My Mother's Shoes

Mom has a lot of shoes, or rather she use to. So do I. Mom's shoes are different though, because at least half of them are in boxes, unworn and unloved (and I do think of shoes as being loved--even if this makes me a freak). Mom has 67 pairs. I have 29. I know this about Mom's shoes because I had the job of sorting them and deciding what to do with them when my brother and I moved Mom out of her house last March. Mom and my father bought that land in Medina back before it was cool and swank to live in Medina. They bought the land in 1949 when it was thought to be inconvenient if not gauche to live in Bellevue. Because they were short on funds, they bought the land and subdivided, selling off half to pay for the price of their own lot. Then they placed a prefab house on their piece of the land, a humble structure that my father added onto over the years with the work of his own hands. Now, Medina is the land of mega-homes, what my brother and I call the Bellevue Burgers. It's also the land of the techies, as Bill Gates led the way for this inundation with his high security mansion just seven or eight properties up from Mom's.

Mom had to move because the State is widening the SR520 bridge--Mom's property as well as several other neighbors' is just what the State needs to turn that bridge into gigantic sky-way to Seattle. My father would be incredulous, never having imagined that this sleepy suburb of Seattle would become such a hot topic.

So, Mom and her things had to be moved...only not all of her things. Her new house in Clyde Hill just wasn't/isn't big enough to hold it all. Paring down on everything, including shoes, was an imperative. The only problem was that Mom didn't see it this way. For Mom, her "things" were her world--her safety, her protection against senility, loss, old-age and death. Only, if you think about it, "things" are pretty powerless; being objects, they go the way of all possessions--easily disposable, non-permanent, easily alienable and lost.

I've been reading about "compulsive hoarding"--it's for my new book, the novel I am writing about Vinny the vintage collector who has a problem with "things" (she has too many of them and can't stop accumulating). Per the self-help book Overcoming Compulsive Hoarding, people who hoard acquire and save items having little value and then have a very difficult time discarding them. This isn't to say hoarders acquire only valueless things. Rather, hoarders accumulate both the valueless and the valuable and cannot distinguish between. Associated with this characteristic are other unpleasant issues like--fear of running out of things, social isolation, loss of functional space inside the house, gross disorganization--the list goes on.

My mother is/was a compulsive hoarder. If there ever was a doubt, cleaning out her Medina house was the litmus test. 160 boxes of unused stationary. 545 unused greeting cards. 123 unused picture frames, not even taken out of their boxes. Closets full of clothes with price tags still attached. Three entire rooms loaded from floor to ceiling with old newspapers and magazines, all saved with the idea that she would get to them soon. And, as the authors of Overcoming Compulsive Hoarding suggest, all this saving of newspapers/magazines derives out of a fear of accidentally throwing something out of value (e.g. information that one may need to retrieve). While it could be argued that any one of these items has value, at some point the sheer numbers of them begin to be concerning. When my brother, Eric, and I got to the attic, we found our concerns confirmed: Mom had the 3500 foot attic stacked to the ceiling with dusty, dirty rat-infested boxes. Inside each box was an incomprehensible collection of treasure and junk: Mom's wedding scrapbook, for example, along side a filthy rag and a stack of yellowed newspapers and the discards from a junk drawer (items like rubber bands, paper clips, looses change, match books, etc). What could she have been thinking? The juxtapositions of valuable and worthless were dizzying.

Parting a hoarder from her things is a fraught activity, and heartbreaking. Much resentment accumulates. For my mom, this was treacherous ground, as she saw no need to lighten her load, not even if it meant that her "things" would be given to those who needed them more, as one tactful mover remarked. My mother, an unusually compassionate woman, could not see the value in this--she saw her own need for these things as outweighing any others' need for these same things.

My brother and I resorted to subterfuge, something that my mother resented then as now. To this day, she still refers to us as "those people" who "stole" her things. I feel bad about this--aren't we all entitled to dignity in old age? So while I can understand her point, hoarding is a mental illness. Someone who hoards has little to no self-insight about their obsessions. We can't expect Mom to understand her issues, particularly as Alzheimer's had a role in her failure to call it what it is--compulsive hoarding rather than the simple act of collecting what is valuable and precious.

So, Mom's shoes. They are all I can think about just now. There's plenty of other things that happened today besides Mom's shoes. She has OT, where Johna told her she's "making good progress"--the magic words that Medicare needs to hear. She has her hair done with plenty of curls--I'm there this time and make sure that she leaves with gazillions of micro curls dangling from her scalp (notice the photo--Mom is smiling because she just looked in the mirror and, once we get her to open her eyes, she too can see that curls are the coif-du-jour). She has lunch for the first time in the dining room today rather than isolated in her room--it's cheerful in the dining room, lots of sunlight, lots of life. But despite these three milestones, I'm still thinking of Mom's shoes because it occurs to me, as I look at Mom in her chair waiting for her OT, with her feet swollen and skewed at odd angles on the foot rests of her wheelchair, that shoes are the last thing she needs. Most of the time Mom just has socks on her feet. When she does need shoes (and one could ague that she doesn't need them at all as she doesn't walk or even attempt to walk), like when she is transported to therapy, her caregiver, with difficulty, works her running shoes onto her sausage feet, laces them up and off she goes. The irony of this--running shoes for a woman who struggles to sit up much less walk.

This fact of--not needing shoes--strikes me as inexplicable sad, considering how Mom and I have always been terribly interested in shoes. Some women like dresses or coats or pants--Mom and I just love shoes. Really love shoes. When I cleaned out her shoe closets last March, separating her shoes into piles for the estate sale, I couldn't help myself from saving (not hoarding) some of Mom's beautiful unworn shoes. It's not that I will wear them--even as my feet have aged and gotten broader and longer, they still can't fill a size 8 1/2 narrow. These shoes feel familiar, however, as every shoe Mom imported from Europe, I imported the same pair too, only I no longer have mine. My feet expanded a half-a-size, meaning that I long since donated (as in 20 years ago) my shoes to a better cause: battered women who need beautiful shoes to find a job and a new life. So I have these samplings of Mom's shoes in a cloth bag, the kind of bag that commemorates events, conferences, businesses. Inside this rather plain off-white bag with "Washington Mutual" on the side are seven pairs of her shoes. I remember their origins--Paris ("Robert Clergerie"), London ("Next"and "Rider"), New York ("Perry Ellis" and "Ralph Lauren"), Florence (Tivo and Beltrami). I can even remember the uneven streets we pounded everyday till our sore feet were what we referred to as "bloody stumps," all in search of new shoe or culinary or artistic delights. Running my fingers over their expensive leather sides, sniffing my nose into their decorative tooled uppers, is a journey of experience, a sniff of memory--mine and Mom's. The leathers are still soft, pungent...an uncommon pleasure, like what happens when uncorking a good bottle of wine and something delicious escapes for the nose even before the tongue is indulged. I swear, it's like we just walked out of Beltrami's last week with shopping bags in hand. It's a snapshot of who we were together back in the 1980s. A museum piece of sort. And like all museum displays, these shoes are an imperfect representation of Mom, extracted as they are from their context. They lack the love of beauty, the exuberance of discovery that coursed between Mom and I on our adventures. They are, in the end, just consumable objects, "things" Mom has no need for; not now and not later when she travels to another life. The shoes stay here. Mom "walks" away without them.

Still, I'm keeping these shoes, no matter what anyone says. Sometimes "things" do matter.

Deeply, a mother's daughter
--this is alifewithmom--