Yesterday, I wrote about the five different jars of peanut butter that our son Sam bought a couple of days ago.
This morning while I was looking for something in the pantry I found 8 boxes of different teas! Why on earth does a 21-year-old have 8 boxes of tea I wondered.
Granted when Sam gets home after a 12-hour shift as an RN in the emergency room he has to chill out. It takes a while for the adrenaline to go away. He has a snack and a cup of tea before going to bed around 7 am.
Back to the eight boxes of different teas; I threw one box away that was empty. On a side note, this makes me insane when my family leaves empty boxes in the pantry. I take a quick peek before grocery shopping and think we are all set with cereal or other boxed items to find out later we are not. Does this happen to other people? These are smart people I live with, I don’t get it. Why?
The pattern I am seeing is that Sam likes to try different flavors of something and buys them all. Not all at once like the peanut butter, but over a short period of time.
Maybe this freaks me out a little bit because when my mother found something she liked…you got it; she bought in every color and pattern. I am not joking. After she had her stroke and went to a care facility I needed to clean out her apartment and give, donate or sell everything within a month or I’d have to pay another month’s rent.
At first, I was like, “Are you kidding me?” After a while I was shocked. She had four closets packed with clothing plus giant totes filled with the previous season’s clothing. By the end, I was frantic from it all. When I say she had duplicate everything; she did.
After cleaning up that shit show I never wanted to see clothing or shop again. In the end, there were at least 27 giant totes of clothing, handbags, shoes, and accessories which made me weary and sick to my stomach, to be honest.
Don’t get me wrong my peanut butter, tea-drinking man-boy isn’t like this…it just unearthed a painful memory of seeing duplicates again. Yikes!
As for me and tea? I only drink it when I am sick and when I do, it’s just plain old Lipton regular or decaf with a big splash of bourbon or whiskey in it to cure my ailments. You know what? It works!
So interesting as to why people do what they do. On the flip side – my mother was a ‘serial’ cleaner. Nothing was sacred. This is why her four daughters (now well past middle age) have absolutely NOTHING to show for having had a childhood. Sentimental objects such as old report cards, school drawings, notebooks, favorite stuffed animals….GONE. After she passed away I was shocked to actually find our birth certificates. Frankly, I figured they had been sent to the landfill years before. She honestly wasn’t trying to be mean…was just OCD about what she considered clutter. Conversely, I helped clean out my late MIL’s house last year and it was similar to your Mom’s situation. Total nightmare. To this day, I still I wonder if in our quest to donate and/or toss everything away, something of hers will end up on Antique Road Show worth a gazillion dollars.