Budding Shopaholic

It's a typical Monday evening. Daughter and I drop off Bar Mitzvahzilla at his tutoring and then, since we're stuck in North Scottsdale for an hour, I drive over to a shopping center that has a rare treat: a Nordstrom Rack.

But first I have to convince the twelve-year-old. Somehow I've raised a non-shopper. She doesn't want to go clothes shopping, she declares. She'd rather go to Michael's and buy more craft project items that we'll never use and end up stuffing in a closet somewhere.

I drag her in there and get ready to do some power shopping, or at least power looking. By then we only have about half an hour before we have to get back to pick up Bar Mitzvahzilla so map out my shopping expedition well. I decide I can only handle a foray through the shoe department.

Well, lucky me. Daughter and I are the same shoe size suddenly. Both 7s.

Then something happens. While I'm looking, and eliminating, and eventually buying nothing at all, Daughter has a tweeny/teeny moment. She has a moment in which she suddenly bursts from being a gangly, wild, child thing into being a woman.

Basically, she commandeers the cart, careens through the shoe department and picks out about twenty pairs of shoes.

I nod my head knowingly. I knew the shoe gene - not to mention the shopaholic gene - had to be passed down somewhere. She might have been pretending all these years with her resistance to shopping but look what happened when I got her in that forest of shoe racks! Though, of course, I can't buy her twenty pairs of shoes. Turns out that right at that moment that she's turning into me I turn into my own father. I say, "What do you think - I'm made out of money?" Neither of us has ever heard me say this before. She has to eliminate all but one pair.

The next week, I tell her we should go to Old Navy for our break during tutoring. She gives me a thunderous look. She doesn't want to go. She can't stand to go. Why does she have --

She walks in, sniffs the air, and immediately starts stacking clothes in my hand. The next thing I know she's in the dressing room.

Born of a shopaholic and a cheapskate, she'll never know a moment's peace. And neither will I.

Are you a shopper or frugal? Have you ever noticed that you've passed those traits on to your children? Are you turning into your own parents?

Thanks for reading,
Linda Pressman, Author of Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie

My Mother's Closet (a Faceshuk post)

Daughter is now twelve. This means a few things. Like she's sprouted up to over 5'3. (Though, somehow, she still only weighs 89 pounds...) It also means adolescence - female adolescence - has set in causing her to fight with me each day like I fought with my mother before me.

But it also means this: her clothes doesn't fit anymore or they're too babyish, or not cool enough, or any of a thousand other reasons she can no longer wear them. She stomps into my bathroom while I'm getting ready each morning, says she needs to go shopping, and then goes shopping. Right then. In my closet.

On the one hand I know I should be pretty grateful she wants to go in there. I am 39 years older than her, after all. Also, I'm glad that we actually fit in some of the same clothes especially since I don't weigh anywhere near 89 pounds. But what's the chance of me having anything hip enough for her?

Turns out that the clothes that are now too young for me are just the right age for her. The clothes I monitor carefully, aware that there's a thin line between dressing well and looking like I'm longing for the 1970s and my own teen years. The stuff that doesn't make the cut gets trotted out for the tween.

This wasn't something I could do when I was a kid in Skokie. First of all, even if our mother's clothes had been attractive to us, I had five older sisters who would have gotten there first. Second, her clothes were never going to appeal to us. I was 12 in 1972, for goodness sakes. I wanted - needed - hippyish clothes, maybe a leather bandanna for my forehead, a halter top, bell bottom baggy jeans, maybe a fringed vest.

My mother's closet was not the place to find these items. The most noticeable thing upon opening its door was the smell of mothballs. Then there were the brocade dresses, the handmade suits, the torturous pumps, the foundation garments. My mother's clothes could actually stand up and walk around by themselves, they were that stiff, they didn't need a human body in them. For a free-wheeling 12-year-old who didn't want to dress like Jackie Onassis, that wasn't the look I was going for.

But here in Scottsdale, in 2011, with a mom who writes at home and has her professional clothes gathered neatly in one side of the closet, it's a windfall for the kid. She looks around at the clothes I think would be perfect for her, rejects them all, steals my favorite top off its hanger and sneaks off before I completely notice what she's doing.

As I'm exiting the bathroom I notice another thing: Bar Mitzvahzilla coming in half-dressed, insisting he also has no clothes to wear. The last thing I see is him heading off to his own shopping spree - in Husband's closet.

Did you ever "shop" in your mom's or sister's closets? Can you? Does your daughter "shop" in yours?

Thanks for reading!
Linda Pressman, author of Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie
Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Indiebound, in many local libraries, and at Changing Hands in Tempe.
(The "Faceshuk" in the title and this code: 3daa678fe7c57f042a0645dfc6668578 are intended to establish my blog ownership on the Faceshuk site. Check it out!)

The 'F' Word: Football

Today was the NFL Draft. I mention this not because I care, or for some reason I actually watched it, but because it means that football is coming. It's unavoidable, marching inexorably closer and closer to me with each passing day. The first sign? The NFL Draft. Then sometime in the middle of innocently enjoying the one hundred fifteen degree days of my Arizona summer, a TV set will suddenly flick on and that'll be it. Pre-season looping into the regular season and the endless fascination around here with All Things Football.

Husband has something else to be especially gleeful about this year: high school football. Bar Mitzvahzilla is already training to be a punter for the high school team.

Since somehow, even though he's still in eighth grade, Bar Mitzvahzilla is already in a "kicking clinic," I had to take him shopping to buy some football cleats. Of course, I wanted him to just use his soccer cleats and call it a day, but it turns out that's unthinkable. There are actually very specific, different, cleats for Baseball, Soccer, and Football, and they're differentiated by something elusive in the pointiness and spacing of the spikes. What do I know? I was a hippie in high school.

Here's something else I learned: when the male Sales Associates at Sports Authority found out that Bar Mitzvahzilla would be playing high school football, they all got starry-eyed. You would've thought Bar Mitzvahzilla was Joe Montana. Here's my son, the computer game addict, the ten-year-old in a teenager's body, being fawned over by these grown men. My son as an object of adoration, and for something he hasn't even done yet. And for something that has a bit more to do with brawn than brains. The hippie inside me cringed.

So there will be no peace for me. Football on TV day and night and actual live football games requiring the attendance of a real flesh and blood mother - an enthusiastic mother - on the other days.

How's your sports enthusiasm? Do you watch the NFL Draft? Have you ever watched your child get admired for something and realized how completely separate he/she is from you as they're growing up?  What was your "label" in high school?

Purse of Shame

Well, I've really been dragging my feet ever since Maria of Mother of Three Seeks Sanity tagged me on What's In Your Bag. I guess I didn't want to admit that I'm stupid enough to carry a purse that costs as much as a small Caribbean island. Nor did I want to admit that I'm stupid enough to carry a purse that one of my children could actually hop inside if they need to, but that by itself can easily dislocate my shoulder. But here I am, finally, shame-faced, with my purse, the Louis Vuitton Galleria Bag, which I love.

I think I've written before about my little teensy, weensy shopaholic problem, right? Also, about how, being raised by the Holocaust Survivor immigrants, who wouldn't pay for anything but food or shelter, I then ended up, after my dad's death, a member of probably the only Jewish family in Scottsdale receiving food stamps?  These things have quite an impact on the heart of a girl. Once I had a little bit of money, I always had a decent purse, and a matching wallet and planner. And eyeglass case. And key chain. And then another purse when I got sick of the first purse. (About this time, people start feeling really sorry for Husband. I know.) 

Now for the inside. Here's what came out when I dumped it:

Really. This is the purse you don't go into without a flashlight. The purse you venture near in fear of coming out alive. Will your hand get bitten off by an animal that crawled in by mistake and has now built a nest in its interior? Could there be a family of vagrants in there? Can it double as a flotation device? Or is it like Mary Poppins' purse - will I one day pull out a lamp from there?

Anyway, that's the accumulated paper from several weeks of lists I lost (there they are!) and receipts for restaurants or returns or whatever shopaholics do when they're avoiding writing.

Then I cleaned up all the garbage and came up with this:

1) Yes, not only am I big enough idiot to spend top dollar for a Louis Vuitton purse, but I've also spent top dollar for the matching accessories - wallet, checkbook, eyeglass case and keychain (and agenda - not shown)- but, hey, I only had to buy them once. You should have seen me when I carried Dooney & Bourke back in the duck days - I had to buy everything in each color.

2) Two Jazzercise membership cards for my two locations. 

3) My little pal, the BlackBerry, which has enslaved me to its blinking light.

4) My mini Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous because I'm a twelve-stepper for my weight. Obviously not a twelve-stepper for my shopping yet! One addiction at a time, right?

5) Weight Watchers Point Calculator because even in my program you have to have a food plan and mine is WW points and has been for 10 years.

6) Lactase for lactose intolerance in clear containeer, inhaler for asthma, some headache pills in blue container for husband. (I know, he should carry his own purse.)

7) Floss sticks, lipstick, mirror, hair ties, tissues and manicure kit. None of which I can ever find.

8) Husband's reading glasses (should I get him his own Louis Vuitton eyeglass case?)

9) Back up house and car keys because I'm stupid enough to have locked myself out of my house before but neurotic enough to immediately be able to whip out the backup keys and get back in.

10) Missing: my notebook. I wrote down a great idea for a story, brought it into my office and forgot to put it back.

Also missing: all of our money.

I'll pass the fun (and humiliation) along to these friends:

TKW from The Kitchen Witch,

Terry from The First Day of the Rest of My Life,

Amber of Making the Moments Count,

BLW from Big Little Wolf's Daily Plate of Crazy (tell me your bag's French, Wolfie!), and to

Ellen at Weighting Around. 

Are you a "purse person?" Do you need everything to match? Do you spend too much on one particular item in your wardrobe and then nearly nothing on the rest? What's hiding in your bag?

Shopping Like an Eastern European

Most of the year I'm a pretty normal American woman. I look normal. I dress in a fairly normal manner. I walk in grocery stores and have a vaguely normal shopping list.

Then Passover comes along and any normalcy is ripped away to reveal my true nature: I'm an Eastern European Jew with a penchant for fatty food.

How did I become my mother, or, rather, my grandmother? How did I get so fascinated with the butchers at all the grocery stores in town, interrogating the staff about their briskets, the weights, when they're expected, and, by the way, they wouldn't happen to have a shank bone just laying around, would they?

Shopping for Passover is like being on the worst scavenger hunt you will ever be on in your whole life. I have a shopping list that looks like it was compiled in medieval Poland:  fatty beef, liver, gefilte fish, eggs, potatoes, matzah, Kosher-for-Passover wine, horseradish, and, yes, shank bones. Then I take that list and try to find those items so I can spend days peering into large cauldrons skimming fat globules off the food I'll be excited to eat the night of our seder. 

While I'm out on this quest, I run into the rest of the world. They're having somewhat more fun than I am. They are playing. I mean, I know they'll go to church on Easter Sunday, but before that happens, there's a good time to be had. They're dyeing Easter eggs, buying Easter baskets, eating chocolate bunnies, having Easter egg hunts, and buying their daughters lovely, pastel Easter dresses.

I find the last thing on my list, horseradish root - a gnarled mess in my medieval grip- and head for home. 

Do you ever have to shop for things that seem a little, um, medieval? Scavenger Hunts at grocery stores? How are your Passover or Easter preparations going?

Fork Over the Forks

I unloaded the dishwasher yesterday and, just to aggravate myself, I counted the forks. Why would I do this, you ask? Well, when you know you had a complete set of twelve place settings of an expensive Oneida set,  painstakingly purchased one place setting a month over an entire year, and then notice that the silverware drawer is becoming increasingly empty over time, it makes a mother suspicious.

So I counted. I'm missing nine forks.  

And what does this mean? It means that my careless, spoiled children have thrown away the forks as they've cleaned off their dishes, or thrown out the paper plates they've used.  

I had this dream of having really nice silverware - probably some Jewish genetic thing, hand in hand with my desire for good china, a gigantic house, and a really big diamond. So far, all I had was the silverware. And the silverware had to be of some heft, not the tinny stuff you find in cafeterias, not the haphazard stuff we had at my house growing up, whatever my mother got from S&H Green Stamps along with whatever people left at our house on the holidays and she purloined. My mother, after all, was coming at this from a different perspective. Any time she wasn't starving in the forest like she did during World War II was good, eating with anything that wasn't her hands was good. Obviously, she didn't have my utensil needs.

So about ten years ago I made a plan. Each month I took $42.00 and bought one place setting and put it away until the end of the year when I had the entire set and we began using them. Of course, what I failed to consider was that by then we also had children. Children who would've been better off eating with their hands. Hence, nine forks gone a missing.

I know I should be a little more optimistic. I mean, knowing our house and the general disorganization and what the kids' bedrooms look like, the missing forks could be anywhere. They might just be stuck under a piece of furniture, maybe welded to the carpeting along with a mass of sticky food or something. They could be lying forgotten inside an old lunchbox, or nine old lunchboxes.

But I don't think so. I think that in my kids' constant juggling of the dual demands of parents wanting washed off plates and cleaned off spots at the kitchen table and their own desire to frantically return to whatever they were doing (TV, gaming, playing outside) they simply dumped the whole thing in the garbage. I'm probably lucky I have any dishes left.

Wait a minute. Should I count the dishes?

How bad is the missing item situation in your household? How about the broken item situation? Are you missing an inordinate amount of one thing that the kids use mostly?

Old Money Bags

Husband had a Big Birthday yesterday. While I blab about my upcoming 50th birthday all over the place,  he's a little more touchy about his which is - do the math - five years older than me.

We did all the obligatory family celebratory things: Bar Mitzvahzilla, Daughter and I all drew him handmade cards. We planned a romantic, candlelit dinner, but then realized the kids wanted to come along. They were unsympathetic to our desire to be alone. Weren't we alone every single night at bedtime?

Then, after our celebration was through, it was time for Husband's Lamentation, a yearly ritual he must go through, tormenting both himself and me about why he's not a millionaire yet.

I don't know if this is just a guy thing, but each birthday since Husband was about 45 he has moaned and groaned about how rich he should have been by each respective age. Millions and millions of imaginary dollars should have been in the bank, apparently. And, again apparently, as he casts a withering glance my way, it's all my fault.

I have to withstand the glare because I guess it's true. I've spent all the money. I don't think it would have been millions, but I'm responsible for some significant portion of frittering. Over seventeen years of marriage, who knows how much?

There's the ill-advised vintage Barbie collection in our den gathering dust, something that seemed like a good idea twelve years ago when I was in my second bout of infertility inbetween having the kids. There's the fact that we have enough furniture in the house to fill a house twice this size, that there are enough pictures standing along walls to fill walls twice as high, and the fact that I have enough clothes - all from sales racks - to change my shirt several times a day and never run out.

But here's how men and women are different. When I hit my birthday each year I think, "I should have had a book published by now," or some other miserable writing related mantra. I never think that I should have been a millionaire. Truly, growing up with as much deprivation as I did, I'm amazed every day that I have any money at all. Only a man would think that.

I try to look on Husband lovingly and benevolently during this time period because I know it's tough on him, this longing for Money That Never Was. And I can afford to be nice right now anyway. For this six-week time period, from January 22 to March 7th each year, I'm actually six years younger than him each year instead of five, a youthful babe to his doddering old man. Who can blame him for festering?

Do you have an achievement lurking in your mind that you expect to accomplish by a certain age?  Does your spouse or partner have a completely different goal? Is it monetary, fame, success, love, happiness, or what? 

Heads Up

I'm wandering through a party store yesterday alone, up and down the aisles. Somewhere in the store is Daughter and her best friend. They've ditched me in a mad rush to cover more ground. I'm a slow-moving adult.

I gave them two choices of where we could go to buy a few cheap trinkets for them to play with. There was the dollar store or the party store. They chose the party store because of all the dress up stuff, and the wonderful opportunity to make fun of me - there's a gigantic 50th birthday aisle filled with geriatric devices that they pull out to humiliate me in advance of my 50th birthday in March. I especially like the bra with pulleys and springs. Little do they know I've needed that one for years.

But I'm alone when I discover the treasure trove that we end up buying. I schlep back to the front of the store to get a cart it's so perfect, so wonderful, that I need many of them. What is it? Styrofoam wig heads. Fifty cents each.

What can I do with a styrofoam head? What can't I do? The girls can paint them. I can mosaic them. Bar Mitzvahzilla can bring them to his friend's house and shoot them with air soft guns (though I'm only willing to sacrifice one to this waste). As a woman with, at best, half a head in working order at any time, I know I need some support. I need these heads.

But first we have to get them to the cashier and then out of the store. We put fourteen in the shopping cart. It kind of looks a little weird, I'm aware of that - bodyless, chopped off heads, all pale and staring. It's a little gory, unusual for me since I have a low scare threshold. But for art, for the dream of art, for a three-dimensional canvas? For that I'll load up a pile of heads.

I carry four heads at a time into the house, one under each arm, one in each hand. A head drops and rolls in the garage. I think of the movie Rear Window and look surreptitiously at my neighbors' houses to see if anyone's watching me. I pick up the head and get inside.

Later I'm driving Daughter and her friend to the friend's house where they'll spend the evening. They're both going to paint their heads to resemble the boys they have crushes on. Suddenly they both get really quiet. I look in the backseat and catch them kissing the styrofoam lips.

Okay, then. I guess they can be used for that too.
___________________________________________
Thank you to Kristin over at Motherese for awarding me the Happy 101 blogger award, my first ever! This post encompasses many of the things that makes me happy: my daughter, her best friend, whom she's known since the baby room at her preschool, art, the dream of art, my son and how he'll always turn things on their head because of, well, testosterone.

I pass the award on to a blogger who, though I've just found her, never fails to bring a smile to my face: Charlotte of Memories for Later. Thanks, Charlotte for your humor-filled posts and for reminding me that just because our particulars are different, we are very much the same inside.

Please click on this link to donate to the Save the Children Fund for Haiti, or you may donate to the Red Cross through this link. This blog is part of the Help Haiti blog challenge and will be donating $2 for each blog comment entered from 1-15-10 through 1-20-10, including my own responses.

Shopping Till Midnight

Even though I'm Jewish and Hanukah's over, I've got to admit it:  I'm still shopping. I love shopping in the days leading up to Christmas.

Here's the truth:  It's the only time of the year when the entire world shops the way I do all year long.  And, even better, the stores are along for the ride - coupon specials every day!  Stores open till midnight!  Extra store clerks everywhere you look!  It's a shopaholics paradise.

I used to work in downtown Phoenix and got stuck in huge traffic jams driving on my way to work every day.  What amazed me was that right when all of us downtown workers were heading to our jobs every morning during rush hour, there'd be all these people who had no business being on the road - like tourists or retired people - during rush hour too, just clogging the place up.  That's how I feel sometimes, being a Jew shopping after Hanukkah's over with the Christmas shoppers.  Shouldn't I really stay home and stay out of their way?  Why am I enjoying the ambience of the frenzied shoppers when I really have no business being out there?

Here's the secret about this midnight pre-Christmas shopping:  there's actually no one in the stores.  Well, there's me and the store clerks all restocking for the shopping bonanzas of the next day.  At least in Phoenix - and I've tested this quite a few times now - the idea that the stores are staying open for throngs of shoppers to stay in there is a misconception.  There's only me, really.

I can always find a legitimate reason to be in there.  This week it's kind of important:  snow gear for the family to head up to Flagstaff for our annual jaunt out of town when Husband closes our store. So I need to be shopping, really.  And, other than the midnight shopping, I really need to be out there with everyone running amuck, with all my awesome coupons clutched in my hand, all the lines stretched out before me. 

And, no, I don't need a gift receipt.  Or a box.

Cursed Purses

As usual, I'm hiding something in my closet.  Being a compulsive shopper means that I'm always hiding something, normally behind the large, pink-zippered bag that holds my now-seventeen-year-old wedding dress.  That bag is so big and bulky it will hide anything.  Then I wait for just the perfect moment to reveal the newest incredibly dumb purchase.

What's the purchase this time?  A purse. 

It started like this:  I had to go to the rich, snooty mall in town to get my planner refill - one of the stores there is the only one that sells it.  I was only going to get the planner, that's it.  I knew I'd be down in the area right after my writing class last Thursday.  1st problem:  when I left the house I took some cash with me "just in case."  2nd problem:  I had looked up the website the day before to see if any of their new handbag styles caught my eye.

Here's what happened.  I walked in, got the planner.  Cast wistful eyes at the handbags while lurking around the glass display cases.  Asked to see one particular bag.  Tried it on.  Tried it on with my stuff in it.  Clerk convinced me that even my netbook could fit in it since it's the size of a pice of luggage.  Imagined how my life could change from carrying this purse with my netbook in it.  Bought the bag.

I blame this cursed purse obsession on the poverty of my teen years, the majority of which were spent hanging up on collection agents, perhaps a unique experience for a Jewish family.  To have a similar experience you'd have to have a father who died suddenly with no life insurance, a store that went bankrupt, a mother with no income, and a bunch of debt.  Let's put it this way, when I was fifteen I put a coat on layaway.  I finally got it when I was sixteen, just in time for the following winter. It was out of style by then and I had gained forty pounds.

So tomorrow I'll just own up to it, shove over the pink wedding dress bag, and take it out and enjoy it.

Either that or return it.

I Drive, She Whines

On Saturday, Daughter and I dropped Bar Mitzvahzilla off at his cousins' house far, far, far across Phoenix. It's a multi-freeway drive to get there, but Bar Mitzvahzilla was going to have a complete nervous breakdown unless he got to go.

This is because things are pretty cool over there. Unlike our house, which is like a lockdown prison since we took away his PlayStation, over at his cousins' house he gets to game until his eyes roll back in his head or until his thumbs sieze up in attacks of tendonitis. First he and his two cousins murder and commit mayhem on the XBox or PlayStation 3 and then, when they're done killing on the screen, they grab their Nerf guns and stalk each other down the hallways of the house. This is supposed to be fun.

But once we got there and he flew out of the car, after he and Daughter battled the whole way there, it was just Daughter and I out for the day with a little extra time. I immediately thought, Free time!  No teenager nagging me to death. A world of possibilities opened up.  Should Daughter and I go shopping to a far away store?  Should we go hiking on one of the pretty Arizona mountains?  Should we go for a drive, a walk, have a nice chat?

Instead, here's what happened. I drive, she whines. First there's some vague headachey thing going on. Then she decides she's hungry.  Then she decides she's getting carsick.  There's a little vague moaning. Does she want to shop?  No. Hike? No. Drive, Walk, Chat?  No, no, no. 

So I drive, she whines, all the way home.

Pharmacist Amnesia

I'm at the pharmacy. I've spent a lot of time here over the years. I'm not only on the auto refill program but normally when I get up to the counter the pharmacy tech needs a hand truck to get my prescriptions from behind the counter to me.

But there's one thing always interesting about me and my pharmacy experience:  they never know who I am.  Everyday is a new day of pharmacy clerk amnesia.

I could stop by there every day of the week - and I'm not exaggerating - to pick up medicine and each time I am asked for my name. Then I'm asked to spell my name. Since I apparently have a lisp of some type - a surprise to me - I am asked over and over again to repeat the letters S and F that may be in my name or address. There are five.

This is all done by Nice Clerk. Nemesis Clerk handles the customers before me with a friendliness that makes me get a little enthused about getting up to the counter. I'm ready to banter! I'm ready to commiserate! I'm pretty much ready to bark like a dog and roll over, anything to keep Nemesis Clerk happy.  But when I get up there, his demeanor has changed. He looks at me with dull eyes, a flat mouth. "Spell your name," he says. Then, "Is that S as in Susan or F as in Frank?"

It's like Communist Russia here in the tundra of the pharmacy counter. There's no arguing with Nemesis Clerk. He's got a mean streak and I know which side of the counter I'm standing on. He's on the side with my medicine.

When I was a kid in Skokie, we had an excellent relationship with the mom and pop pharmacy near our house.  If anyone in our family experimented with shoplifting, the eagle eyes of the owner's wife would spot us doing it, make a note of the item stolen, and quickly add the item onto our mother's charge account.  My mother, oblivious, paid and was probably happy no police were involved.  We grew up in the aisles, moving from chocolate bars to Kotex pads to cigarettes as we got older.

Once I got asthma, if I ran out of medicine, the pharmacist would spot me a few pills till I could get a new prescription instead of letting me die.  That was nice.  Especially because my mother wasn't so good at this whole thing - like figuring out when I was going to run out of medicine and stop breathing.  This was a good arrangement.  So much easier than arranging my funeral, that is.

This pharmacy?  I've gone here over twenty years.  They have no idea who I am.  I spell my name, lisping through the letters.  Nemesis Pharmacy Tech heaves over my package.  I leave clutching my medication.

Threadbare

My mother calls me up. Because her TV's on so loud, she yells into the phone, "Do you have any old towels? Bob and I are going up to the cabin tomorrow and we need new towels."

Now, if anyone else asked me for old towels I'd think maybe it's for a project or for cleaning a car, or maybe drop cloths are needed for some reason. But not with my mom. Just like she said: my old towels are her new towels. She's trolling for my cast offs.

I tell her I have to think about it and I do. I have to examine my towels to see if it's time to give them away.

One time I was over at her house and I made the mistake of opening her linen closet. This is the house we bought in the wilds of North Scottsdale when our whole family moved here in 1973 from Skokie, but from looking at the collection of towels in her linen closet it didn't look like my mother had cleaned it out since the day we moved in. It also didn't look like she had left anything behind in Chicago. It was like being transported back in time. All the towels we had in the 1960s were in there. It was like a time capsule. Does my mother ever throw anything out?

I'm pretty sure my mother's never bought a towel in her lifetime. Since we owned a laundry in Chicago, maybe she got her first towels from the ones that simply showed up at the laundry loose or got separated from a customer's wash, instantly becoming part of our motley household towel collection. And here they are still: in 2009 Scottsdale, threadbare - vintage maybe.

One time, when I was first meeting my husband's family and we were staying with my sister-in-law, I was about to take a shower so I asked her for a towel. She handed me a pile of rags. I looked down at it, actually not comprehending why she had handed me these schmattas. Maybe she needed me to do the dishes before I got in the shower? Scrub the windows? The toilet? But she said, "It's your towel." I held it up and I could see through it, it was so threadbare. Both my husband and sister-in-law then looked at me completely straight-faced and said, "Towels only get soft when they're threadbare."

So, since it's obviously genetic, this predisposition to using things until they disintegrate in my hands, I guard against it by making sure I buy new towels once every two years. How do I know when it's time to get them? Easy. It's like clockwork - exactly when my mother calls asking for the old ones.

Crowned

Since I'm slowly turning into my mother, it was only a matter of time until I acted just like her when shopping.

Since I'm a compulsive shopper, I somehow always think of something to go shopping for after my morning exercise class. This is my favorite way to waste the rest of my morning and put off chores and writing. And anyway, I have a coupon. Of course, I have many coupons from being every store's favorite customer. So I get to the store and shop. I have a goal: I have to hit $75 in order to validate the coupon. I end up buying some longish, fleece shorts for Skinny Stick Daughter in a size seven even though she's ten-years-old. Even though they're a size seven, I'm still not sure they're going to fit her, but if I go any smaller than a seven I'll end up in the toddler department.

I bring them home and she puts the first pair on. I look at her admiringly. They look fantastic! I'm aglow. Not only that, but after the coupon and the sale price and the incentives and the other markdowns, the store practically paid me to take them away! They cost $3.52 each! I'm kvelling at my genius and how gorgeous she looks in them!

Daughter, however, gives me a deadpan look. She touches the rhinestone accents gingerly, wrinkles up her nose, and says, "A Princess crown, Mom?" Like that's all she needs to say. I mean really. Don't I know that all that Princess stuff ended for her a long time ago? If it ever even started. She's more of a Tom boy/girl. She can't show her face at school with a crown on her clothes.

I'm crestfallen. "But they only cost $3.52 after the coupon! The purple pair cost $2.65!" But she's unmoved. She shakes her head. "No, Mom."

Of course, it's inevitable that I've turned into my own mother, the 1960s Jewish shopaholic. My mom's idea of a really good time was to load all seven of her daughters into her 1965 Chevy Nova and take us down to Turn Style, Skokie's version of Walmart.

The first thing she'd do once we walked in Turn Style was to steal all the Brach's Candies from the display. My mother didn't understand the idea that all this Brach's Candy was sitting there on a kiosk, unsecured, yet not free for the taking. To her if it wasn't behind a counter, that meant it was free. When she was done with that, we'd all fan out, the seven of us going off to different departments until we all reconvened at customer service hours later. One of us would have to skulk up to the counter and ask the customer service person to page mom since, invariably, we'd have lost her somewhere in the store.

If I found clothes I liked, I had to lope through all the aisles of the store searching for her in the vain hope that she would actually spend money on something that wasn't food or shelter. With five older sisters and one younger, and a mother who sewed, let's just say that new clothes wasn't exactly what we showed up at the Turn Styles register to buy. We showed up with fabric. And empty Brach's wrappers.

So, of course, my daughter doesn't know it, but she has it good. And, she doesn't know how appropriate that crown probably is.

The Ring Thing

There are few questions I dread from my children. I am very open with them. After having a mother who nearly sent me go off to gym class in 6th grade with a can of FDS as deoderant because she refused to admit to me what it was actually for, I'd like to think I'm pretty approachable. My kids can ask me about sex and be embarassed by the answers. They can ask me about my ex-marriage I'll answer their questions, even though I've been stuck talking about a marriage that lasted two and a half years for 12 years now, ever since I told them. Still,I'll do it.
But when my daughter looks at the ring on my left hand and she's all aglow with the romance of it, admiring it, watching my diamond glitter, and then she asks, "Is that the diamond dad gave you when you got married?" That's the question I don't want to answer.

It's embarassing to have to admit that no, there is no part of the ring I wear today that is the ring dad gave me under the chuppah. That just sounds bad. When I try to explain that the shape of the diamond - a Princess cut - is the same cut as the one he gave me though it's not the same diamond, she's not buying that. I'm a different kind of Princess for even suggesting it.

When I got engaged I worked in an office at a Big Insurance Company where, for some reason, all of us were getting engaged. Each day, one of my friends was showing up with her engagement ring: one carat here, one carat there. Future Husband bought mine and he wasn't having any of that buying a ring worth three months of your gross income crap. He bought a .80 carat diamond. Then I got to show everyone in the office my ring and, I swear, people were pulling out jeweler's loupes to look at it and weighing the carat content. I skulked back to my desk, my joy in my 80 point diamond ruined. I wish I could say that this didn't bother me but, trust me, it bothered me.

I've been married a long time, long enough to upgrade my ring. First I designed a new setting for the ring and had the jeweler put the old diamond in it. Then a few years and some prosperity later, the diamond got bigger and the old one went in a pendant. I wasn't going to sell it or anything; I do have some sentimentality. A few years later it got a little bigger. I can certainly lift my hand - it's not that heavy - but let's just say that if I had friends at work, or if I worked, for that matter, I could hold my hand high.

Is there ever enough? Yes. I love my ring now. It has a Hebrew band under it with a quote from the Book of Ruth, "Whither Thou Goest, I Shall Go." I have a ring on my right hand with the Ani, "I Am My Beloved's, My Beloved Is Mine."

I didn't always know exactly who I was, but I found out later. I'm a nut for being Jewish. I add Hebrew to my rings and it gives me a feeling of the eternal - they end up being not just Jewelry but JEW-elry. I also like rings thick enough that I can barely bend my fingers and, okay, I need a little glitter. And if my daughter would just stop rolling her eyes, I'd explain that to her.

Lipstick Jungle

Here's how I broke my shopping abstinence - with a lipstick.

I needed a lipstick, a perfectly legitimate purchase. I went to the store, found out my color was discontinued (I've never actually gone to the store and not had my color discontinued - what's with that?) so I was about to pick a new color when the insane thought hit. It said, "Wait! Since we have to buy 2 lipsticks now (one for the purse and one for at home) maybe we should go to Macy's where they have an Estee Lauder free gift!" Did it sound logical? Sure, as logical as the guy in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous who puts booze in his milk when he breaks his sobriety.

Once I brought that bag home with another stupid gift that I will never use and will only give away to one of my six sisters and which contains products and colors that are all wrong for me, I was off and running. On Thursday I had another "legitimate" purchase to make: I need a new desk. Now that I'm putting the living room back together, apparently I need a new configuration, something that won't jinx my book this time when it's submitted to agents or publishers, something that will make it all good, like it was the desk's fault last time.

So I go to the store - or stores in this case. I come back home with a gigantic ottoman and four new bar stools. No desk. If this was booze I'd be laying in a gutter somewhere waking up from a hangover, but it's not. Instead I'm filled with remorse and have to go deposit the $400 I spent in our checking account tomorrow to pay for this stuff. The least I can do is pay for it.

At the weight-related 12-step meeting I was at today someone said that on every page of the Big Book there's something she can use as a prayer, each word in it can be used for a prayer, and I realized that's it: the Big Book is a prayer. And another person said that she didn't need her HP's help with the things she can do, she needs his help with the things she can't, so she's waking up each day and asking for help with those things, the things she can't do and she doesn't even specify what they are, she just lets him work on it. I was sitting there, normal sized for such a long time and sitting next to someone who was quite large. But suffering? Both of us were suffering.

The Archeological Dig in my Living Room

Last week, my husband told me that he was ready to have the wood floor installed that I've been waiting for in my office/living room. He's kind of in charge of this since we own a flooring store and has to schedule the installers, etc. So I've spent the last week cleaning this room out and it's been like an archeological dig.

Up until 33 days ago, I was a compulsive spender (who's counting?) so, of course, the wreckage of my shopping past was in there. I found so many beautiful, new picture frames in there that I'm ashamed of myself. What could a person be thinking when she buys so many? They're on sale so I'll buy 20? There are art prints of every size, both ones I love and ones that are just masterpieces because one time I was going to teach Art Masterpiece and bought everything ahead of time but then the school decided not to go with it. This is what you're like when you're a compulsive spender. There are gorgeous, wood carved wall hangings. There are two clock collections from the 1940s and 1950s, one of starburst clocks, and the other of hanging rope clocks. Was I trying to buy time? There is more furniture than can reasonably be squeezed into a room: my piano, my desk, two couches, a coffee table, two end tables. There are wall-to-wall ceiling-height built-in bookshelves and two free-standing ones, all of which have books piled on them.

Now the room's empty. Of course the rest of the house looks like a bomb hit it. And tomorrow the guys will show up and start working: pull up the carpeting, repair the drywall, paint the room, and put down the wood. But this week sometime, I'm going to have to answer the question of what, exactly, I'm supposed to put back in there when they're done? This is actually supposed to be a house, not a warehouse. I am committed to really making each room usable. Outside it may be HOA-hell with annoying gates and identical houses, but inside it's mine.

My mother, who, besides being a Holocaust survivor, was also once a Skokie housewife, weighs in with her opinion. She says, "Move your stuff out of there! Leave only the couches! It's a living room - don't let the kids in there!" She'd probably like me to get the couches wrapped in plastic and rope it off.

But I know that in there, somewhere, is my book - all my books, the ones I've written and the ones I haven't. The one about growing up one of seven sisters with Holocaust survivor parents; the one about being fat for 25 years; the one about how hard it is to leave a marriage, even when you know it's the wrong guy; and the one about being a teenager in the only Jewish family in Scottsdale in the 1970s on food stamps. Those books are in that room so I guess I'll keep that in mind when I'm rearranging. I need to make them easy to find.

Full House

Today I was sitting in my weight-related 12-step meeting listening to a share when suddenly I realized I felt full. And I don't mean full of food. I mean that for the first time in my life - 49 years - I don't feel like I absolutely need something that I don't have.

I don't mean to make a big deal out of nothing but remember, I'm Jewish, the child of Holocaust survivors, number six out of seven daughters. Want is my middle name. I was born fighting my way to the top of the family, born fighting for food from a mother who never bought enough, and apparently born ready to buy everything else.

But lately there is calm. I take no credit for this other than after what I hope to have been my last compulsive shopping trip ever, I came home with a set of filled bags hardly knowing what I'd bought and hid them in my closet and realized I was very sick. I then walked around the house with my camera and photographed the evidence of my shopping sickness: too much furniture in every room (because one day I might move into a house twice as big and I'll need it); the closet filled with empty bags, each with a receipt in it (because I might return everything); books piled everywhere, even duplicates; my kids, turned into compulsive shoppers themselves, toys everywhere in their rooms; my living room now a storage warehouse, filled with all the paintings I never put up, an antique mirror collection, and enough furniture for two living rooms. The wreckage of my past.

It's just been about 28 days right now. Baby steps. But full is good. Full is something I never felt before. Full means that I might be somewhere near gratitude, and that sounds like a pretty good place to live.