Hoarding

Someone asked me why my mother being a hoarder was such a big deal. Here's a list of things that might help explain that. The order is fairly random and not necessarily chronological.

1. I spent the entire time I was in high school, sleeping on a toddler bed, with springs poking out of the mattress that used to give me scratches. Despite the bed drawing blood on numerous occasions, she wouldn't replace it.

2. I could never have friends over because the house was too messy. If I tried to clean anything because it bothered me, there was a big fight. I was accused of passive/aggressively trying to make her clean something. To this day, I have to catch myself from doing the same thing when other people (including my husband) help me clean.

3. My mother considered me a tool to be used rather then a person. She had no problems with using me as a bargaining chip to get more money from my father. While my stepfather never laid a hand on me in a sexual manner, my mother made it clear that she would do nothing if he chose too.

4. I was never as important has my mother's stuff. Even when money was tight, clothes, school supplies, and whatever else I needed was usually bought with someone else s money because she had better things to spend her money on.

5. Hoarding involves a certain amount of narcissism you notice in small things. On a drive to visit my brother for Christmas, it was insisted that I go. I had to ride in the back seat, with the #100 Labrador, and no heat. Since my mother couldn't sit in the car for the 13 hour drive we had to spend the night in a hotel. My parents went out to dinner, leaving me in the hotel room to babysit the dog. The dog got a steak dinner, they brought me back Mcdonalds. The point of all this: so my mother could prove to her mother that she was a good mother and grandmother herself.

6. Never once, in my entire childhood, were my sleep issues acknowledged or addressed. Despite sleepwalking as a child, going night after night on little to know sleep, being awake to hear the mice chewing on the walls, my mother snoring down the hall...etc, I was just a light sleeper.

7. To this day I have issues with cleaning. My mother's way of cleaning was let everything pile up, then frantically throw everything in a box and out into the shed. Nothing was sorted, or ever thrown out. Even when things are a mess and I don't like, it's hard for me to clean it, just to make myself feel better about it. There's this ingrained idea somewhere in the depths of my consciousness that I don't deserve better.

8. Many people have asked, why I didn't go live with my father, since I did have that option. My mother made sure to tell me that I would never be happy. That there was something wrong with living in a clean house, it was too 'perfect'. That there was something wrong with someone who kept her house like that. More importantly, I was “HER” daughter and I shouldn't live anywhere else. I was part of the hoard.

9. I needed financial aid for college. My mother didn't finish her taxes in time for me to fill out a Fafsa after I graduated. I had to stay at home for a year, until I finally did most of them and all she had to do was sign it. This may sound trivial to an adult, but for a 17 year old who wasn't even allowed to be in a car with anyone but her parents, it was a big deal.

Everything about my mother's hoarding was a big deal. So big, that even now she's dead, I'm still cleaning up the psychological hoard.