Hate the sin, love the sinner?

So you'd have to actually know me to get how ironic this post title is. I grew up in an incredibly conservative, literal-minded, Bible-believing, born-again evangelical Christian household and am now as left-leaning, eastern-philosophy-oriented, non-religious as they come. (Public service announcement: If anyone takes this opportunity to post anything about my being a lost soul and hoping I will come back to the fold of Jesus' precious sheep, I will delete your comment immediately. I will then commence to send you evil thought-vibes over the internet, which may or may not progress to my buying a voodoo doll with your name on it. Just sayin'.)

"Hate the sin, but love the sinner" was something I heard a lot growing up. I believe that translates into something like, "We are judging the hell out of you and are totally okay with it. You're going to burn, by the way." I know it was a little more nuanced than that, but still. When you're a kid, hating the person and hating their actions aren't so far removed from one another.

Turns out, as an adult it's not so easy, either. Given the amount of pain my parents have inflicted over the years and my current desire to be a healthy, happy person, it's difficult to maintain (or create, as the case may be) a healthy relationship with them. I know a lot of people in my situation have made the difficult decision to end all contact with their parents. I applaud their courage and sometimes wish I could follow suit. In many ways, it would be simpler. Not easier -- that is, in no way, an easy road -- but simpler.

After much soul-searching, I have realized that I wouldn't feel okay about myself if I simply walked away from my family. For better or worse, they're my people. But I have also realized that just because I got the short end of the familial stick doesn't mean I need to maintain relationships that are painful and damaging. So where to go from here? Is there a way to separate my parents as people (the sinners, so to speak) from their damaged, shaming, hurtful, judgmental, hateful sin?

While this struggle has different nuances from making peace with a hoarder parent, for me they feel very similar. It's difficult for me, even as an adult, to separate my mother as a person from her hoarding and her behavioral oddities. I've worked through and let go of a lot of the childhood resentment and recrimination. I have changed quite a bit, but the fact remains that she, well, hasn't.

I've realized more and more that creating a healthy relationship with my mother may not actually be an achievable goal. I realized this afresh recently after she stopped speaking to me. Over the course of the last decade, she has repeatedly requested that we talk about my childhood. I'd refused every time, because that was clearly not going to end well. She was looking for validation as a mother and a person, and I have none to give. It's not really my job, anyway. But this time I decided that maybe it would be good for me to say my piece, and so I did. There's really no gentle way to explain how being raised by a clinically depressed hoarder feels to a child. I tried. She didn't like it. And now she isn't speaking to me. Which is kind of sad. It's also kind of awesome. It definitely makes that whole hate the sin, love the sinner thing simpler. Until she starts talking to me again, but that's a whole different post.

Hot damn. I'm baaaaack!

So I took an extended, albeit unannounced, leave of absence from the blogosphere. I needed some time and space to keep weeding through and discarding some of the emotional detritus from my past. It's been an interesting seven months. (Since blogs are tone-of-voice free and since I am Queen of the Understatement, let me just translate the word "interesting" for you. It's been fantastic, gut-wrenching, amazing, and incredibly draining. Thank god for good friends and a good therapist.)

Those of you who have been following me for awhile (thanks, by the way! I am awed and humbled and touched by all of your comments) know that I have been battling for years to extricate myself from some pretty damn destructive family-of-origin patterns. I grew up in a very repressive, very judgmental born-again Christian household. (To be clear for any evangelical Christians who may be reading this and bristling, I have nothing against Jesus. He was a pretty awesome dude. I do, however, have a lot -- a looooooot -- against being raised by a family who taught me that I would never, ever be good enough and who slapped a religious coating on that belief and called it gospel.)

My mom is a capital-H Hoarder who has, at last count, managed to fill a four-bedroom suburban home, garage, yard, and variety of sheds with absolute crap. Because you might need it someday, you know? She struggled with depression and, I suspect, hypomania the entire time I was growing up. This part is hard to jam into a nutshell, but I spent my formative years in the role of mother, taking care of her. I was home-schooled until high school, so there was, quite literally, no escaping the chaos and the dysfunction.

My parents were married, but in that "I hate you with the fire of a thousand suns" kind of marriage, where their volcanically caustic relationship poisoned everything around them. My dad lived with us, but we didn't see him much. He spent most of his waking hours (and all of mine) at work. Years later, he came to me and apologized for not taking better care of us kids "because I never knew how bad it was at home." I'm sorry, what? How? What? I have no words. But that's a post for another time.

My dad loves me, I know, but has his own issues around anxiety and shame, especially of the religious variety. Talking with him is like emotional dodgeball, as he lobs giant verbal balls filled with guilt and shame in my direction. Don't get me wrong -- he does his best. It's just that his best kind of sucks. As an adult, I can see that with reasonable clarity. As a child, his constant disappointment and disapproval of me was soul-crushing.

It's been a long road (16 years and counting) to weed out which parts of me are actually me and which parts of my inner voice come from my parents. It's an important road and I am fully aware that I'll be traveling it for the rest of my life, but sweet mother of all that is holy. It's a lot of work. Good work, necessary work, but still. These last six months or so have been pretty intense for me in terms of making peace with my need to turn my back, if not on my family, on much of what they have taught me and on the parts of who they are that diminish me.

It is wretchedly and wrenchingly difficult for me to stand tall and take care of myself, given that I was explicitly and implicitly taught for years that to do so is unacceptable. The good news, the news that brings me peace and joy and amazement that life can be so incredible, is that I actually can. I can take care of myself, and I can love myself, and I can give myself all of the nurturing and understanding that my parents weren't able to when I was growing up. I deserve to be loved, and I deserve to love myself. I wake up in the morning now and am filled with a gratitude so profound that it borders on joy. I am safe. I am happy. I am me, and it's pretty damn fantastic.

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.

Score one for therapy

I've spent the last couple of months struggling with how to be a good daughter to my bipolar, wildly inept, crazy-making hoarding mother while remaining sane and healthy. After much mental anguish, several self-help books, and lots of therapy, I have come to the following conclusions:

1. Our culture has no real archetype or paradigm for bad daughters. Seriously. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is Lizzie Borden. Given that I'm planning to figure this whole thing out well before I have the urge to hack my mother up with a hatchet, that's not exactly the role model I was looking for. (On the plus side, Googling "bad daughter" led me to The Bad Daughter: Betrayal and Confession by Julie Hilden, which is quite an interesting read.)

2. Although I've known this one for awhile, recent interactions with my mother have driven this point home once again. She isn't going to change. As much as I deserved a tuned-in, consistently caring mother as a child, she wasn't that person then and she isn't now. Harsh as it sounds, she is and always will be damaged and narcissistic. She is unable to see or acknowledge how her behavior affects other people and will continue to blame others (read: me) for her failures in relationships and in life.

3. She seems incapable of sustaining long-term relationships, whether with family members, friends, or her own children. She drives people away with her neediness, anger, narcissism, and social ineptitude. She doesn't know how to make and keep friends. Does it make me sad that my mother is lonely? You bet. Does it occasionally twist my stomach into a knot or two when I think of her dying alone, as seems likely? Damn straight. But am I responsible for this state of affairs, or for making her any less lonely? Nope. That's on her, not me.

4. And for the grand finale of all conclusions, one that surprised even me -- how I can be a good daughter to my mother while still taking care of myself? I can't. I can't be a good, care-taking daughter to her and still be happy and healthy. And given that I'm not willing to spend any more of my life sacrificing myself for her well-being, at least for now it means that I have given myself permission to be a bad daughter. As a wise friend once pointed out, I can be a bad daughter without being a bad person. What that means in practice, I'm not so sure. But I do know that just having this realization is huge and life-changing and just the beginning.

Childhood memories? What childhood memories?

I was almost an adult before I realized that it was strange that I can’t remember much of my childhood. The normal state of affairs is not to have a large, fuzzy blank between the ages of, say, 3 and 13. It's disconcerting not to be able to trust your own memory. It's even worse to have people recount stories that you don't remember AT ALL, even though you were there. On occasion, my father will mention something traumatic that happened when I was a teen or tween and I can't recall it in the slightest. Given that a big chunk of what I do remember is either upsetting or just plain weird, I always kind of figured I was repressing memories. It's a bit disturbing to think that all those memories might bob to the surface of my mind one day, as I have already spent enough on therapy to install an Olympic-sized swimming pool in my shrink's backyard. Or maybe just send him on a really nice vacation. But I digress.

Recently, though, my therapist explained something that made me feel much better about the whole deal. Apparently, most parents interact with their children in a way that helps them make sense of the world. (What? You mean other kids don't have to figure it all out for themselves as they go along? Damn, that must be nice. Not that I'm bitter.) These repeated interactions, where your parents help you process the events of your young life, also help you to encode memories. I never really had anyone to consistently help me with, well, anything. Forget having anyone who could help me make sense of my world. I lived in a world that didn't make sense for anyone else, either. And so where a child with more support would have processed events and encoded them into memories, I just lived through events and then forgot them.

For me, this explanation was kind of a relief. I was already well aware that I didn't have anyone who could really help shepherd me through my growing-up years, so that didn't exactly come as a shock. I'll definitely take that explanation over feeling like I have all of these unremembered traumas circling below the surface, just waiting to float up and bite me. Awesome it is not -- but I'll take what I can get.

Lies my mother told me, part 3

Sometimes I feel like my life is a continuous process of weeding through the pile of hoarder's child messages mounded in my brain, discarding the ones that no longer fit, are flat-out wrong, or simply make my life untenable. That would be, ahem, most of them.

One of my mother's recurring refrains is "As soon as I get my ducks in a row..." or its near cousin, "As soon as I get my life in order..." This is delivered in a wistful, wry tone of voice and always followed by something she would love to do, but refuses to allow herself the pleasure of actually doing it. Growing up with this constant refrain (especially in a family of sturdy, German-descended farming folk with a mighty Protestant work ethic), I learned that you must complete all of your "shoulds" before there's any room for enjoying yourself. I must clean the house/finish grading papers/call Grandma before I can take a bubble bath/read that book on my nightstand/go hiking/and on and on. You need to tick off all the items on your to-do list before you deserve to take care of yourself.

I recently had an epiphany about this. Life is pretty damn daily, you know? And there's a reason it seems like every time I cross an item off my list, I have to add another one. It's because every time I cross an item off my list, I actually do have to add another one. Life is ongoing. I'll always have more to do tomorrow. So screw it -- I've decided that now I'm going to take care of myself first. Do I want to go to Starbucks before I do the grocery shopping? Why not? Read another chapter before I finish the laundry? Certainly. Do something fun before I've checked off every last item on the list? You bet. Because, at the end of the day, there's always going to be a duck or two that isn't in a row. I say, smile and wave at them as you head out the door to do something that will make you happy.

Surprising sympathy. Sort of.

I'm the first to admit that I normally have precisely zero sympathy for my mother, the hoarder. This is a trait that I share with many children of hoarders. There's something about growing up in a household where your parent bonds with things more than you that doesn't inspire a ton of warm, sympathetic feelings. Recently, though, I had probably my first flash of sympathy ever. After moving last month into a much smaller place, I still have one bedroom stacked with boxes to go through. It's like death by a thousand tiny decisions. Open a box, take out an item. Does it go to Goodwill? The garbage? Do I keep it? If so, where do I put it? Then multiply that by all of the items in the box, and then by all of the boxes I have left to go through. Overwhelming. And this is coming from someone whose default mode is "If I don't love it, it needs to go away." And then I thought of my mother, who has filled a four-bedroom house, two-car garage, and two storage sheds to the brim with utter crap. It's an incredibly overwhelming amount of possessions.

Researchers are discovering that hoarders' brain function seems to differ from that of a healthy person. (This will come as no great shock to those of you who are related to a hoarder.) Part of the issue seems to be that they cannot accurately judge the value of an item, leading to keeping a huge excess of things that to them (and them only) seem valuable. They also have great difficulty making decisions (this likely isn't shocking to you either). But if I am this worn out by clearing out one bedroom's worth of stuff, I can't imagine what facing down an entire hoarded house would feel like for my mother. Therein lies possibly the first glimmer of sympathy I've ever had for her.

Granted, the sympathy is limited. Her refusal to seek help for hoarding or her concomitant manic depression kind of puts the brakes on the warm fuzzies. It's certainly not her fault that, like many hoarders, she grew up traumatized by living in an abusive family. It isn't her fault that her brain chemistry doesn't work like most people's. But forcing three children to grow up in the midst of her very substantial baggage? I don't have enough sympathy to let her off the hook for that.

A funny God

I was talking with my therapist recently about how life seems to keep circling back around to my unresolved issues. He mentioned the phrase "a funny God," which at first confused me. And then I realized he was talking about what I was talking about -- that, until you have really, truly worked through something, life/God/the universe/whatever you want to call it will keep bringing you the same situation until you work your way through it.

I moved this weekend, downsizing from an 1800 square foot house to an 850 square foot apartment. Not surprisingly, this means I now have WAY too much stuff. Stuff stacked in boxes around the apartment, stuff stacked in piles that I have to work around. Stuff that has made my home chaos.

I was staring at all of this stuff today, feeling overwhelmed and triggered by memories of growing up in a house where you couldn't actually walk straight through most of the rooms. You had to pick a path over, through, and around the piles of stuff. I felt very much like I was back with my mother, surrounded by an unmanageable chaos. And then, all of a sudden, I realize that wasn't true at all. Too much stuff, yes. Chaos, yes. But, this time around, I have the ability to simplify, discard, and organize. I have the power to make my life what I want it to be. My mother's issue no longer needs to be my issue.

A funny God, indeed.

If wishes were fishes

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.