Gloating gets you what?

Wow.  Another phone call with my hoarding mother.  She was bursting with happiness... but the in the way you would expect.  It was more a malevolent capering glee... You see, the neighbor that she HATES just got busted for driving during his license suspension.  Last year he picked up his second or third DUI.  

Now- I do not personally like or dislike this person.  I have little opinion one way or the other.  I do hear about all the things that my mother has blamed him for which include:

• Posing a dead cat in a snowbank off and on over the course of a day
• Stuffing leaves and twigs in the rain downspout
• Entering without breaking into her hoarded garage (see the Derecho Post for why that is unlikely)

And so it goes..  

It saddens me that her life is so small, so bereft of the little and larger happiness that allows most of us to focus on the positive, on others besides ourselves.  The negativity, the rumination, and the violent fantasizing make me sad.  And tired.  And angry.  But mostly sad... for her.   

I think about her inability to let go of any perceived slight or petty misunderstanding ... and her inability to let go of things that she hoards her house, her garage, her life with.

How empty, and how sad.  I wish better for her.  I wish her to be happy.  I wish for a mother that I could visit, that would visit me, and that I could have a typical (whatever THAT is) conversation.  But it is not to be.  I have never had that.  

Hoarding.  No one wins.  No one.