I have a confession to make. This carefree, fun-loving writer, alas, has a dark side. It’s recently come to my attention that I am powerless over the compulsion to surround myself with stuff. I am a collect-aholic.

This condition is not to be confused with the sane practice of collecting as a hobby. Bona fide collectors acquire items of rarity and worth, storing and displaying them with respect for their value. Collectors are often highly educated about the history of these objects and invest their resources in logical, considered ways.

My collections are not like that. The items I collect are neither rare nor valuable, and they’re chosen not out of my deep knowledge of their provenance, but only because they caught my fancy. I’m a human magpie grabbing every shiny new thing that catches my attention. The focus of my obsession changes through the years, but retains one common trait: It’s always very useful junk.

Books were the earliest and longest standing object of my obsession. Bookshelves in each room of the house, including the kitchen and bathroom, hold tomes on every subject that has ever interested me. My favorites are those how-to books, written for readers with little experience in a given subject. In spite of the fact that I am neither an idiot nor a dummy as the titles suggest, I’ve gained a lot of wisdom from these guides. Unfortunately, they’ve yet to offer one on how to kick your addiction to collecting.

My father is partly to blame for my condition. He saved all kinds of stuff, always unusual and unusable items, such as empty Dristan bottles, which he then organized compulsively. The bottles were lined up like soldiers on every surface in the house. One day he had an epiphany. “Why the hell am I saving these?” he asked no one in particular. Obviously, there was only one sane thing to. Out went the Dristan bottles. He needed the space for his beer can collection.

My own pack rat tendencies at least serve a purpose. I remember the stage of my addiction to stuff that my daughters still call “the year Mom went crazy with wicker.” I didn’t see it as an illness at the time, since the items I acquired were all quite useful. We had wicker to sit on, wicker you could put fruit in, wicker that hung decoratively on the walls, and little wicker cabinets in which we stored our other wicker objects. Wicker was my friend, until the cats realized it made a great scratching post. This resulted in a collection of shredded wicker, which is not nearly as useful. I was miraculously cured of that addiction.

But the cats themselves were part of my twisted disease. If I could have stopped after adopting just one, which no addict can do, it wouldn’t have been a bad thing. But then I took in another and then another and another. I couldn’t make it stop. Soon we had eight furry friends and my entire wicker budget was being spent on cat food, which immediately put an end to the adoption frenzy, no intervention required.

My dear mother unknowingly has been feeding another of my addictions lately.

“I sent you a few boxes,” she announced one day. “It’s just some things I can’t wear anymore. Pass them on to someone who can use them if they don’t fit,” she said.

Mama, it seemed, had begun to downsize. Closets were getting cleaned, possessions evaluated, space being made. This was no small feat. As a very small child, I learned from her example what matters most in life: your family, your spirit, and your wardrobe, usually but not necessarily in that order. She really likes her clothes.

Her wardrobe, carefully built over several decades, slowly became mine. It was like Christmas when those huge boxes arrived in the mail, although I felt a tad guilty as the postal carrier drove up my street each day. With a sigh of resignation, he would heave himself into the bowels of the truck, emerging with my goodies, and stagger to my doorstep looking like Hercules suffering under the weight of the world. Or at least the weight of the world’s wardrobe.

My mother gradually bestowed upon me a more extensive array of suits than I owned when I was on the corporate fast-track in the 1980s, enough belts to hold up the pants of a small country’s entire army, and a shoe collection that would put Imelda Marcos to shame. I should have recognized the signs of addiction as I drooled over the short skirts and high heels and the multitude of boxes accumulated throughout the house. The more she sent, the more I wanted. So what if there was no longer room to walk?

Those boxes were a diva’s dream come true. The boxes contained not only clothes, but all sorts of things that sparkle and shimmer and shine, in every color of the rainbow. I could hear Liberace crying from his grave, “Why, oh why didn’t I ever own stuff like that?”

My mother’s decision to give me my inheritance early required, of course, that I initiate my own process of cleaning, evaluating and making space. Two things became clear as I stared at the over-stuffed drawers, overflowing closets, and the growing stack of boxes full of my mother’s treasures. One, it is apparently true that the apple does not fall far from the tree; and two, perhaps you actually can have too much of a good thing.

I’d hit bottom. The time had come to get out of denial and ask for help. I stood amid the maze of boxes, the wicker shreds, books stacked on every surface, and enough clothing to dress the city of Chicago through the end of the century. The poor cats meandered through the labyrinth as I dug out my cell phone and dialed my daughter.

“Honey, I’ll be sending you a few boxes....”