I can tell her outright that this is not a problem that I personally had when I was growing up. I was kind of a minimalist when I was a teenager, thanks in part to going to a Catholic high school where I was forced to wear a uniform. Saved on lots of clothes issues! I did, however, collect socks. We were allowed to wear really funky (if we wanted to...and I did) socks with our heather colored skirts and white shirts. Funny thing, those socks. I was sorting through a box in my bedroom yesterday ( it has been sitting in my room for three years) and found quite a few pairs of my socks (circa 1974-1975). My girls thought they were a riot! Can you hoard socks?
But I want to go back and sort through all of this. Maybe by telling my story, I will figure out what the hell happened along the way and I can stop paying someone $165 to talk to me for 45 minutes a week.
Let's start with the family. I am the eldest of nine siblings. We didn't have a chance to hoard. There wasn't ever really enough money for essentials, never mind extravagances. I do remember one stuffed animal that I had that I kept hidden in the closet so that none of my sibs could get at it. I also remember flying completely off the handle when my sister, who is three years younger than me, would "borrow" my clothes without asking. I especially loved when she would take one of my bras. I was a solid 34C, she was maybe a 32AA. Nope, we didn't have much. We still like to say that we grew up on love.
But wait! Could that be one of my problems? I didn't have the things that I really wanted so I've tried making up for that in the past 20 years of my life? It could not be less of the truth and certainly not as simple as that. I had no idea how poor we were until much later in my life.
I started "working" when I was 11-years-old. I started babysitting for cash and was always willing to give up time with my friends for the cash. When I was fourteen during my eighth grade year, I worked as a server (we were called waitresses then!) at a little restaurant behind my Catholic grammar school. When I graduated from eighth grade, I worked full time that summer at the rectory where the priests lived. It was awesome! I had never seen so much money all at once. I was making $140/week minus taxes and thought I was rich! Why am I including these work facts? Because once I was making money for myself, I started to shop.
Let's go back a minute to the babysitting. I have to say that I had a few clients that were a little "sleazy". Well, the dads were. But I kept at it because I had discovered the joys of 45's. For those of you unfamiliar, we used to have these huge, round things called turntables where you could play a "record". The records were either 45's (about 6" across) or 33's which were probably 12" across. But yeah, I found out about 45's and I would happily take some of my earnings every couple of weeks and buy records. They were my most prized possessions. And then, two weeks before my 13th birthday, our house was gutted by a fire. You know what the first thing I noticed when we were allowed to go into the house the next day? My pile of 45's that was stacked up on my mom's stereo cabinet had melted down from a pile of probably 16" tall to a flat, black mess that was completely unrecognizable.
I'm stopping again. I'm sure some therapist out there would say that the trauma of having worked hard (and with sleazy dads...gross) would certainly point me in the direction of hoarding. But not yet. I, and my brother that is a year younger than me, decided to sell "tours" of the burned out wreckage of our house. And eventually, we would sell tours of the re-build. We got tons of kids to give us money to go into the house and look around. And I kept babysitting. And I started my collection over. I still have a bushel basket full of 45's in my basement.
Would someone really expect me to give those up? The hard work, the entrepreneurial spirit, the shear joy of being able to do that for myself? Yep, it's what they expect of me.
Next time: How I Survived Catholic School
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