The Definition of Dysfunction

by Charity

The definition of dysfunction is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  I know this firsthand.  I know the struggle to hold on to these behaviors and beliefs, and I know the struggle of wishing for things that can never be.

Today, once again, I made life extremely difficult for Mary and the others.  I'll spare everyone  the details of the struggle, since I've written these things many times before.  The end result is that I made a decision--a choice, Mary says--to dispose of all of the approximately 200 romance novels that sit filling a four-foot-high, two-foot wide bookcase in our bedroom.  All of them.  At the first opportunity.

As I've said before, our mother was a hoarder who accumulated approximately 15,000 romance novels by the time of her death.  Our parents owned a nine-room house, the books filled milk crates that in turn filled five of the nine rooms.  It was like one of those television shows.  Our father was able to get rid of the majority of the books soon after our mother's death, but fourteen years later, we were still throwing them out when we were cleaning out the house.

Very few of the ones on our bookshelf were taken from our mother's hoard.  Most of them we'd bought so we could have something to talk to our mother about.  She had spent a good amount of energy during our childhood looking for interests that we could share, and she'd never really found one.  Stamp collecting, no.  Needlepoint, no.  Coloring books, sometimes, but it was strange having a mother who colored in coloring books.  Our body age is 54 now, and it's taken us until this year to realize that we never really liked our mother.