Post # 600

PK

I respect your quest for understanding into the core cause of you wife and her sisters’ fetish for shopping and all affiliated activities. But, I beg of you, don’t rush to the cliché explanation of placing all the blame on the parent, in this case my mother. I feel the adult child does need to accept responsibility for their own actions, as destructive and counter-productive as they are. While I wholeheartedly support the concept of working with the addict and helping them to see the destructive results of their ways, allowing them to cast blame on a dear soul who is long gone (and would be celebrating her 97th birthday tomorrow) would make you, dare I say, an enabler.

I tried hard to remember my childhood; to recall the subtleties and nuances of shopping with my mother and how it could have possibly influenced my four sisters and been in any remote way responsible for the shopping neuroses they currently demonstrate. It is not possible. Frankly, my own anti-shopping neurosis is much more of a classic Jungian response.

My mother was a consummate shopper. It wasn’t that she came home with ‘something’; she came home with trophies. (Note: a trophy is not a rubber spatula at half-price, it is a bolt of fabric for $1.29 that mom made into a wedding dress, four bridesmaid dresses, a slip cover for the couch, a duvet for the bedroom and still had enough fabric left over to make three ties.) I will never be the shopper my mother was, hence I hate shopping.

This really can’t be compared to the whole hunter/gatherer thing. It is on a much different level. One that I don’t understand.