Isn't it (Un)Romantic

by Charity, Laura, and Rachel

As Charity mentioned in an earlier post, our mother was a hoarder who amassed, among other things, about 15,000 romance novels.  Fifteen thousand.  This was just one of the many oddities about her that we took as normal, a wildly inconsistent normal that never made sense to us, but was the only normal that we were supposed to have.

We could digress about how, during our childhood, our mother repeatedly tried to engage us in activities that she enjoyed, regardless of whether or not we enjoyed them.  She had no idea, because she never really knew us.  The romance novels were her final attempt before her demise, and with Allegra being the good sport that she is, we showed enough interest to satisfy our mother without going off the deep end as she had.  We ended up with one four-foot-high bookcase stuffed with about 200 paperbacks, in our best estimation.  In the end, we'd say that we'd read fewer than half of them.

Fast-forward to 2016.  Our mother has been gone for 16 years. After our mother's death, our father had had the onerous task of donating her books to libraries and such, and he managed to get rid of about 90 to 95 percent of them.  The remaining 1,000 or so ended up in one of the dumpsters that we and our brothers had rented while cleaning out the house after he died.

So why were we still holding on to the books in our own bookcase?  Were they that well-written?  Were we going to read them all?  Were we going to re-read any that we'd already read?  No, no, and no.  Any illusion that we had about the desirability of romance (or sex, for that matter), went out the window a long, long time ago.

The reality is that we have absolutely no reason to keep them.  We have an extensive history of not addressing the status quo until it becomes unbearable.  Having the books around is just one part of the burden that we drag though our life like Sisyphus, hoping naively to get to Point X in healing, only to discover that we're worse off than we thought.

No more.  No more.

A couple of months ago we decided that it was time.  Our plan was to fill as many sturdy shopping bags with the books and take them discreetly to the newspaper-recycling receptacle at our local train station.  We had one condition:  It all had to be done in one trip.  No way would we be dragging this out; it needed to be done in one gigantic heave-ho.

The problem was that we were having a god-awful heat wave with god-awful humidity, for weeks on end.  It wasn't until today, with the weather in the relatively comfortable upper 70s, that we decided to do it.  We'd been stressed out and ungrounded for weeks, feeling like a bunch of us had been thrown into the washer together and pulled out in a big, tangled, limp mess.  Rachel was angrier than usual, and she was pulling others into it.  We had to get this done.

There were way more than 200 books.  The final count was 340.  Three. Hundred. Forty.  The books filled up 14 shopping bags, which took us about half an hour to load and half an hour to unload.  Three or four trains passed through the grade crossing as we stood there tossing books into the dumpster.  Clouds turned heavy and bluish overhead, but we knew that we weren't going to get caught in the rain, because what we were doing was right.

Done.  Gone.  Empty bookcase, at least for now, since we have a number of books on other subjects--our interests--waiting to take their place there.  No more enslavement to the mother we could never have.  And no more collateral damage from our grandmother.  May she rot in hell on a barbecue spit.  We're done dragging ourselves up the hill.