My Mom Isn’t a Hoarder. She’s a Keeper of Our Family History

I get unparalleled satisfaction out of Ajax-ing my bathroom sink pure white. I feel a sense of accomplishment when I use my partner’s custom glass cleaner solution on the mirror, resulting in a streak-free surface. Forget an annual spring cleaning. Decluttering my room — ridding it of dust, disorganization, and chaos — is the perfect way to end my week. Without this routine, I feel restless at night, unproductive, and cranky. 

After years of living away from home, I’ve begun to realize that my need to inhabit a neat space is a direct response — even rejection — to how I grew up. Left to their own devices, neither of my parents, but especially my mom, were too skilled at organization. My mom tends to keep anything with sentimental value: my baby clothes, toys, drawings, report cards, and yearbooks. 

She also has a hard time letting go of items that don’t hold any meaning to her: shoes she’s never worn, boxes of work documents and files that no longer serve any purpose, photo albums that she hasn’t perused in years, and food items that are past their expiration date. Even if it benefits her, she hates throwing things away, held back by the distant possibility that we might need it again someday and will regret getting rid of it. 

Sometimes, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of stuff, she would have me declutter certain areas of the house, but she had trouble relinquishing control. Once, when I accidentally threw away a plastic bag with locks of hair, she made me dig through the trash — by then filled with old Q-tips, tissues, and bottles — to fish out the ponytail. The bag held her tresses from her first-ever haircut. She has held onto this hair for decades, taking it from her childhood home to the house she now shares with my dad.  

I grew up constantly surrounded by clutter. While my mom, dad, and I were close, there was no room for us, and it affected us emotionally. We were stressed, tense, and exhausted. We even stopped having parties to keep the rest of the family from openly criticizing my mom for what they described as hoarding. Young and impressionable, I joined in, nagging my mom for her piles. I wanted to shame her into changing. I thought I was helping her.

At that point, I couldn’t see the truth: My father grew up in a financially unstable household, and my mom had an emotionally distant mother. When they found themselves in a situation where they could buy, accrue, and become attached to things without consequence, they didn’t have the skills to manage their belongings. I wasn’t much help either. I left my dirty dishes in the sink and refused to sweep and mop communal areas. But I couldn’t help it, feeling like if I did help clean up, she wouldn’t like the way I did it or I would accidentally throw something away and get in trouble again. 

I felt out of control in the rest of my home. My bedroom, however, was mine. By the time I reached puberty, I became determined to transform my room into a paragon of cleanliness. For fun, I watched YouTube videos and learned how to organize everything from a pencil case to a kitchen cabinet. While other kids went to the movies with friends on weekends, I was home sorting my DVDs and organizing my bookcase. Later on in college, I was the roommate who scrubbed the bathroom tiles and threw out old leftovers from the fridge. Fearing I would become like my mom, with a house overrun with stuff, I obsessed over keeping my spaces tidy.

It was only two years ago that I began to see things differently. I’m not sure if it was because my mom started remodeling her house and putting in the work to make it beautiful or if it was just that I was growing up. But one day when I was visiting, I went into the garage, arguably the worst part of the house that is off limits to guests, and found my old American Girl dolls on a shelf, still in their boxes, dusty but in perfect condition. At that moment, instead of being frustrated, I was grateful that she had never thrown away this huge part of my childhood. Despite all of my griping, she had held onto these things because they had been important to me once, almost like she knew that they would one day become so again. 

Sure, there were some things we could have lived without. And yes, we could do a better job of fighting against our materialistic consumption. But my mom, I now know, has never really been a hoarder. She’s someone who has a deep, emotional reverence for the past, who values the little things in life that so many of us find easy to leave behind. 

In many ways, I see her as an archivist, a documentarian, a keeper of our family history, a storyteller who remembers every backstory and memory of any object or photo she has in her collection, from a rainbow poncho I wore every day in the first grade to every numbered birthday candle she’s lit on my cakes since I was 1. Sometimes, she still pulls out that bag of candles and reminisces about how fast and how much I’ve grown, and I’m grateful there is someone who will always remember.

Because of her, I’ve learned that there are some things worth keeping for the sake of record and memory, not only for our family now but for all the generations who will come after us, especially at a time when physical media is fading. 

While I might always be decluttering, I’m learning to be okay with a little bit of mess and gathering clothes, craft supplies, and everything else in between that matters to me. I print out photos instead of storing them solely on my phone, put my letters and notebooks in a box, keep books I know I’ll never read in the hope that someday, I can give my future family something of me to hold onto. 

I do this because our lives are worth remembering. Because we have earned the right to leave behind a mark of ourselves on the earth. And because, despite everything, my mom may actually be the best person I could ever imagine becoming.