Cleanliness is next to what now?

Hoarder's children don't learn how to keep a house clean. (I know, I know. Bow to the Queen of Stating the Obvious.) Not only do we not learn how to clean, but we also learn a complete lack of consistent routine; ironically, rampant perfectionism (of the "if you can't do it perfectly, you might as well not even start" variety); and a sense of being completely overwhelmed by life (hoarders aren't exactly known for teaching their kids how to break a task into smaller, accomplishable pieces). That, plus my mother's voice in my head ("Everybody else knows how to do it. You're just really lazy") have made figuring out this home maintenance thing an uphill climb.

Here's the thing, though. As my personal life completely imploded over the last year or so, I began to realize how much living in chaos affects my outlook and stress level. Even if I have a well-developed case of hoarder's child clutter blindness, at some level I do register the mess and feel stressed by it. And so, fifteen years after leaving my mother's home, I set about really figuring out how to address this issue once and for all. Here are some of the highlights of what I've learned.

1. Cut yourself some slack. As a culture, we view people who don't keep their houses clean in a truly negative light. I really struggled to let go of viewing my messiness as a deep, personal flaw. What worked for me was to take a deep breath and replace my mother's voice ("What's wrong with you?") with something I would say to a friend in the same situation (usually, "Do you realize how much you've already gotten done today? No wonder you're tired"). Repeat about a million times, and you'll be on your way.

2. Have less stuff. Some children of hoarders go the stark minimalist route. Some, like me, just struggle with having a bit too much clutter. I now keep a Goodwill bag in my closet. When I come across something that isn't useful, loved, or beautiful, into the bag it goes. Every month or so, I donate the bag o' crap so it can go clutter someone else's house. Less stuff to maintain = less time cleaning = more freedom.

3. Learn how to clean. Read blogs and books about cleaning. Learning how other people do it not only demystifies the process, but makes it seem a lot more doable. It also lends itself to learning tips that streamline some of the little annoyances in your life. (Among my favorites? Store sheet sets in one of the matching pillowcases. It keeps your sheets together and negates the fact that you couldn't care less about folding the fitted sheet neatly! Another super-handy one is to keep a dish wand (the kind that stores cleaner in the handle and has a scrubber on the end) in the shower and wash it down while you're in there. My shower has never been cleaner!).

4. Ask a friend. A really good, non-judgmental friend. I've discovered that pretty much everyone I've talked to would like their house to be cleaner, which makes me feel better. For the really ridiculous questions, though, it's been great to be able to go to my best friend. She knows all about my hoarder mother and never makes me feel silly for asking questions I should probably know the answer to already. (How much time per day do you spend cleaning? Wait, you clean your washer?)

5. Figure out what works for you. There are about a million systems out there for keeping your house clean. I've had a bear of a time figuring out which one might work for me. They all seem so overwhelming. I finally started small, with setting a timer for 15 minutes a day and cleaning whatever was bothering me the most until it went off. Did I do this perfectly every day? Nope. Did it simplify things enough that I felt less paralyzed about just diving in and getting started? Yep. Recently, I've combined this strategy with matching a particular task and/or room to a day of the week. Cleaning on a rotating basis takes away the indecision and also makes me feel like I have a deadline. Vacuum on Sundays, deep-clean the kitchen on Mondays, living room on Tuesdays... (Full disclosure: I've tried this system before and always ended up quitting and feeling like a failure. If I was too tired or lazy or sick  to do the work on Monday or Tuesday, I'd tack it onto Wednesday's workload and pretty soon be so overwhelmed that I'd just throw in the towel. What makes this time different is that if I skip a day, I actually skip it. Didn't do laundry on Wednesday? No problem. The next laundry day is Saturday. I'll do it then.)

6. Perspective is key. I have a tendency to be an all-or-nothing thinker (again, thanks, Hoarder Mom!). "I didn't clean the house today" somehow turns into "I'll never figure out how to do this" which turns into "I'm a terrible person." Keeping things in perspective helps keep the emotionally charged topic of cleaning house from becoming, well, emotionally charged. If you can stop this train of thought in its tracks, "I didn't clean the house today" can become "Well, at least I finished the dinner dishes, and that's okay. Wait, I'm okay!" And that feels pretty good.

Aargh!

This will come as a shock to no one who grew up in a hoarded home, but I did not grow up in a household where people knew how to set or respect healthy boundaries. When issues arose, the options were to ignore them (doesn't that make it go away?), pretend you don't have any needs (What? No, really, that doesn't bother me at all. Really), or just bottle it up inside until you explode for no apparent reason. (That last one is even more awesome if you end up screaming at someone for an infraction completely unrelated to what you're actually mad about.)

As an adult, I'm still working on the whole setting healthy boundaries deal, at least with my mother. With other people, I'm fine, given that when you discuss an issue with most people they're willing to work things out to both people's satisfaction. (Or, in the case of compromise, to both people's mild dissatisfaction. But at least it gets worked out.)

But when you try to work things out with someone who's profoundly dysfunctional, setting boundaries  doesn't go so well. If I bring something up with my mother, it gets turned around into being my problem and my fault. To preserve what relationship we have left, I've kind of thrown in the towel on calling my mom on her crap. Doing otherwise makes me too crazy.

Until recently, that is. At the moment, I've had just about up to here (picture my hand waving somewhere about six feet above my head) with dealing with my mother's passive aggression/hoarding/hypochondria/dysfunction. The thing is, she's getting older and I know that her care will, at some point, become my responsibility.

Which brings me back to the boundaries thing. At previous stages in life, I'd worked out how much distance I could keep from my mother to maintain my own sanity. As she gets older, I have to figure out anew how to set boundaries with a woman who neither understands nor respects them. How is it possible to take care of someone who's lost her mind without losing mine?

I hate Mother's Day

Really. I hate Mother's Day with a fiery passion. Most of the time, I feel like I've made my peace with having a mother who just couldn't care for us kids the way that most mothers do. But then sometimes I run across something (like this truly lovely blog post) that makes me realize that I still mourn not having a functional relationship with my mother. I still have an internal sense of that lost little girl who grew up in a hoarded house with no room for her, physically or emotionally.

I know I can't possibly be the only one out there who hates Mother's Day. Granted, it really isn't the type of thing that tends to come up in conversation. I might as well announce a hatred of puppies and unicorns. But then again, maybe not. Truthfully, I don't see how children of a hoarding mother -- or a mother with any kind of mental illness -- could avoid having at least somewhat mixed feelings about the day. Hoarding tends to be comorbid with other mental illnesses, which means that many of us children of hoarders had additional parental issues to deal with. Female hoarders have a higher incidence of panic disorder, binge eating, OCD, substance abuse, and bipolar I disorder (the kind with the really high highs and the really low lows). Male hoarders have a higher incidence of social phobia than male non-hoarders. (See this NIH-published study for more information.)

My extremely anxious mother hoarded, binge ate, and suffered from what seems to be undiagnosed bipolar disorder. Growing up with her was less than delightful. Don't get me wrong -- she loved us and tried to do the best that she could (although her best was a total nightmare). So every year, as Mother's Day rolls around, I once again try to make my peace with celebrating a mother who couldn't cope with her own life, much less the lives of her three children; a mother who prioritized her relationship with things over her relationship with people; a mother with whom I, more often than not, had to assume the role of care-taking adult. That's all still true, come to think of it.

So here's to all of those people out there who have mixed feelings about the holiday (and the people who outright loathe it, like me. I know you're out there.) Happy freaking Mother's Day.

Lies my mother told me, part 2

Growing up in a hoarded home, you internalize a lot of messages about how to exist and how to make your way in the world. As my therapist has pointed out, this means you learn patterns of behavior that help you survive your childhood. Unfortunately, the flip side of this means that if you're looking to create a healthy adulthood, there are a lot (a LOT!) of messages that you need to rethink and revise.

One of the biggest messages I received growing up was never actually verbalized. It had more to do with watching my mother's reactions to problems. For the most part, whenever an issue arose, her reaction fell into one of three camps. Option 1: Make no attempt to solve the problem. Stick head in sand. Repeat as necessary. Option 2: Attempt to solve problem via incredibly complex, complicated solution that is doomed to fail. Flagellate self ceaselessly when completely unrealistic solution doesn't work out. Option 3: Blame someone else for the problem. (This last one is very handy, as it totally preempts the necessity of examining your own contributions to the issue. Unfortunately, it also means you have a snowball's chance in Arizona of actually resolving anything.)

As an adult, these three choices seem to have melded into one giant, crippling shorthand. No matter what the problem is (and in my life lately, there have been some doozies), my unconscious reaction screams that "There is no possible solution to this problem!" I'm pretty sure this comes from the complex of issues that stem from growing up in a crazy, hoarded home, not least of which is the specter of learned helplessness that raises its ugly head all. the. damn. time. As I'm facing my own, new apartment that is still in chaos from a move, plus a variety of implosions in my personal life, it can be hard to remember everything I've learned over the past decade. Sometimes, no matter how far you've come, it's still hard to be a hoarder's child.

Sometimes you win just by showing up

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.

Lies my mother told me

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

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.

My worst nightmare

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

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.

Children of hoarders, children of alcoholics

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

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 my brother who, like me, can't handle watching 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 a 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?