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"I went into this thinking these were going to be some of the worst years of my life -- that I was going to look back on my life and say this was the black period -- when, in fact, they were some of the best years of my life."

-- Jo Maeder

There's a room in Jo Maeder's house filled with hundreds of little eyes.

The eyes belong to dolls ---- hundreds and hundreds of dolls.

Dolls resembling celebrities.

Dolls with coconuts for heads.

Even dolls made of wax by Maeder's great-aunt.

This doll room, which is as bizarre as it is humorous, was left behind by Maeder's mother, Mama Jo, when she passed away. Mama Jo had collected dolls since she was a young girl, a hobby she continued until her death in 2006.

"They take up so much room, and at the same time, I think they're very comforting because they connect me with my mother," Maeder says. "They're part of her legacy."

The dolls aren't the only gift Mama Jo left. She also inspired Maeder's memoir, "When I Married My Mother," which was released in April by Da Capo Press.

The memoir chronicles the period in Maeder's life when she suspended her career as a New York radio disc jockey to care for her eccentric and increasingly dependent mother.

In 2003, Maeder traded her cosmopolitan life in New York for a life of familial duty in Greensboro, where she bought her first home for her and Mama Jo.

Her friends thought she was crazy.

But Maeder walked away with something far more valuable than anything she gave up: the chance to develop a warm and loving relationship with her mother ---- something the two had never shared before.

"I went into this thinking these were going to be some of the worst years of my life -- that I was going to look back on my life and say this was the black period -- when, in fact, they were some of the best years of my life," Maeder says.

* * * * * * *

Before Maeder and Mama Jo shared a house in Greensboro, they lived in different worlds.

Maeder worked in New York as a weekend disc jockey for Z100, the biggest top 40 station in the country. She also did voice-over work for national radio and advertising companies. Always on the go, she dated frequently and had a crew of "Sex and the City" gal pals.

Mama Jo was the complete opposite.

During this period of her life, her daughter described her as a brooding, increasingly angry person who rarely left her home. She no longer ate properly or took her thyroid medicine regularly. She also had a tendency to collect -- or hoard -- random objects such as her beloved dolls, toothpaste tube caps and bags filled with human hair.

Although Mama Jo had agreed to move to Greensboro, Maeder knew that persuading her mother to leave her cluttered home in Richmond, Va., posed a different matter entirely. Because Mama Jo had a strong attachment to the objects she hoarded, Maeder and her brother, Arthur Weitz, worried they might have to remove Mama Jo by force.

But fate intervened.

The fire marshal deemed her home uninhabitable and ordered that she move into a nursing home, a situation she resented at first. But when Mama Jo realized she would soon move into a house with her daughter in Greensboro, her perspective shifted.

"She was very mad at first, saying, 'Get me out of here! Get me out of here!' " Maeder says. "Then after maybe a week or two, she had calmed down so much and just said, 'I know I left you with a big mess; just keep the dolls and all the family memorabilia.' "

The word "mess" hardly described the situation inside Mama Jo's house. Weitz originally thought it would take him and his wife a single three-day trip to clean the house. Instead, his first trip stretched longer than a week. In the end, the cleanup would require three moving trucks and 10 dumpsters.

"It was just like a head-on collision you see from far away coming at you in slow motion over the years that we finally had to deal with," Maeder says. "Thank God I had my brother to help me because I could not do it alone."

* * * * * * *

Maeder's New York gal pals warned her against the move to Greensboro. For starters, Maeder and Mama Jo were not close. The rift between them began early.

In 1969, Maeder, who was 14, and her brother chose to move with their father from Richmond to Miami, but Mama Jo chose to stay. The parents divorced soon after, and about a year later, Maeder's brother moved back to Richmond.

Maeder did not. "My mother was already seeing somebody else, and she automatically remarried, and my aunt became sort of my surrogate mother," Maeder says. "(Mama Jo) was more like my friend from high school that you kind of see once in a while, but you don't have a lot in common with anymore.

"It was mostly cordial, but there wasn't any glue there."

* * * * * * *

Doctors told Maeder that moving into a house with her mother would be difficult. A social worker even warned that Mama Jo could become violently angry upon entering a clean environment without her collection of random junk.

"I had so many fears that she was going to wander outside or fall onto the porch or she was going to get angry because her things weren't around," Maeder says. "I kept waiting for this other shoe to drop, but it never did."

Instead of hand wringing or constant arguing, Mama Jo became Maeder's partner in crime. They attended ice cream socials with their neighbors and watched the Christian television program "The Hour of Power" on Sundays. But they also did more adventurous things. Maeder took her mother to a male exotic dance review in Kernersville and to Green Queen Bingo at the Empire Room to see drag queens perform.

Despite her declining health, Mama Jo was up for anything, and instead of being like distant high school friends, she and Maeder became best friends.

Maeder describes their relationship as being akin to a marriage.

"I fell so in love with her, I really did," Maeder says. "She was funnier than I ever knew, and maybe she wasn't funny when she was younger, but you get a better sense of humor as you get older, and we just had such a great time."

* * * * * * *

After three years of living with Maeder, Mama Jo's health began to decline. Her eyesight worsened, and her organs began to fail. Maeder visited doctors and did everything she could to help prolong her mother's life. But in April 2006, Mama Jo died while resting in their home under hospice care. She was 84.

"There was a big relief but also a lot of sadness," Maeder says. "I still miss her; I miss her every day."

She says that the chance to spend time with Mama Jo and resolve the issues that stood between them for decades gave her a sense of peace. And now, three years after her death, Maeder says it still feels like her mother's spirit is with her.

"She died just a month before Mother's Day, and even then on the first Mother's Day, it was sad, but I still felt that she was here in some ways," Maeder says. "When you're able to have such resolution with somebody and end it on a good note, it kind of feels like they live on."

* * * * * * *

Before Maeder wrote "When I Married My Mother," she completed seven manuscripts -- none of which were published in the United States. She credits her ability to release her first novel in the United States to the universal themes of her mother's story and the 15 years she spent writing manuscripts.

"If I had tried to write about my family before, it wouldn't have worked because I needed that experience as a writer," Maeder says.

Maeder continues to make a living recording voice-overs from her home studio, but she hopes "When I Married My Mother" will lead to a follow-up.

"It's a memoir about the radio business," Maeder says. "It will follow a disc jockey, who was one of the first female disc jockeys, Alison Steele, and me because we ended up working together at some point."

As for the doll room, Maeder is unsure what to do with it now. Good stories are the only thing Maeder wishes to collect. Still, the decision to get rid of the dolls is a difficult one because they meant so much to her mother.

"I'm waiting for the answer to that question because I really don't know what to do," Maeder says. "So, when I'm in that state, I just wait, and the answer eventually comes."

If Maeder and the doll collection do eventually part ways, she'll always keep the final gift Mama Jo left this avid story collector: a happy ending.

Contact Joe Scott at movieshowjoe@gmail.com

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