Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Home for a minute

I should have taken lots of pictures, but literally for the last month I have been glued to moving things out of my mother's house. First I moved her to assisted living where she has a lovely apartment. She seems to be happy and that makes things so much easier. Then I began the huge task of emptying her house of 53 years. For the last 15 years there have been few repairs, but they did manage to totally renovate their kitchen and one bath (sorta). The wall paper my dad put up is falling off the wall in many places and paint and wall paper were done almost 30 years ago. Everything is hugely dirty because the woman who lived with my mother did a poor job of cleaning. Go figure, the room she lived in was worse than the rest of the house. My dad had a work shop that was piled to the ceiling. The pickers have loved going through the piles at the street. Truthfully, in after thought I should have rented a dumpster.

My husband had to be out of town on business most of this time and I tried to bring my little dog, Sparky with me, but he hated it there, so this trip home was to drop him off. The rest of my family bugged out on me. I have a small family with just one child, who has not learned that family comes before everything else.  My parents alienated most of the remaining members of our family. They had (have) mental illness and were not easy to live with or be around. My sister has nothing to do with my mother. She writes her about once a year and that is it. While I was having a horrid time moving my mother, she was helping flood victims. At some point her anger with my parents was transferred to me. Our scant communication is by text and I am now completely done. I imagine the next time I will see her will be when my mother dies and she shows up for one or two hours for her funeral. This is so hard you cannot even imagine. Not surprisingly all of the help she promised a year ago did not materialize (she probably doesn't remember saying she would help). In so many ways she has become exactly like our mother, the woman she will never see again. She said she wanted absolutely nothing out of the house. My mother had saved every stitch of clothes she ever wore, her cheer leading uniforms.... Also I found articles where she had been in the paper as a debutante, engagement, etc... Her report cards from first grade to grade twelve, stuff from her nursing school time, pictures, letters from friends and boyfriends and on and on. My mother adored my sister. She was her favorite child and I was the bad child. I tossed everything that I had put aside for her as she was very clear she wanted nothing. I did not get any pleasure from that it just broke my heart to get rid of her history. Nothing of mine had been saved and I did not expect it to be.

I had a monster garage sale and almost everything went. I was hugely blessed to have my friend, Deidra and her husband and daughter drive from Memphis to Baton Rouge to help me. I could not have done it without them. I only have a few boxes of leftovers and will take that to a charity donation this week. I was very fortunate to hire a nice, and hard working handy man to fix the house up enough to sell. I will have to thoroughly clean everything. Pictures next time I post.