My mother was an alcoholic beatnik poet with the best handwriting you ever saw but who got herself trapped in a bad marriage by an accountant with rage issues.

Neither of them should have ever had children, a statement to which my sister and I will proudly attest to.

Instead of being a suburban mom, she should have been living in North Beach, drinking wine and writing poetry with Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. She would have fit in with that group perfectly — not so much with my dad, it turns out.

She got back at him for his rage in several ways. One was to be drunk and smoke a lot. Another was to ask him questions about history and current events that she knew he couldn’t answer and that would enrage him. She once took time out from her Tareyton and Korbel to ask him, “What do you know about the Boxer Rebellion?”

His response was a storm of unrestrained profanity and vitriol that rose from the position of his head at the dinner table into a thundercloud above us that flooded the kitchen with hard rain. I learned that evening that my dad could create his own weather when suddenly provoked.

A third was to never throw anything away that could be stored almost neatly in some part of the house until it would become the 300-pound elephant we all talk about. Our family had a lot of elephants, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

When the couple moved to Ignacio from Larkspur by way of Sebastopol in the late 1970s, my mom turbocharged her hoarding career in ways no one anticipated. For one, she lined a wall in the condo’s entry landing with empty Kleenex boxes from floor to ceiling.

She also decided to subscribe to every news and design magazine available at that time, and kept every issue, piling them in the “living” room and on every piece of furniture. It was impressive. When she died in the late 1990s, 10 years after my dad died, it took multiple visits from Marin Recycling dumpsters to clear the house — by multiple I mean a hell of a lot of dumpster visits.

Let us move on.

Disclosure: I’m in my second marriage for the third time. I will leave it to you to figure that one out. My third wife, who is also my second, is a noted local specialist in interior design and architecture. She’s a talented and successful professional, especially in collecting items of furniture and other items from her clients that she has replaced with new things — for a handsome fee.

Our garage, the ace designer’s storage facility, isn’t much bigger than either of our bathrooms, so space in there is kind of scarce, as you might imagine. We lead the major leagues, if you will, in trips to Goodwill and Salvation Army, because when her clients buy new stuff for their sumptuous homes, they don’t want the old stuff back, for some reason. Who knew?

As a guy who grew up with a hoarder extraordinaire, I habitually get rid of things I don’t need or use right now. It is a zero-sum life. If I bring an item in of any kind, another similar item goes out. Gone.

You might wonder, hey, how does a nearly 74-year-old man with zero tolerance for extra stuff cope with people such as his mother and his designer wife?

My answer is: If you can write about it, it can’t kill you.

Skip Corsini is a San Rafael resident. IJ readers are invited to share their stories of love, dating, parenting, marriage, friendship and other experiences for our How It Is column, which runs Tuesdays in the Lifestyles section. All stories must not have been published in part or in its entirety previously. Send your stories of no more than 600 words to lifestyles@marinij.com. Please write How It Is in the subject line. The IJ reserves the right to edit them for publication. Please include your full name, address and a daytime phone number.