My mother calls me to vent. "So Tony [her landlord] called; he said I have two weeks to clean up my apartment or he's not going to renew my lease. I'll have to find another place to live. I told him it's much better than it was and that I work 60 hours a week and I can't afford to take two weeks off to do this and it's not that bad and I'm only one person and I can't be in two places at once and there aren't enough hours in a day and...." Lucky for me, she has Sprint and her phone doesn't work that well in her apartment, so some of the initial volley was mercifully broken up.
Don't get me wrong; I love my mother. I do. But, she has ADHD and several personality traits that tend to go with it, including hoarding. Have you ever seen the shows about hoarders? Where they make up elaborate stories about objects that most people would consider trash? Welcome to my world. She's not as bad as some of the people on the TV shows, and it has ebbed and flowed in degrees over the years, but it's never gone. Not all people with ADHD are or will become hoarders. Conversely, a significant percentage of hoarders tend to have other underlying psychiatric issues like ADHD, Obsessive-Compulsive disorder, Bi-polar disorder, etc. Hoarders without underlying issues usually suffer some kind of trauma that triggers the behavior. She used to say she was like this because when she was a child her mother used to clean out her room and throw all her stuff away. I realized a long time ago that my grandmother cleaned out her stuff because she has always been like this- a fact that I pointed out to her tonight when I finally became exasperated with her.
I know she is trying. She has battled this for years, but with the ADHD undiagnosed and untreated for decades, the hoarding is deeply ingrained. She has no idea why she does it and this frustrates her. My father is the polar opposite- he's extremely clean and neat- and he was the only thing that kept our home in check when I was growing up. Still, growing up with a hoarder was an interesting experience to say the least. I remember being about ten or eleven or so when my father finally had it with the newspapers and cat food labels in the basement. Yes, you read that correctly. We had probably a couple of years of Sunday papers stacked in the basement. Stacks and stacks, six feet high. My mother wouldn't throw them away because she hadn't gone through and cut out all the coupons yet. When she did cut coupons they weren't organized and were rarely used. They became part of a different pile in a different place in the house. I remember thinking, if you're not going to use them, yet not throw them away, why bother cutting them out? At least it's a little neater if you leave them in the ludicrous stacks of papers. The day my father finally said "tough shit" to the coupon clipping excuse was a great day. I helped him load up all those papers and take them to the dump. I felt like a huge weight had been lifted. We cashed them in for about $15 and he took me for ice cream.
Now with the cat food labels, there was apparently some kind of offer where you save umpteen labels from 9-Lives canned cat food, mail them in somewhere and they send you a coupon, or some cat toy, or something. In the basement next to the newspapers was five or six paper grocery bags full of these canned cat food labels. Yes- that's correct- five or six bags, stuffed full. Not one had ever been mailed anywhere. Much to my mother's protest, as my dad and I were loading the papers he asked me what I thought of those bags of labels. I told him it was stupid and made no sense; that we both knew she would never do anything with them. So, out they went. Oh glorious day!
Ironically, from the time I was six or seven I had to clean my room every Saturday before I was allowed to play, watch TV, or do anything fun. In our house in Sayreville my room was at the opposite end of the hall from that of my parents. I distinctly remember one Saturday when I got up, cleaned my room, and was hanging out drawing or something. It was just one of those lazy teenage days where I got consumed by a creative project. In the morning while I was cleaning my room my mother decided to clean hers too. She sat on the bed in her pajamas watching TV, and started with cleaning out the drawer in her nightstand. I barely noticed until about five hours later when I got up and went to the bathroom, happened to look into her room, and there she sat, still cleaning out the same drawer. She was about half way through it.
After my parents sold the house and went their separate ways I shared an apartment with my mother for a year. I couldn't get out of there fast enough. In the year I lived there, my bedroom was the only room that had ever been unpacked and clean. I moved out when I was 20. At one point I had to feed her cat while she was away. She had enough packets of duck and soy sauce and such to start her own Chinese food restaurant. All over the kitchen- ketchup packets, Chinese food condiments and the like- I threw them all away. That stuff has a shelf life and some of it was months if not years old. Stacks of plastic won ton soup containers- I threw all of them away too. And much like the hoarders on TV, stuff was stacked everywhere with trails to walk from room to room. Every apartment thereafter was the same story. She has a storage unit that she's had for about ten years now. Over $150 per month, times ten years. I don't think she's been in that unit in at least five years. For all I know, she no longer has it and doesn't want to tell me.One time I was helping her move and she had an entire box of empty baby food jars. I asked her if it was garbage. She told me no, and then proceeded to explain to me a very elaborate craft project she had planned for them. I tossed them when she wasn't looking; she never knew until I told her last night.
I haven't been in her current apartment in years. The last time I was in there it was for about 30 seconds to help her carry something in and I held my breath the entire time. I haven't set foot in there since, and I won't. I can't. Not only is the smell overwhelming, but my allergies would go apeshit. It's impossible to be a clean hoarder. The most disturbing thing for me about the TV shows about hoarders is that as soon as I see it and people try to describe the smell and say things like "you can't believe how bad it is," I think to myself, oh yes I can.
It's sad to me that I can't go visit my mother, that I can't come to NJ and crash on her couch to visit, and that it's basically impossible to have a semblance of a "normal" relationship. So many people going through the kinds of things I've gone through over the past 18 months often move "home" for a while; I don't have that luxury. My mother was one of the last people to even know what was going with me. Granted, this is not entirely because of the hoarding but because of the ADHD as a whole. The ADHD deserves a future post of its own. Until then, feel free to post and ask questions if you like. The only way to humanize and destigmatize things like this is to talk about it.
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