I have lived in the same apartment for six years but have now successfully moved on. I am a person who is pretty adverse to personal change. Political change, I am all about, but ask me to relocate or give up anything I have held dear and I am overwhelmed. The dread that I felt leading up to moving day cannot be exaggerated. I grew up in the same home my entire life and I’m sure that that contributes in some way to my inflexibility. In actuality, the moving in with the boyfriend part of this process, once decided, was the easiest part. It was more the leaving of fond memories and even more than that, the schlepping of the massive amount of crap in my apartment that had me full of dread and panic. I have been doing purges of my possessions all year long.
You might have gleaned from this blog that along with the normal amount of accumulation that occurs during a six year period, I have my mother, who has contributed a small country’s worth of clothing and knick-knacks. Going through said things has been no small task. When friends would come over to help me purge, the most repeated sentiment of the day was usually: “Oh, my mom gave me that”. My mother herself maintains that she is never moving again. She says the only way she is leaving that house in Connecticut is in a pine box.
Keeping my mom from adding more items to the pile during a move is also a task unto itself. When I first moved into my last place 6 years ago, it was the same thing. My former roommate and childhood friend Maura, recalls that while packing up in Connecticut, my mother would ask me if I needed a particular thing and I would say: “No, I’ll never use that” or “No, I have two of those already”. Then I would walk away and Maura would watch my mother put the item into the car anyway. I only recently discovered that she had snuck not one, but two mattress covers on my old bed, which explains why it sounded like I was sleeping on a diaper for five years. I assure you— I have not wet the bed since my potty-training years. This second mattress cover is just the ideological equivalent to refusing another helping of potatoes from my Ukrainian great-grandmother. “They’re good for you,” she would say as she plopped them onto your plate. More is more, right?
Now, this time around, I did not ask my parents to come up and help. With regards to my dad, I knew better. The last time I moved, my dad was confounded by my mom’s idea that they needed to be there to move me in at all. While I was indifferent, my mom insisted that they both had to come along. Unfortunately for my dad, the move happened to fall on one of the hottest days of the summer and on a day when he also was in the throes of a nasty flu. I remember him carrying a box up the stairwell, covered in sweat and stopping every three steps to catch his breath. That was the day he declared “Never again”. He rallied enough later that day to regale us all with jokes about all the funny Swedish words in the Ikea instructions, but I knew that for this move I did not have to worry about my parents spontaneously descending.
That was until my mother called the morning before and said: “Now… you can say whatever you want, but I’m coming up tomorrow”. When such pronouncements are made, it is best not to argue. It’s like the time she came to visit me during my semester in Rome. The second time she visited the apartment she barreled right in, fixed a dangling curtain, and then cleaned the whole kitchen. My roommate emerged from the kitchen in shock and said: “Katrina, your mother is doing the dishes. I tried to stop her but I couldn’t.” Resistance is futile. And so long as she doesn’t try to re-organize things, you will be okay in the end.
A slew of friends came to help move, which was wonderful. One of them heard me refusing a set of blue and white dishes from my insistent mother. The conversation went something like this:
“Helen was getting rid of these and I thought they were lovely— like toile”
“They’re fine, but I have three sets of dishes as it is”
“For parties?”
“Nope, I’m good.”
“Are you sure you wouldn’t use them?”
“Yep.”
“Not for a big dinner party?”
“Nope.”
“What am I going to do with them?”
Brendan’s family also helped move that day. Brendan’s favorite part of the move-in took place when his mother, looking at my mother’s car, asked her if we had really gotten everything out of it. He and I know better that her backseat is always down and there is almost always random furniture and a toolbox in the back. My mom looked at her confused and said: “Yes, why?”
It has now been over two months, and yes, I have found a plethora of redundant cleaning products that somehow got past me during move-in. During unpacking, roughly one out of every seven boxes belonged to Brendan. Each time I happened to open one of his, I would exclaim; “Wow! This one is yours!”
My Ukrainian genes seem to be kicking in as I get older because I have now said to Brendan several times: “But what if the Queen comes over?” (In actuality, he is the neater of the two of us). As far as domestic co-habitation is concerned, it’s treating us well, but that is perhaps another blogpost for another time.
Yesterday I bought some new picture frames and couldn’t remove the remnants of the price tag on the front. That’s when I discovered a jar of paint thinner under the sink covered in my mom’s handwriting: “Paint thinner- good for sticky stuff, etc.” Thanks Mom.
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