Baby Steps

This blog is turning out to me more negative than I had hoped when I began it. I don't know why, but when I moved home from the Midwest, I had really really high hopes that my mom and I would achieve some kind of breakthrough and I would be able to be a positive force in her life, and show her the joy of a clean living space. Maybe it was the fact that I'd been away for six years and hadn't come face to face with my mom's stubbornness as often in those years, or the fact that I as so miserable in Chicago that I started to see home with overly rose tinted glasses. At any rate, I was sure that I was going to have the one COH blog that was happily recording progress stories.

Things have not gone according to plan. But, on the eve of Mother's Day, I thought I'd take a break from the anger and frustration to celebrate a tiny baby step I saw my mother make the other day. My mom has been recycling a good amount of paper the last few weeks - filling the bin. For someone who has a particular issue with paper, this is a step in and of itself. In particular, the other day I saw her recycle half of a ripped up Christmas cracker (those tubes with little goodies inside and you pull on either end of the paper to open them). Why is this significant? Because it wasn't an old receipt that you couldn't read the numbers on anymore, or a TV guide so old that some of the shows aren't on the air anymore; it was a solid 6" x 4" ish piece of pretty gold paper with an embossed design and embedded glitter. "You could do something with that."

For a woman who refuses to throw away an expired coupon in the kitchen junk drawer because it features a one inch picture of the Campbell's soup kid in a graduation cap (an old version of their "labels for education" logo) that is "so cute!...You could cut it out and do something with it," throwing away a solid scrap of quality paper is a step.

Happy Mother's Day to all those out there who may be struggling with their own mothers as well!