Why I Became Obsessed With Shopping

I could accumulate objects even if the people and life I loved and wanted more than any object were stripped from me ruthlessly, brutally. 

After my mother died, my father couldn’t bring himself to empty out her closets. My mother had been sick for a decade, declining slowly throughout my 20s. She had plenty of time to feel all the things people feel when they understand that they’re dying, when it no longer feels like an abstraction, but rather a fact. She felt alone. She felt afraid. She felt able to appreciate the sun on her face, the velvet of a cat’s ear. She felt out of control. She felt grateful for her friends. She felt air hunger. She felt like something in her was against her, was eating her alive.

Though I lived this with her, in my way, I didn’t live it the way she did. Trying to imagine what she felt to be diagnosed at 47 stirs up a fear too bright and alive to sit with. She must have felt like she was trapped in a burning building with no means of escape, except the burning was inside of her.

I was passing through Eugene a few years ago when my father told me he needed me to go through the closets and empty them of my mother’s things. She’d been dead five years by then, her patterned blouses long out of date, the boxes of shoes covered in a sheen of dust. I had no interest in this task. It felt overwhelming. And I’d already cleaned out so many dead people’s closets—his father’s, his mother’s, my mother’s stuff from our cabin. It was getting strange, as if I could add a line to my CV: the only one with the stomach for the closets of the dead.

My father still slept in that bedroom, still cuddled the dogs there and read the paper.  Couldn’t he just drink a few glasses of wine and do it? But when I showed up at the house and saw the way his back curved when he mentioned it, the reserved and closed off look in his pale blue eyes, I knew the answer was no. He could not.

The closets were filled with expensive clothing—clothes to wear to the theater, out to dinner, to the courtroom (my mother was a trial attorney). That alone wouldn’t be strange. My mother loved clothes. She loved saturated color (magenta, maroon, royal blue). She loved silks and linens and leather. She spent hours getting dressed up or farpitzed—her rings glittering, her shirts shining, her lipstick in concert with her eyeshadow and probably her handbag. She had secret fashion knowledge I do not possess. She was vain, in other words, but a lovely, self-respecting kind of vain.

Reflecting back on it, I admire this about her. Vanity, kept in check, is a weapon against despair. But what felt strange, unsettling about emptying my mother’s closets were not the clothes themselves, but the price tags on almost all of them. These clothes, with their yellowing tags, were objects I would never have permitted myself to buy.  But my mother, sick with cancer, had bought them knowing she would die. I imagined her, walking alone in the big city after a consultation at Sloan-Kettering, entering the hallowed halls of Saks. And now I filled at least 10 garbage bags with her unworn purchases—these out of date, too-big-for-me fancy outfits.

Judgment filled me.

I loved my mother, but this was ridiculous. Expensive, wasteful, and maybe a little insane. What was she doing? My mother was a civil rights attorney. She fought, at least a lot of the time, for the greater good. She made me do volunteer work from the time I could make a phone call—sex education, tax reform, environmental work. She had principles and values—would permit nothing less from me. Why was she spending gobs of cash on cropped suede mini-coats with jeweled buttons? Coats that she bought, apparently, on a whim, with no occasion in mind? Or five different versions of cream-colored blouses?  How many cream colored blouses does a mom need? And elastic pants? When did she ever consider wearing elastic pants? They were all the way elastic, sort of like jodhpurs made out of seatbelts. And don’t get me started on the flowing overcoats. Black, charcoal gray, matte black, beige, shiny black, dark red. And the shelves of shoes.

I dragged the bags downstairs, annoyed and upset, churning with feelings. This often happens to me in my childhood home. I churn and churn, but though I pride myself as being emotionally perceptive, the emotions are too quick a fish for me and I can only just grab their tails before they slip from my grasp.

I’m upset! I thought. This is unfair!

Unfair, a leftover and useless idea from my mother, the attorney. Nothing is fair. But still, it made me brood. It made me dark-feeling and furious. It was terrible stuff, these Neanderthal feelings, leaking up from my lizard brain.

I lugged the bags across the wood floors near the kitchen where I knew they would sit for months while my dad figured out where to donate them. He sat at the kitchen table. “Why did she buy all this shit?” I fumed. “It’s wasteful and crazy. It’s irresponsible.” I lifted a bag up like a gavel and banged it down, except bags don’t bang, they just silently settle.

My father looked at me from his cluttered and dirty post-mom kitchen, the handmade plates now cracked and chipped in a greasy cupboard, hinges loosening. His hair was more white than ever, cut dignified and short. He wore, as he always wore, his torn orange hiking shirt. See? Here he was with plenty of places to go, and yet he only needed one shirt.

Why couldn’t she have donated money to things she cared about? More money to loan repayment scholarship for public interest lawyers? Money to help with cancer research? Money to save the environment, to give micro-loans to poor communities? Or whatever! To buy thousands of dollars worth of clothes was downright gross and insane and shameful and consumptive! So materialistic and capitalist and…!

I shoved a bag toward a window, then another bag. My father turned his most fierce stare on me. “She hoped to wear them, Robin,” he said. “She hoped she might get better and live and wear them.”

And then I felt despair.

A cool hand on my throat, then the tightening of tears. Because that statement, while complicated, felt more true than not true. The operative word: hope.

My mother hoped to wear this stuff, these bags of designer clothes. She hoped to be around. She hoped to live even though she knew she would not live. And don’t we all hope for that? She hoped for a future free from pain and full of theater, dinners, and meaningful work. She hoped that buying things would cause this to be so. The clothes were an offering to an angry God. Or maybe they were an act of defiance.

Before this, though, I had my own irrational foray into the world of emotional shopping. My mother had a prized object, a red leather Italian purse that she would not let me borrow, and when she got too sick to use it, I stole it. By this time, she had brain damage and couldn’t ask for it back, but still I hid it, squirreling it away in my car. I wanted the bag. I wanted my mother to want the bag. I wanted to be the things she carried. I wanted to shine with an expensive grace. I wanted my mother.

I didn’t know what I wanted. I wanted to beat up death, slice its balls off with a sharp blade and cut them up so tiny they disappeared—death crouching, death asking for mercy. I wanted to blow it up. I couldn’t do what I wanted, so I took the bag. But after she died, I didn’t want the red bag. I only wanted that red bag when she was alive, when it still belonged to her. I wanted a new red bag now, in my different orphaned life. I wanted my own bag. A bag for the future, for a different future, this weird and alien future that was not about dying, that was suddenly about my own living. I couldn’t explain to anyone why I needed this bag.

I looked obsessively for this red fantasy bag—in stores in Eugene. In Berkeley where I lived. Online. I didn’t know what I was looking for exactly, but I looked for hours. For days. For weeks. I looked at every red bag available in America. I assessed their merits and shortcomings, the inches of their handles, the metal of their zippers, their stitching. I examined them, imagined them flung on a table, draped on my arm. I imagined getting a tenure-track teaching job and storing my papers in it. I imagined that the bag would be there for me, championing me to shape a life that made sense, now that this other life had ended—the life of watching my mom die.

I could not move forward without this bag. But I couldn’t commit to any of the bags that I saw. The hunt for the bag became a quest. It felt like a riddle, complex but solvable. When I searched for the bag, I felt like I was moving forward. The search also took me away from myself, from my grief. It gave me a project, and better yet, a project that no one else could care about or relate to. It was all mine.

It took me years to unravel the shopping obsessions that overcame me in the year following her death. Red bag, briefcase, shoe with a certain toe box. I would pour over these things, obsessively comparing traits of like objects. I would make a purchase after months of research and then the whole thing would start over. I could gather things, exactly the right things. I could accumulate objects even if the people and life I loved and wanted more than any object were stripped from me ruthlessly, brutally.

Mine was different from my mother’s hopeful shopping, but not completely. She shopped to say fuck you to death. I shopped to create a distraction, but also to reengage with some part of me left reeling, a seeking and searching part of myself. I could not find my mother. My mother, she was gone.

But how do you comfort the unsettled part of you, the part that won’t stop looking for what is lost? These other searches that I created—the search for a perfect object, and later a perfect job—were difficult, absorbing, taxing, and yet they, unlike the other quest, had possible happy endings.

Some of you will tell me to meditate, to find a relationship with creativity or spirituality that fills this searching maw. You are surely right. But I will continue to hunt for things, I think, despite all the advice you give me.

Why does that feel so embarrassing to say?

I know that I should have deeper, better pursuits. I mean, of course I do have better pursuits, but they share their time with these fairly shallow ones. That time I spent looking for a bag could have been used to mentor a child or donate blood or volunteer with a literacy organization and better the world.

But the fact of the matter is, I too succumb to it—shopping gives us a sense of hope. A hope that we will find something we’ve looked for. Shopping, in the developed world, in a world in which we do not need a hunk of candle wax so as to read by lamplight on the plains, is frequently a metaphoric act. It represents that simple wish: that we might stay invested in and tethered to the physical world.

When I finally found the bag—used, on eBay (I had it for years and it just fell apart last month), I paraded it around, happy I had it. It had a more youthful look than my mother’s bucket-shaped one, and it matched a pair of my shoes.

But within a month, I remembered a pair of my mother’s earrings from the ’70s that I couldn’t find. I needed earrings like that, I decided. And the whole thing started again. And again.

I’m fine with that.

Robin Romm is the author of two books. Her memoir, The Mercy Papers, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and a best book of the year according to Entertainment Weekly and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her story collection, The Mother Garden, was a finalist for the PEN USA prize. She’s written for magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, Salon, and O Magazine. She is also a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review.

Excerpted from Spent: Exposing Our Complicated Relationship with Shopping, edited by Kerry Cohen. With permission from Seal Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2014.

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