattern plastic tablecloth). Life decisions in Kensington are determined by alternate side parking regulations. You don’t surrender your spot without damn good reason.  Instead you walk.  If there’s a haul involved, you take the shopping cart. Walking is purposeful, destination-driven and you always return home trawling a full net: dry cleaning, jugs of milk, and whiny first-graders.

So surely you can appreciate the treat it was for me to spend an afternoon over spring break with my sons and their cousin blazing a small section of the Appalachian trail without purpose or packages.  Just three little boys and me, venturing forth through a cowfield in Vernon, New Jersey.  

Volunteers improve our lives in so many ways. For one thing, they maintain miles of boardwalk over wetlands on this historic trail snaking from Maine to Georgia.  The boys picked walking sticks and we were on our way.  It was a mild day.  A mallard couple drifted among the cattails. A bullfrog sat in the muck, under the boardwalk, unblinking, no matter how many spitballs we leaned over the planks and hurled his way. Nature’s palette in early April favors washes of greys and taupe. Soon the forsythia and mountain laurel would leaf out in gold and purple,  but that afternoon only the dull evergreen of native cedars broke up the browns.  

With boys threatening to outgrow me by year’s end, frequent snack stops were required. Leaning against a white birch, munching peeled eggs with crazy salt, I noticed my first flower. It was unremarkable. Pale, low-lying, easy to miss.  Maybe a distant relative to an Easter lily? I bent down. No scent. Couldn’t be an Easter lily. Didn’t smell like a funeral home.  

At the next snack stop, as the boys picked out what they liked from the trail mix: peanuts, sunflower seeds, chocolate covered raisins, I noticed my second flower. This one also, low to the ground,  a small lavender star with a yellow stamen. A far cry from those showy staples of spring: daffodils and Dutch tulips.   Then I noticed another, and another.  All puny and pastel, but together they whispered: winter is over, beauty is underfoot.

Back in Brooklyn now, as my feet return to their duty-driven paths, the forest flowers bloom anew.   Their delicacy and soft-spoken promise of renewal tremble in my mind’s eye as I stop at the fruit stand and inspect the underside of a carton of cut-rate strawberries.  Mushy. I’ll pass. I bump into our old mailman whose route was changed. He smiles widely and asks after my senior poodle, who always gave him a hard time. It occurs to me that forest flowers may take human form.

Returning home with a crate of mangoes, a little girl clacks down the block in her big sister’s high-heeled slippers. She is so pretty in her awkwardness… her pointy elbows, pointy slippers, like the points of a star flower. As I turn into my dooryard, my neighbor, who speaks about six words of English, smiles at me and tilts her head in that special way.  Later, I catch my child alone, admiring his chess trophies. The mailman, the little girl, my neighbor, my son.  They cheer me.  You have to look for them, the forest flowers in your day, but they are there, on your dark as well as your bright days.  Every single day.  Get low to the ground. Pay attention.   

Before me peaceful,

Behind me peaceful,

Under me peaceful,

Over me peaceful,

All around me peaceful…

- Navajo Indian

from The Family of Man,  a favorite 1960s coffee table book, 503 pictures from 68 countries, created by Edward Steichen for MOMA, with a prologue by Carl Sandburg. Check it out.

Choices

Hello Busy Subscribers!

I’ve been reflecting on time management this week. You know that satisfaction of hopping on the B train just as the doors close on your backside? “YES!” You made it. Just in time. In fact, it’s a timing coup: no missed train, yet no time wasted on the platform either. This is how I live my life lately, jumping to appointments like hopping subway cars. I’m always optimizing time, intolerant of unproductive moments—impatient to the point of a diagnosable disorder no doubt. Okay, you’re probably more chill than me, but I assume your days are still much like mine, packed with obligation, enrichment and recreation. So I want to start off this week with a huge THANK YOU for:

1. subscribing to my blog,
2. not yet unsubscribing,
3. opening my posts and (more or less) making it through them. 

This makes Post #17 in the new year. That’s a lot for you and me... and a lot has been falling by the wayside because of it. I’ve been making different choices lately:

Choice A  OR  Choice B

• write my blog OR change out the boys’ winter wardrobe for summer shorts
• write my blog OR rout out size 6 underwear from the 10-year-old’s skivvies drawer
• read someone else’s blog OR make homemade applesauce
• write my blog OR clean out the china cabinet
• peruse Pinterest boards OR clean out the kitchen drawer
• follow friends on Twitter OR scrub the shower curtain liner
• plant bulbs in public spaces OR sew buttons on shirts
• write my blog OR give myself a sloppy pedicure
• try a radical recipe for ground turkey OR wash out the garbage cans
• write my blog OR clean the microwave
• write my blog OR fold laundry
• read someone else’s newsletter OR match mittens and socks
• join a book club OR clean out the car
• do a set of push-ups OR dust the blinds
• write my blog OR sleep
• I’ve been favoring A over B these days…. overlooking the gummy corners of the kids’ mouths and the kitchen floor. Slacking on changing sheets. The pots and the poodle go unwashed.

The daily must-dos are enough for me these days. It’s enough to slide supper on the table, correct homework, sign school trip permission slips, enforce piano practice.

When the kids finally nod off, column B beckons, but I’ve been plugging the ear buds into the MacBook, raising the volume on my iTunes The Cure radio station, and going for A…

I LOVE choosing A and I’m managing the consequences…

What are your housekeeping shortcuts?  

Here are 3 of mine:

1. Clorox wipes by every toilet.

2. Dressing from the clean laundry basket.

3. Dim lighting.

One area I don’t take nearly enough shortcuts: the stovetop. But that’s my choice too. I still love to cook. When a 5lb bag of last October’s Macintosh apples scans at $2.99 in April, it’s time to make applesauce, and screw the blog. Homemade applesauce is worth the effort.

What’s worth your effort these days?

Old Goat!

When the boys toddled around, weighed down by infrequently changed Pull-Ups, and still occasionally now, we stop by the barn at the Prospect Park Zoo. Spend enough time in petting zoos and you will A) lose your mind B) contract an animal-borne illness because you neglected to use the hand sanitizer provided or C) gain valuable insights into human nature. (A and C so far for me).

Insert 2 quarters, dial up a palmful of compressed hay pellets and head for the pens. That’s my limit by the way: 50 cents worth of family fun and slobber. If they want more, I make the boys scrounge for fallen kibble. I think they like this part best, down in the dirt. If I could get away with it, I would sneak the wooly beasts heels of bread, but there are docents milling about. Feeding gluten-rich crusts to domesticates and water fowl is a big no-no. Even if I get around the docents, my boys know this no-no and are the worst enforcers. They would turn me over to the rangers in bermuda shorts in a little boy heartbeat. But I’m just not convinced Tom Turkey’s gizzard will explode if he pecks at an organic crumb of pumpernickel, priced at $4.39 per loaf.

Ever try to feed a Cotswold sheep with a goat standing by? Guess who gets the pellet from your palm?  Goat muzzles out sheep every time. As a kid, my favorite sculpture in the MOMA garden was Picasso’s She-Goat, a sway back, proud, pregnant goat with enormous teats. No coincidence there. Picasso strikes me as a randy, bearded billy. I love Picasso and I love goats, with their weird vertical iris, asymetrical markings and endearingly insistent natures. I love how they frisk up to the fence with a “Wassup?” Makes my day.

It was in watching this bully billy, on a recent Sunday afternoon, that my barnyard epiphany hit me:  the personalities we attribute to individual animal species can be reduced to single traits. Sheeps are sheepish, lions are leontine, and goats are, well, rascally, old goats. True to their natures, this old goat muscled out Mary’s little lamb, who backed away without a bleat. Yet here’s the crazy thing: this Noah’s ark of personality traits that manifest individually in our furry, scaly and feathered friends, floats within our single species. Homo sapiens exhibit a wild range of disposition, from self-effacing sheep to proud peacocks, from faithful dogs to fickle felines, stealthy scorpions to stupid asses. Zookeepers who dish out yams daily in the baboon habitat may rightly object to my generalization, pointing out that there are braggarts as well as cowards within this old world monkey family. Yet hide for hide, kittens are basically skittish, wolves wolf down their dinner, and baboons bear teeth, flaunt red butts and generally monkey around.

Ask yourself: why are humans so different, one from the next? Why are your kids so different? Why aren’t we all bearish or dovelike? My spin? Just another example of an inscrutable intelligence at work. It takes all types and a breadth of talents, to fill the jobs that keep this planet spinning. We need them all, the goats and sheep, wolves and owls, and especially the doves. (We can lose the slumlord cockroaches). I know God exists because for every job on this planet there is someone to do it. Some kids actually want to grow up to be phlebotomists. They see the reward of painlessly puncturing a hidden vein. Or how about offensive linemen? Plenty of boys want to grow up to be knocked down, again and again.

I have experienced God’s perfect floor plan first-hand at the American Museum of Natural History:

5th fl: arachnologists and entomologists corral tarantulas and stinkbugs
(astrophysicists are off in their own orbit)
4th-3rd fls: curators and exhibition crew build temporary shows
3rd-1st fls: finance, education, development & HR departments are tucked away behind permanent exhibits. Gift shop workers sell field guides and lava lamps
lower level: cafeteria workers and custodians serve it up and clean it up

And tourists everywhere. Eurotrash in expensive loafers pound the marble floors to see sulfide chimneys and duck-billed dinos. In its third century of existence, the museum swims along in its talent pool, a cultural triumph, a self-sustaining tourist trap.

I just gotta believe there’s a divine intelligence sparking the solar plexus of each individual, igniting our passions, guiding our vocations. The crossing guards ferry our children across 4 lanes of traffic, the entertainers lighten our load, the philosophers and shrinks make sense of it all. It’s not our superior intellect that gives us the edge over those that creep, cantor, fly or swim. It’s our varied temperaments that define our success as a species. The next time you find yourself in a room full of personalities, at a cocktail party, or PTA meeting, remember this: where would we be without the goats and the sheep and everything in between?

careers for goats:

• mayor of an urban mecca
• Food Network celebrity chef
• paramedic
• butcher
• graffiti artist
• rocket scientist
• romance novelist
• offensive tackle
• NASCAR racer
• baseball manager of an urban mecca
• ambulance chaser
• fashion designer
• plastic surgeon
• WWF smackdown superstar
• power/ashtanga yoga or zumba instructor

careers for sheep:

• mayor of a small, homogenous town
• vegan chef on public television’s Create Channel
• mortician
• independent, family farmer practicing humane animal husbandry
• origami artist
• rocket scientist
• business writer
• distance runner
• golf cart driver/caddy
• baseball manager of a single-A franchise
• real estate attorney
• quilter
• neurosurgeon
• restorative yoga instructor

animal adjectives to describe humans:

• antsy
• batty
• bovine
• buggin’
• bullheaded
• bullish
• dogged
• dovish
• feline
• foxy
• hawkish
• horsey
• mousy
• mulish
• piggish
• sheepish
• sluggish
• sphynx-like
• squirrely
• wolfish

animal nouns to describe humans:

• ass!
• chicken liver!
• horses’ ass!
• little monkey
• louse!
• minx
• old goat!
• pig!
• rat fink!
• shark
• snake in the grass….
• swine!
• tiger!
• turkey!
• vermin!

animal verbs to describe humans:

• badger
• crane
• goose
• hawk
• lark

Support

To defend against the fireballs launched daily at our vulnerable walls, these are some buttresses that keep the building standing…

The Usual Supports:

• family
• friends
• therapists (psychiatrists, analysts, shrinks, witch doctors)
• spiritual advisors (priests, ministers, rabbis, imams, gurus, senseis)
• psychics (soothsayers, astrologists)
• bartenders
• 12-step programs
• self-help books
• praise music
• spirituals
• Bach
• bubble baths
• televangelists
• vitamin supplements
• furry pets

and here are...

The Less Usual Supports:

• ex-bosses (the ones we left on good terms with)
• ex-boyfriends
• mothers-in-law
• sisters-in-law
• hairdressers
• barbers
• manicurists
• Zumba teachers
• tailors
• cobblers
• auto mechanics
• supermarket cashiers
• letter carriers
• disco
• techno
• tech support teams at the Soho Apple Store
• department store make-up artists
• guided meditation
• Tom & Jerry cartoons
• chewing gum
• non-furry pets

God defies categorization. She manifests in all these.

Tap into whatever supports keep your citadel upright until the fireballs burn out. You can also counterattack with buckets of hot oil.

Did any special supports of yours go unmentioned? Leave a comment so we can pool our wisdom!

Promise

Step outside. Look up. The trees are still bare, the branches unchanged.  Not quite. The tree tops are swelling at their tips. Getting ready.

A child, looking out the window at a snow sky is getting ready too.

A runner at the starting line of the New York Marathon: on her mark.

A crocus pushing up through the earth.

A first kiss.

A child, placing a plate of cookies beside an empty stocking on Christmas Eve.

A roast turkey, just pulled from the oven.

Anticipation of something good to come. This, in itself, is a gift.

What promise does the closed bud hold for you?

It was a punishing winter. Happy spring!

Healthy Hoarding

Picture this: a low-ceiling cellar and 4 walls lined with storage shelving. The shelves are stuffed with: kidney-shaped hospital bed pans, vases from FTD floral arrangements huge pickle jars of duck and soy sauce packets.  Add gallon Ziplocs of medicine dispensing cups, travel-size shampoos and mouth wash.  Throw in, say, 19  gunky-eyed kitties snaking the legs of a de Kooning abstraction of beat up lawn furniture in the center of the floor.

No, this is not my cellar.

Now picture this: a low-ceiling cellar, a clear expanse of indoor/outdoor carpet, and one shelving unit. A bag of unopened cat litter sits under the slop sink, purchased in the hopes of soon adopting one clear-eyed kitty. The shelves are crowded with: chinese take out containers (the “bad” plastic,) styrofoam containers, leaning towers of pizza boxes. Also: aluminum lasagna pans, cardboard cake boxes, lightly used Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts cups, and a rabble of unmatched Tupperware and lids.  Oh and gift bags: Happy Birthday, Happy Purim, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy New Year,  folded and stored, holiday-ready.

This is my cellar.  Is there a difference?  I think so.

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One riotous storage unit in an otherwise manageable basement. Not bad.

My clutter represents short-term, healthy hoarding. Healthy hoarding is saving stuff with the concrete intention of repurposing it. It’s the middle “R” in Reduce, Reuse, Recyle.  I mostly hoard packaging, packaging that has several more lives to live--like me.  I can’t get myself to toss a styrofoam clamshell that only housed undressed iceberg lettuce. Alas there’s not room enough for clamshells in the kitchen storage bench (already home to a family of paper bags) so down the stairs the styro goes, to be wedged between baby food jars and balled up Shoprite plastic bags.  But the clamshell will come back up soon, be filled with meatloaf and mash and depart with a dinner guest.  

Unhealthy hoarding, by contrast, is collecting stuff you’ll never use, for no good reason. Unhealthy hoarding fills subconscious needs; provides the salve to unspoken wounds of childhood. But hey, I’m only guessing.  I’m not going there. Google it yourself

Two other robust hoarding habits I proudly practice: composting and old clothing collection.

I amass food scraps, and, because I cook, that amounts to pounds of peelings, parings, egg shells, and coffee grounds, lots of coffee grounds. Every week.  Luckily, I’ve got Compost 4 Brooklyn nearby, a community composting project.

Darning died alongside his evil twin, ironing. I don’t do either anymore.  Holey socks and T-shirts wth split seams go straight into a tattered pillowcase, bound for the clothing recycling bin at any Sunday farmers’ market. Plastic produce bags of potato peels and a laundry bag of long underwear with spent elastic, I co-habitate comfortably with these, along with my passion for packaging.

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Why do I do it? Hoarding down to a single square of paper toweling?  (BTW, did you know a Bounty that shines a mirror, will then beautifully mop up the piddle of an incontinent 15-year-old poodle?) I do it because of the black and white film, still looping in the prefrontal cortex, of bulldozers pushing pyramids of garbage: trash = landfill. And setting the right example for my kids. There’s that too.  My boys are Pavlov’s pups when it comes to peeling tangerines. They frisk straight to the ceramic crock next to the sink to off their rinds. Kids follow their mommies leads, good and bad, don’t they? Mine will likely grow up cursing like former New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn,  but golly, they won’t ever throw an apple core in a garbage can!