Hoarder's Child

I heart routines

2012-02-07T17:46:00.000-08:00

This post made me realize afresh how much I really, really like routines. Apparently, it's not just me. Granted, as an elementary school teacher, I probably have more routines than most people. Math at 8:30, read a story at 10:00, lunch at 11:00.... The more time I spend with tiny people, the more I realize that kids really do thrive on that routine.

And that makes me think about the complete and total lack of routine that I had growing up. Waking up in the morning, I never had any idea what that day might be like. Will I have any clean socks? Can I even find my socks? Which side of Mom will I see today -- the fun-loving, childlike mom, or the angry, moody one who's obsessed with her stuff? Looking back, a complete lack of schedule, routine, and predictability meant that I drifted through most days feeling completely unmoored.

As an adult, that may help explain why I have such a deep-seated need to be able to predict, with reasonable certainty, what today will hold. Life has definitely underscored the lesson that there are many, many things that are not under my control. The struggle for me now is to create a routine that takes into account what I actually can control, while letting go of the things that are simply uncontrollable. It's still a work in progress, but the fact that I can articulate the struggle at all makes me realize that I've come a long way from that kid searching for clean socks amid the hoard.

If wishes were fishes

2012-01-14T18:57:00.000-08:00

When I was younger and just starting to come to terms with my family's dysfunction, I wished a lot for things to be different.

I just re-read that sentence and realized that, while true, it isn't entirely accurate to phrase it only in the past tense. I am still coming to terms with my family's dysfunction. On occasion, I still wish for things to be different. The wishing usually happens during a phone conversation with my mother. We live one state apart and don't talk all that often, but our conversations still have a way of making my want to hurl my phone out of a window. So far, I've resisted the urge, but that's still no guarantee for the future safety of the phone. The most frustrating, button-pushing conversations are those that deal with her chronic good intentions. Either her long-term memory is extremely selective, or she is the most blindly optimistic human I've ever met. Either way, the umpteenth conversation about "As soon as I get my life in order" tends to send me over the edge. What she means by that is "as soon as I clean out and discard roughly 3000 square feet of trash, I will start living my life." And what she means by that is "I wish my life were different, but I just can't seem to figure out how to make that happen." If wishes were fishes, as my grandpa would say.

The problem with growing up with the "I wish" mentality is that you don't ever really learn what to do to change a situation when you're unhappy. Wishing, unfortunately, doesn't make it so. Over the past few months, I've embarked on a quest to fill in some of the skills I never learned growing up. I'm figuring out the housework thing (don't walk away from the dishes after dinner -- you'll get distracted and forget about them until the next morning), making friends (give yourself some credit for being someone other people would actually like to befriend -- a little self-esteem goes a long way), and generally just trying to be aware of changes I can make that will make me happier. So far, actually making changes works a lot better than wishing. Huh.

If Barbie were a hoarder...no, seriously.

2012-01-12T17:36:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure whether to file this under "This is hilarious!" or "Someone has too much time on their hands," but Barbie can add now add hoarder to her extensive resume. She's been an astronaut/race car driver/trophy girlfriend/dentist/lifeguard, so what's one more occupation, I suppose?

Photographer/artist Carrie M. Becker has created a series of photographs titled "Barbie Trashes her Dreamhouse." She created ten different, insanely detailed dollhouse dioramas, filled them with doll-sized detritus, and photographed the series. It's kind of awesome and kind of horrifying. If you'd like to check it out, go here.

Eureka!

2011-12-31T18:34:00.000-08:00

I've spent the last, well, forever making covert observations of other people's housekeeping habits. Whenever I go into someone's home, I scope out the cleanliness level (or lack thereof) and compare it to my own house. Granted, comparison is typically a losing game, but growing up in a hoarded home gives you no point of reference for how to function in daily life. I've spent most of my life observing other people to get some idea of what "normal" is. Housekeeping skills are no exception.

I tend to basically ignore typical levels of dirt and disorganization in other people's houses. What really stands out to me is when a house is impressively clean and organized. If it wouldn't make me into some kind of weirdo social pariah, I would sit the oh-so-together hosts down and beg to know their secrets. How do they do it? How do they keep their houses so clean in the midst of everything going on in their super-busy lives?

I find that keeping the house clean has been a losing battle for me. We children of hoarders tend to fall into two camps -- obsessively, compulsively, spartanly neat or hoarders ourselves. I fall somewhere in the middle. I'm definitely not a hoarder, but neither am I particularly clean or tidy. This didn't really bother me as much when I was younger, but as I've gotten older, I find my inability to keep a clean house increasingly irksome. I've tried all kinds of strategies to solve the problem (Mrs. Meyer's Clean Home, Organizing from the Inside Out, scheduling tasks for specific days, apps designed to create a customized system), but nothing's really solved the problem. The house is still dirty and cluttered most of the time. And no matter how much I remind myself that this failure doesn't make me a failure, it still feels pretty darn bad.

Or it did, until I unexpectedly found my eureka moment in this book written for adult children of alcoholics and other dysfunctional parents. Housework isn't mentioned once in the book. It did say that children who grow up in dysfunctional families are never taught how to complete large tasks, so we feel overwhelmed when facing big jobs and often won't even start. And with that, my friends, something clicked. Maintaining my house completely freaks me out because I feel so overwhelmed by the size of the task. And no matter how many times I've tried to break it into smaller chunks or come up with a workable system, I eventually just throw up my hands and quit. The feeling of relief here is profound. I'm not lazy! I'm not irreparably damaged! I'm just overwhelmed! And so I have decided to scrap all of the systems I've tried in favor of an egg timer. I set it for 15 minutes a day and clean for as long as the timer is ticking. No assigned rooms, no particular task, other than whatever seems most important at the moment. If I still feel like cleaning when the timer goes off, I can. If not, I can stop. Somehow, this seems completely doable and lessens the pressure that I've been putting on myself. While my house may never be as neat and tidy as some of the homes I've seen through the years, right now it's totally livable and getting better all the time. And while it's far from perfect, it's finally good enough for me.

Only a hoarder's child

2011-12-10T09:37:00.000-08:00

So I just read this post about a kitchen fire in a hoarded kitchen and I had to laugh out of sheer recognition. I've posted several times about daydreaming that my mother's house would catch fire, thereby eliminating the eventual need for my brother and me to clean it up. Apparently, I'm not the only one out there who would appreciate a little divine intervention in the form of a house fire. But I'm pretty sure that only another hoarder's child would file a kitchen fire in the hoarded home under the category of "a Christmas miracle." Under the circumstances, it seems totally understandable.

People clean their dishwashers?

2011-11-26T22:09:00.000-08:00

One of the issues with being the adult child of a hoarder is that you're playing catch-up on a lot of life skills that other people take for granted. Housework, for example, is something that I'm still figuring out. How often do people clean their baseboards? Wash their walls? How much time are you supposed to spend cleaning your house every day?

There are a surprising number of websites out there dedicated to cleaning and organizing. This fact makes me feel much better, as I am obviously not the only person out there who's still figuring this stuff out. And, as an added bonus, once in awhile I run across a cleaning-related factoid that makes me laugh. For example, it never in my entire life occurred to me that a person might need to clean their dishwasher, but apparently you can. If I ever get to the point where the rest of my house is so clean that I'm concerned about the inside of my dishwasher, I'll be doing pretty well.

Sometimes you win just by showing up

2011-11-24T18:59:00.000-08:00

In my last post, I bemoaned the learned helplessness that can come with being the child of a hoarder (or an alcoholic, or any dysfunctional parent). Through a thousand small interactions, you learn that nothing you do will make a lasting difference. I suspect that this tendency to hunker down and take cover amongst the piles of crap (and rage and dysfunction) served me in childhood. It may not have served me well, necessarily, but it definitely helped minimize the amount of flack that I got. I learned not to make waves, which protected me from a lot of the emotional hurricanes coming from my mother.

The problem is that, as an adult, sometimes you need to make waves to live a fulfilling life. No one wants to live hunkered down in a corner. Sometimes you need to stand up for yourself, or challenge someone else, or set healthy boundaries, or just simply show up so that you can create your own best life. This showing up, every day takes guts. Sometimes it's incredibly difficult just to show up and make today the best day that it can be. It requires making dozens of choices not to coast through, not to go through the day on auto-pilot and simply react to what happens to you. It takes guts to be an agent of change in your own life.

Regardless of what is going on around me, regardless of what others around me are doing, I'm learning more and more that I can win the battle just by showing up. Even when it's a struggle, it means that I'm present in this moment and that I remain centered within myself. It means that I grant myself the power to act, not react. I have the ability to choose what I want and need to make my life a happy one. For someone who grew up in a family that implicitly discouraged action, this realization is life-changing indeed.

Star light, star bright

2011-11-05T14:26:00.000-07:00

I don't remember large chunks of my childhood (hooray for repression!), but I do remember wishing on the first star I saw every night. Star light, star bright -- it was always the same wish. I wished for things to be different -- for the house to be cleaner, for my mom to be happier, for my life to change.

Wishing on a star didn't get me all that far, although it did provide a tiny beacon of hope during some pretty bleak times. Unfortunately, the wishing stemmed from my having learned that when something is making you unhappy, you're powerless to change the situation. Psychologists call this learned helplessness. Rats in captivity, when repeatedly exposed to a painful stimulus, will eventually learn that there is nothing they can do about it. Later, when an escape route is presented to them, they won't leave. They just hunker down and wait for the pain.

As a child I learned that, no matter what I tried, nothing I did would make any difference. As an adult, this learned helplessness manifests itself in a tendency to hunker down and wait for things to pass. I wait for difficult situations to change on their own, instead of taking action. I know now that this isn't a logical or true belief. I try not to let it too deeply affect my actions. Yet I still find it difficult to truly believe that any attempts to change my life will have any more lasting effect than those long-ago wishes on a star.

It really, really could have been worse

2011-10-24T15:10:00.000-07:00

And in another news item that makes me deeply thankful that my mother hoards innocuous things like books, this Louisiana couple just got sentenced to jail for hoarding snakes. Seriously? Snakes? Not that I condone animal hoarding or anything, but I could at least kind of see how you could get started hoarding something like puppies. Puppies are cute. Plus, they don't typically harbor a desire to kill and eat you while you're sleeping.

Granted, the news coverage makes it sound somewhat unlikely that these people are genuinely hoarders; it sounds more like they were just trying to make a (neglectful, unethical) buck by illegally breeding snakes. Disturbingly, though, they presented themselves as an animal rescue organization. This, apparently, isn't uncommon amongst animal hoarders, who will continue to adopt animals long after they've stopped having the funding or wherewithal to care for them (much like this Ohio woman, who hoarded dogs, cats, snakes, fish, and a horse). The lack of insight amongst animal hoarders is mind-boggling. Long after they have begun keeping animals in absolutely deplorable, cruel conditions, they continue to believe that they are saving and caring for them.

I haven't yet come across a news report of an animal hoarder with children in the home, but I'm sure it happens. And just thinking about it makes me truly thankful for small mercies. Growing up in a hoarded home was heartbreakingly difficult at times, but at no point was I sharing space with 100 snakes. Ick. So it really, really, really could have been worse.

Well, that explains it

2011-10-22T10:44:00.000-07:00

One of the more interesting things about reading about hoarding is finding actual explanations of why hoarders do the nonsensical things that they do. I grew up as the daughter of a mother who saved milk jug caps and boxes of miscellaneous paper. I am the granddaughter of a man who lived in a house stacked with so many newspapers that he had small aisles to walk through, plus a backyard filled with oil drums left over from the oil shortage in the 70's. This meant that, even as a child, I spent a lot of time being completely mystified by what went on in my family. Why was it so hard for them to throw out things that were clearly complete garbage?

Turns out, among other things (and this will surprise no one who is a hoarder's child), hoarders find decision making much more difficult that the average person. This New York Times article discusses a study by David F. Tolin, a professor of psychiatry at Yale and director of the anxiety disorders center at the Institute of Living in Hartford. When the brains of hoarders were scanned while they tried to make irreversible decisions about what to discard, the part of the brain involved in decision-making lit up like a Christmas tree. They showed clear signs of stress and difficulty making choices; non-hoarders showed no such effect.

In practical terms, this means that when I pick up a piece of junk mail, I think, "Piece of junk mail. Recycle it. Done!" When my mother picks up a piece of junk mail, I'm pretty sure that the thought process goes something like, "This is a piece of information that could be valuable someday. Maybe I should recycle it? No, I might need it later. Maybe I should put it in this towering pile of papers on the couch? No, maybe that's not a good place for it. Maybe I should put it into my incredibly overly-detailed filing system? No, if I can't see it, I might forget about it. Maybe I should, um...." At this point, the piece of junk mail is clearly not going anywhere, so it's put somewhere to be dealt with later. Multiply this process by one bajillion pieces of detritus filling the house and you'll begin to understand, at least partially, why the decision to discard something is never really made.

What a waste. Literally.

2011-10-11T18:51:00.000-07:00

Not surprisingly, we children of hoarders are well aware that our parents aren't going to live forever. Unfortunately, we're also well aware of what is going to happen to us after they're gone. Since burning the hoarded house down is generally frowned upon, that leaves us with the dreaded option of actually having to clean it out. Years ago, my brother and I decided that when our mom dies, we're going to go through the house, remove anything we'd like to keep (about two boxes of baby pictures, all told), and have a clean-up company come deal with the rest.

This plan sounds fine on the surface, especially as I mostly just try not to think about it. But when I consider that my mother has filled a 2100 square foot home, three storage sheds, and a two-car garage with total crap, the plan gets a little more complicated. (Hence the trying not to think about it.) It can cost tens of thousands of dollars to hire a company to clean out a hoarded home, plus all of the repairs that are necessary once the place is empty. But the alternative is putting our entire lives (and, most certainly, our sanity) on hold for months while we clean out thousands of square feet of junk. It is completely insane to think about the utter waste of time and money spent cleaning up a hoard like this (not to mention the wasted life that went into creating the hoard in the first place). And when I read something like this Newsweek article on what happens when a hoarding parent dies, I'm pretty sure my blood pressure goes up about 15 points.

Lies my mother told me

2011-10-09T16:12:00.000-07:00

I experience such a flood of recognition when I read this post by One Wee Spark that I'm pretty sure I stopped breathing for a second. She writes about lies that you grow up with in a hoarded home, one of which being "if I can't do it perfectly and complete it right now, I should wait until I can."

My mother had several stock sayings that she repeated throughout my childhood (one of which being, "you make my life a living hell," but that's another post). I remember her telling us kids that "if it's worth doing, it's worth doing well." On the face of it, this is a worthy sentiment. In our house, though, the meaning somehow morphed into something more akin to, "if you can't do it absolutely perfectly, then don't even bother starting." When applied to most areas of life, this misguided perfectionism basically paralyzes your ability to function. In my adult life, this translates into being an excellent procrastinator, which then translates into stress generated by a to-do list that gets longer rather than shorter. If I can't get it done perfectly and completely, I'd rather not even start.

Lately I have been giving myself permission to do things less than perfectly, so I can just get them done. I can vacuum the dirtiest part of our house and leave the rest for later. A short phone call to my grandparents is better than not calling at all. It's immensely freeing to start letting go of the pressure I put on myself. And the more I let go, ironically, the more I realize that trying to do everything perfectly has often kept me from accomplishing anything at all.

Apparently, I'm not the only one

2011-10-05T18:19:00.000-07:00

One common theme running through the writing of children of hoarders is that we're always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Some of us are already hoarders ourselves. But those of us who aren't are often hypervigilant, waiting for something bad to happen, waiting for a switch to flip that will turn us into our hoarding parent. Some of us keep Spartan houses, throwing away anything that might even resemble clutter. Some of us live with clutter, but keep a constant watch out for signs that things are taking a turn for the worse. All of us, I would guess, have to play catch-up to learn basic housekeeping and life skills that most people learned as a child. Some things seem fairly obvious -- dishes should be washed after dinner, you sweep the kitchen after you've made a mess of the floor. Some things are more of a mystery for those of us whose parents did no housekeeping as we were growing up. How often do most people change the sheets? Are you supposed to get a new towel every time you take a shower? How messy do "normal" people let the house get during a busy week?

If my father is right, my mother's hoarding was triggered by the trauma of an interstate move forced by economic circumstances. That means the hoarding started when she was in her mid-30's. I'm 31, so I haven't quite reached the age she was when she began hoarding. I also know that the hoarding "switch" is often flipped by traumatic events in the life of the hoarder. I've had plenty of trauma in my life (less-than-idyllic childhood, death of a sister, a disastrous starter marriage) and so far have had no impulse to start collecting things to comfort myself. I have an ongoing Goodwill bin in the closet and experience a disproportionate amount of joy when it's full and I get to discard it. I'm even happy when I finish off a tube of toothpaste or a bottle of shampoo, because that means I get to throw it out. But no matter how often I remind myself that I'm not like my mother, that I don't have the same problems that she has, the fear is always there. One day, I'm afraid, I will wake up in a house where I have allowed things to rule my life, to push out relationships, to distance myself from family and friends. And I know that other children of hoarders and I are in that same place, hoping that other shoe never drops.

Survey says....

2011-09-22T19:48:00.000-07:00

Although there are plenty of books for parents and spouses of people with mental illness, research into growing up with a mentally ill parent has been sadly lacking. Until now, there has been no systematic research whatsoever into the effects of growing up as the child of a hoarder. If you're interested in contributing to the field of knowledge about being raised in a hoarded home, keep reading.

From Dr. Suzanne Chabaud:

Thank you for participating in my research on Adult-Children of Hoarders. This research is unique in that it taps into so many aspects people’s lives from childhood to future expectations. The conclusions we derive from the completed surveys will guide future research, education, intervention, and outreach for people who grow up in hoarded homes.

Some of you may have participated in the Interview Component of the research. Thank you, again! We are offering for you to participate in this Phase, as well. You are under no obligation.

I know that completing about 200 questions in the survey can be tiring so please take breaks as needed. Do not feel compelled to complete it in one sitting. You may exit the survey and return at a later time. Try your best to answer all of the questions, as I believe that each is valuable. The more completed surveys I receive, the more I can make meaningful conclusions.

It is also important to use the navigation buttons inside of the document; the software only saves information in pages and only when “next” is used to navigate. In order to insure anonymity, we have also programmed the survey to allow exiting and reentering the survey through a web link. Because of this, you will need to use the same computer each time you log back in to continue with your progress. It is best to use IE or Firefox. Chrome has had a couple of compatibility problems.

Thank you, again, for your valuable participation! I hope that you can feel proud for what you are providing. I also hope that your self-examination will be enlightening for you too. If you have questions while you are taking the survey, please feel free to email me. Any technical issues, please email Ms. DuBois at cynthiamdubois@gmail.com. She will happily assist you.

Sincerely,

Dr. Suzanne Chabaud

You can take the survey here.

My worst nightmare

2011-09-14T17:48:00.000-07:00

This article about two women whose hoarded home caught fire scared the bejeezus out of me. One of the women, age 60 and not very mobile, was home alone when her house caught fire. In her own words, it's fortunate that she was sitting on the front porch, because "if it had happened while I was in there, I would never have gotten out."

My mother is in her 60s and not very mobile. Over the last few months, she has begun hiring people to help her clear out her house and "get her life in order" (her words, not mine). Since I can remember, she has been working on getting her life in order, by which she means organizing her junk and making her house more presentable. Unfortunately, as with many hoarders, her organizing often takes the form of churning her things from one pile to another. I'm hopeful that having hired some organizers will help her take the next step of actually letting some stuff go. Her house, as far as I know, isn't yet to the point where she would have trouble leaving in case of fire. Hoarding often gets worse as the hoarder gets older, though, so stories like this always strike a nerve.

I recently read another article that I'm going to have to mentally file under "you can laugh or you can cry." This article about firefighters who were unable to fight a fire at a hoarder's home is actually kind of funny, in a twisted way. Or maybe I just think it's funny because it gives me a special kind of glee to picture this happening to my mother's house (when, of course, her not-too-mobile self is far away from it). These firefighters realized they couldn't get inside to fight the flames, so they brought in a backhoe to tear the front of the building off. (I would love to be listening in on the phone call for this insurance claim. "Okay, so you have some fairly extensive fire damage...and pardon me? I thought you just said the firefighters ripped the front of your house off with a backhoe. What? Oh.") So after they tore the front of the house off, stuff started pouring out of the house "like [a] jackpot from a slot machine." Then the first floor of the home collapsed -- but, not to spoil the suspense, it only fell about six inches because all the stuff in the basement kept it from falling any farther. Regardless, to the surprise of no one who is reading this blog, the house had to be condemned.

It's not just the hoarding that hurts

2011-09-11T16:43:00.000-07:00

In thinking back over my childhood, I'm just now starting to distinguish between which of my mother's damaging behaviors stemmed from the hoarding and which came from her mood disorder. Growing up, we never talked about what went on with my mother. We never really even talked about the hoarding, unless someone was coming over to visit. Then we didn't talk so much as embark on a marathon cleaning session so no one would know how bad it really was. Piles of things would get shoved into my parents' room and into the garage. Since the doors were kept shut, a lot of the mess was kept hidden from any outsiders who might judge.

It wasn't so simple to hide the fact that my mother struggled with severe depression. She would go for awhile being, in psychological parlance, a "good enough" mother. The dishes might or might not get done, but we'd have some kind of predictability about our days. She'd spend time with us doing fun projects or taking us to museums or other educational places. I was never certain, though, when the other shoe was going to drop -- when she would go from being "good enough" to unable to get out of bed, crying all the time, lashing out at us kids that we made her life "a living hell." Her paranoia that people were telling lies about her, her refusal to let us play outside because the world was filled with dangers and bad people who might hurt us, her jealousy of our having friends outside the house or of loving adults other than her -- those didn't come from hoarding. After this time spent crying in bed or moving slowly around the house under a dark cloud, her behavior would change again. Suddenly, she would be cheerful and full of energy. She'd start several new projects that we kids all knew would never get finished. She never realized that, though, and would stay up all night to work on them, sometimes for several nights in a row. She'd go on spending sprees, buying bags of gifts or clothing for us or for friends. After awhile, she would cycle back down to being our regular mom -- until she got depressed again and the cycle started once more.

I didn't realize until I was in college and going to a therapist that her other behaviors, the hyped-up/talking too fast/shopping spree/up all night phases likely mean that she was struggling with bipolar disorder and not simple depression. Growing up with a mother whose moods and treatment of her children varied so wildly, independent of anything we had done, meant that I grew up with the sense that the world is an unstable and unsafe place. Couple that with the damaging behavior around the hoard -- the things that looked like trash to us were such valuable treasures to her, things that seemed even more important than we were -- meant that growing up, I often questioned my own sanity and view of reality.

Many parents with compulsive hoarding also have another mental illness, whether it is OCD, severe depression, schizophrenia, or something else. It's very common for families not to talk about it, as mine didn't. If we were lucky, at some point someone explained to us children of hoarders that our parents have an illness that is in no way our fault. If we're very lucky, and willing to work through all that we've experienced, we'll be able to realize that the craziness isn't part of us at all. It doesn't need to define us. It isn't who we are.

So yes, I'd say her nerves were bad

2011-09-08T17:45:00.000-07:00

It's always fascinated me that we live in a culture that casts so many aspersions on the mentally ill. Blame the Puritans, I guess, as well as any of the Founding Fathers that subscribed to the idea that if you were physically ill, you clearly brought it on yourself by displeasing God. It's not that far of a leap for us to think that the mentally ill are weak, or shiftless, or have done something to bring their misfortune upon themselves. Pull yourself together! Why can't you just snap out of it?

Or, in our case, we hear others say such things about our parents, if anyone knows about their situation at all. Frances Boudreaux recently published Where the Sun Don't Shine and the Shadows Don't Play. She writes about growing up with her mother, who was a clinically depressed, schizophrenic hoarder. (Just typing that last phrase made my heart ache. Honestly, could it get much worse than that?)

In an interview, she mentions that "In the 1960s in rural Central Louisiana, you didn't talk about mental health issues. It was OK just to say your nerves were bad, which my mother did." On a larger scale, I think society has moved more toward openness in the past few decades. At least there are conversations happening and funding put toward supporting those struggling with mental illness. On a smaller scale, though, I question how much truly has changed. Hoarding is such a bizarre and misunderstood illness that I very rarely have heard another person begin a conversation about it, even when their lives have been deeply impacted by a hoarder. Yet, when I've mentioned it, I'm almost always surprised by the other person's response. "Oh, my uncle was a hoarder. You should have seen his house!" "My sister..." "My dad..." and so on. There's so much shame and fear of judgment for being related to a hoarder that often, we limit ourselves to saying even less than "her nerves were bad." And so the shame and secrecy continue and we continue to feel alone, even though we truly aren't. It's enough to make me wonder what would happen if we could be a little bit braver, a little bit more open -- if on a smaller scale, with the people who touch our own lives, we could keep that conversation going.

God bless Elizabeth Vargas

2011-08-23T21:17:00.000-07:00

Seriously, the most awesome thing I've seen all day are Elizabeth Vargas' facial expressions in this 20/20 special about children of hoarders. As she clambers through the hoard, it's actually kind of funny to watch the spasms of horror cross her face. This is a woman who probably should never play poker. After mountaineering her way through the hallway to the living room in what seems to be a state of shock, she picks up and puts down a mustard bottle and then a ketchup bottle, clearly thunderstruck by the fact that they are being stored on the living room floor. (Apparently, she keeps hers in the fridge. Huh.)

There was something very validating about being reminded that growing up as a child in a hoarded home is, to most people, completely foreign and simply unacceptable. 20/20 clearly articulated some of the most damaging and lasting effects of growing up this way. Continuously receiving the message that your parent's junk is more important than you are leaves lasting scars. The feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness have a way of following you, although they are most unwelcome companions.

Watching the show was a little difficult for me. But I also felt uplifted by the profiles of hoarders' children who have grown up and gotten out, moving on to create lives of their own. And to Jason Brunet, whose mother was featured on this show and on Hoarders -- your brave message of hope is actually even more awesome than the expressions on Elizabeth Vargas' face. You're right: there are people out there who understand. And there is always hope. So to those of you who are still living with or struggling with a hoarding parent, to those of you who feel worthless and helpless and like nothing will ever change -- it does get better. It truly does.

Wait, how is this my fault?

2011-08-18T23:42:00.000-07:00

The comment OneWeeSpark left about this article on children of hoarders got me thinking. A line in the article states that "There are no easy answers to this, which is why so many families of hoarders give up trying to change them." Reading this shot me right down memory lane, back into one of the less-than-delightful aspects of being the child of a hoarder.

Growing up, most people didn't know much about my mother's hoarding. Those that did, while well-intentioned, clearly didn't understand what was going on. There's such a misperception that hoarders are just lazy, disorganized slobs who should get up off their couches (if they can still find room on the couch next to all the piles of newspapers) and just start throwing things away. When someone new actually would see the inside of our house, which didn't happen much, they would typically ask (understandably), "How can you live like this?" This question was often followed by some form of disappointment that we kids weren't helping our mother enough, or the expectation that we should just dive in and start throwing things away, or another insinuation that we were somehow responsible for what was happening.

"...Which is why so many families of hoarders give up trying to change them." It took me years -- decades, really -- to come the the conclusion that (brace yourself!) it is not, in fact, my job to cure my mother. I cannot solve the problem by riding in on a white horse (or a white Dumpster, maybe) and throwing everything out. Hoarding has such deep psychological roots that, typically, if a house it cleared out against the hoarder's will, he or she will just fill it back up again.

Besides that, when did it become the child's job to care for and change the parent? Would someone ask the child of an alcoholic to help Mommy quit drinking? The child of a schizophrenic to help Daddy cut down on his pesky paranoid delusions? Blaming the children of hoarders for "allowing" our parents to live the way they do not only misses the mark, but also deepens our sense of shame around an issue we don't need to be ashamed of.

Apparently, it could have been worse

2011-08-17T09:18:00.000-07:00

I was reading recently and learned that there are several types of hoarders: animal hoarders, squalid hoarders, and clean hoarders. (Really? 250,000 words in the English language and the best term that researchers could come up with was "clean hoarder?" Come to think of it, that's actually kind of funny.)

Clean hoarders keep things that the rest of us consider junk, in quantities that impede basic daily activities (cooking, sleeping, mobility, etc.). Piles of gifts for other people that are never given away, 27 bottles of unopened shampoo, newspapers and magazines stacked to the ceiling -- you get the idea. Hoarding of this type can be dangerous, as it creates fire hazards, falling hazards, and basic house maintenance issues. Clean hoarders do not, however, tend to keep things on the more nauseating end of the trash spectrum.

Squalid hoarders keep junk, too, but they also keep things that would make most people's stomachs turn. We're talking used paper plates, rotting food, dirty adult diapers, bags of garbage, and sometimes their own bodily excretions. (Seriously?) Their houses often begin to decay as well, because they are unable to have a repair person come in to, say, fix the leaking toilet. It will just keep leaking for years until the floorboards give way. These houses are often unsalvageable after the hoarder moves out. They're so far gone that they must be bulldozed.

Animal hoarders live in squalor, too. You've probably seen them on the news. They're the hollow-eyed people arrested for animal cruelty after the humane society raids their home and finds 82 cats (or dogs or horses or whatever), in varying states of illness and starvation, living there. Often, they will keep dead animals in the freezer or in other areas of their property. (Again I say, seriously?) Ironically, these hoarders often truly believe that they are "rescuing" the animals under their care.

My mother is a clean hoarder. So yes, I'd definitely say that it could have been worse.

It all started when...

2011-08-16T20:15:00.000-07:00

My father thinks my mother started hoarding about 25 years ago. After struggling to make ends meet for a long time, they had given up and were moving to another state in hopes of finding work. He remembers her loading up the truck with absolute junk that she couldn't bear to part with. You never know when you might need that old rebar, right?

When I was very young, I remember her being not so great with the housework or tidying up, but the house wasn't filled to the brim. The collecting, for the most part, was limited to stuff that got stored in the garage. As I got older, the garage stuff started overflowing into the house. Then we moved again, my mom started working, my parents' marriage continued to deteriorate, and the stuff just kept coming in. About 10 years ago, my parents separated, my sister died in a car accident, my brother and I moved out, and the stuff started coming in faster.

Many hoarders begin hoarding after experiencing a trauma. My mother's hoarding had already begun when my sister died, but it definitely intensified after that. Hoarding also tends to worsen after the hoarder starts living alone, so I guess we're dealing with a double whammy here. Regardless of exactly why, my mother's hoarding just seems get worse with time. The fact that she won't allow me in the house anymore (plus the fact that her piles have now spilled out onto the front porch -- sorry, neighbors!) scares the bejeezus out of me. What on earth does the place look like inside at this point? Mostly, I try not to think about it too much. Occasionally, my brother and I talk about what we'll do when my mom is no longer able to live alone. Given that she's filled a 2200 square foot house, a two-car garage, three storage sheds, and sections of her back and front yards with junk, cleaning the place out is going to be somewhat less than awesome. (Personally, I lean toward burning the place to the ground, but I'm pretty sure the insurance company would frown on that sort of thing.)

Now we know, and knowing is half the battle

2011-07-27T15:35:00.000-07:00

God bless the internet. When I first heard the term "compulsive hoarding" in the late 90's, two things happened. First, I thought, "Oh! So THAT'S what's wrong with my mother." Second, I thought, "Great! So if there's a name for this thing, there must be a ton of information out there about it." I was right on the first thought, wrong on the second. At that point, research on compulsive hoarding was in its infancy and there just wasn't much information available. There is now. It is oddly comforting to me that Googling "compulsive hoarding" pulls up 402,000 results (and counting).

Back then, I felt alone. Even though I knew there must be other people going through what I'd been through, no one was talking about it. Today, people are making TV shows about hoarding. People are writing blogs and web sites and books about hoarding. So not only are we friends and relatives of hoarders not alone, but now we know what's going on with Mom (or Grandpa, or Aunt Judith, as the case may be). And knowing is half the battle.

Children of hoarders, children of alcoholics

2011-07-24T20:00:00.000-07:00

Given that my family doesn't drink, I never gave much thought to the effect of being the child of an alcoholic until today. Sure, we had our issues when I was growing up (not being able to walk through the house without picking your way over huge piles of stuff, for example). Drunken parents, fortunately, were not one of our issues. So imagine my surprise when I stumbled across a Children of Hoarders page which said that many adult children of hoarders have a lot in common with adult children of alcoholics. They offered a quiz on common personality characteristics of adult children of alcoholics. Having been raised on a steady diet of Cosmopolitan quizzes, I figured I'd take this one, too. Granted, this one wasn't quite as light-hearted as, say, "Which Cosmo bachelor would adore you?" (Some sample items: "I guess at what is normal." "I avoid conflict or aggravate it, but rarely deal with it.") Lo and behold, on a scale of 20-100 (with 100 being a high probability of being an adult child of an alcoholic) I scored ONE HUNDRED NINETEEN. Oddly, this actually made me feel better. If there is a reason for my conflict/failure/criticism/intimacy issues (other than, as I've always assumed, grievous personality flaws on my part), that means I can actually do something about them.

(Go here if you're interested in seeing the actual quiz.)

The gift that keeps on giving

2011-07-22T13:28:00.000-07:00

I realized this week that, no matter how much time and effort I've put into sorting through the psychological detritus of growing up in a home with a hoarder, being a hoarder's child really is a gift that keeps on giving. And not the beautifully wrapped, lying-under-the-tree-and-waiting-for-Christmas-morning kind of gift. Really, it's more the unpleasant, coal-in-your-stocking variety.

There were two conversations that precipitated this realization. The first was with a friend whose mother is also a hoarder. I found out that neither he nor I can watch A&E's show Hoarders. Well, to be more precise, even watching the commercials causes me such anxiety that I have to change the channel. He, braver soul that he is, told me that he actually attempted to watch the show with a friend. That experience apparently culminated with his getting more and more irritable until she asked, "Wait. Why are you mad at ME?" To which he, chagrined, replied that he was sorry and he wasn't mad at her. It just hit too close to home.

The second conversation was with another friend who happened to catch a segment about adult children of hoarders on NPR's show Here and Now. They talked about the lasting ramifications of growing up with a hoarding parent, some of which are simply not learning some basic life skills (say, organizing and, um, cleaning your house). While I'm OK at organizing (although I will definitely never be the type with all my shoes ensconced in plastic boxes decorated with a photo of each pair), housekeeping has always been a Sisyphean task that I just cannot seem to manage. (Note to former roommates and my husband: Very sorry. Still working on this.) I always chalked this up to a personal character flaw, but that conversation started me thinking. It's not that much of a stretch to realize that growing up in a household where housework just wasn't done might lead to challenges with keeping my house tidy as an adult. But if that's the case, what other gifts from my hoarding heritage are still with me?