My mother was an avid collector of…well everything it seems. Sometimes the collections were cool, or even useful. Like the glass apothecary jars, she would buy at garage sales and the flea market. She had hundreds of them, in every size possible, but they all served a purpose, and they were neatly displayed on shelving in our kitchen. Used as canisters, they held our flour, sugar, cornmeal, tea, coffee, baking soda, and everything else you can think of, right down to the cinnamon, nutmeg, and cayenne pepper. Whenever Mom bought kitchen staples, she carefully dumped the contents of the box, bag, or can into the jars, labeled them, and put them on the shelf in order by size and priority (flour, then sugar, as per tradition) or alphabetically (the spices). I thought it was so cool. I never gave any thought to the idea that it might be an early warning sign of much bigger problems.
My mother was always a bit obsessive about things. If she had a hobby, she was all-in…at least until she got tired of it. She was even known to record a song over and over on both sides of a cassette tape so she could have it on repeat ad nauseam. I couldn’t listen to the theme song from Grease for years after that torture. We laughed about it then; we thought she was just quirky.
In the podcast this week, we talked about her obsession with buying collectibles. These collections started for herself…Kiss memorabilia, NASCAR gear (especially Rusty Wallace), and shoes. Oh, the shoes! If she found a pair she liked, she would buy them in every color available. The same went for pants and blouses, too. They would all be identical (or nearly so) but in different colors.
Mom also started collecting things for other people. I think I mentioned on the podcast that she started my sister on a black-and-white-spotted cow collection. After a neighbor gave me a few sunflower-themed dishes, she started buying anything with sunflowers on it to give to me. She did the same with piano and music-themed items for my husband. She even turned a vinyl LP album into a clock for him once. I think, in her mind at least, she knew that he is a musician and so he must love all things related to music. That’s the way her brain works.
In more recent years, as we have learned more about autism, we’ve come to understand that many of these traits are indicators of someone who is on the spectrum, and sometimes a harbinger of things to come. Although she has never been formally diagnosed with autism, Mom eventually started showing the tell-tale signs of memory loss and fixation that come with the mental disorder known as dementia, which, like the autism spectrum, isn’t really just one thing, but rather a lot of very similar behaviors and conditions all lumped together in an easy to label box. Part of me wonders if the two are related, or if not, what impact the two conditions have on each other. Mom’s condition deteriorated rapidly after my father and sister died, and with no one keeping her behaviors in check, she was hoarding. I don’t know if autism and dementia are related, but I do know that autism had an effect on her dementia and vice versa. Autism created challenges in communicating with her about dementia, and because she interpreted everything so literally, she had no understanding of nuance or degrees. Everything was black or white…there was no middle ground. Her dementia made it hard to set routines, an invaluable tactic for people on the spectrum. It also made it useless to reason with her, since the reasoning part of her brain is what has been damaged.
Last weekend, we celebrated my mother’s 75th birthday. We all bought her gifts of the things she is currently most obsessed with: word search puzzles, odd and fun pens, and stuffed animals. She has quite a collection of them all, and my family happily acquires them for her. It’s what she would have done for us. Now, I just hope that the things I collect don’t become an obsession. I look around my office, and I wonder….
No comments:
Post a Comment