Sometimes I
just really miss my mom, I think she’s buried under the mess. Maybe if I
can clean it out, I’ll find her again...

Below is the result of your feedback form. It was submitted on
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 04:29 AM.


Relationship : Daughter of Hoarders
Source : Google
Message :

When I was young, maybe 5 or six I remember tons of relatives always
coming over. Our house was clean, nice, and the yard and surroundings
perfectly landscaped. The only mess was my parents marriage. When I was
eight, my father left. The mess started about two years after.  My mother
took a lot of self-esteem courses, and made some new friends, she also
bought a small business. She was on a positive streak, and she began
re-decorating and fixing the home. She spent more and more time away
from home and with her new business. We ate out a lot, went on trips,
visited her friends, always avoiding the house.

The first room to get cluttered was the toy room. Coming from divorce
with two guilty parents, I was inundated with toys and various things.
However with a single mother as a parent, the childhood vacation was
over. My childish playing and likes seemed to be a huge in-convenience for
my mother. And they toy room became useless, a place for a child I
wasn’t allowed to be.  It became the dumping ground for all the mess
that had no place. The cupboards in the common areas began to fill with
bills and papers. Mail, newspapers, odd’s and ends…they took up every
nook and cranny. Then it was the bedrooms, under coffee tables,
everywhere was covered in “things”.  I remember getting severe anxiety as
a child around this time, the house was horrible. It would pile up and
up, when I would stress my anxiety about the issue to my mother it
would immediately become the blame game. “it’s your mess, it’s the
cat’s fault, I’m not perfect/ I can’t do everything/ I did
EVERYTHING when I was with your father and look where that got me/you do it
too”  were all the common defensive phrases.    We would clean
basically twice a year (big cleans) the one major one at Christmas. 

The worst room was (still is) the basement. It is piled to the ceiling
with crap, and my mothers room/my bedroom.



When my teens hit I began to realize that it wasn’t normal. I
started combating the mess. I managed to keep the common area’s
inhabitable, sometimes they would get bad, but by 17 I had a pretty firm control
on it.  It was hard battling the “mess”.  I never understood where
all her stuff came from, why everything had to be scattered everywhere.
  Sometimes I would skip school, come home and clean, just so It was
habitable enough to have a friend over for 1 hour. I would always make up
stories on how my mom was entertaining a bunch of people on the
weekend…that’s why it was messy.





Realization she was different:  By 18 I started to realize just how
different my situation was. I would watch tv programs, or go to other
hoarders homes. I would see the similarity and feel at ease.  My home may
have not been as extreme as some, but the undercurrent was exactly the
same. I had a friend comment once (one who came from a normal home) that
it seemed like I was the mother, and she was the child. She said this
in reference to the fact that I cooked dinner, did the dishes, cleaned
the house etc. my mom was never home. She was always at work. When she
did come home it would be like a bomb went off.  She seemed grateful at
the fact that I had cleaned. But almost instantly she would become
bitter, and angry she couldn’t find something. She would ask
“where’s that gas bill, I left it on this table”  I of course would reply,
in the pile of gas bills! ( I would sort them and throw out the
envelopes and extra junk and file them in a file folder). She would storm over
to the file folder, rip out the bills and start going on about how I
must have “threw it out”, and that’s why I shouldn’t go through
the things. Of course it would be where I said it was and she would just
mumble a “sorry” along with her reasoning on why she was right.
She was always blaming me for things that were “lost” , to this day
she will bring up a bill I threw out when I was 12.  She never
questioned why was a twelve year old child cleaning the entire house?


Now:
I am going to be twenty seven. My mother is in her sixties, and can
barley stand to do the dishes. She has finally admitting to her hoarding
problem. I am thankful in some ways that things never became to extreme.
However after years of neglect the house is in need of a lot of
repairs. My fiancé and I live here and are currently combating the house. He
is a great support. As she is getting older she will be retiring
  soon, she isn’t too financially well off.  The battle is now is moving
forward. We are going to buy our own home and have asked my mother to
come a live with us. We plan to get either a guesthouse for her, or a nice
suite. She tries so hard to stop hoarding, but she cant. It’s very
frustrating for me. I love her but sometimes I just hate her.  I feel
tired, overworked, and drained. Trying to go through a house of memories
(a lot very painful) and not being resentful of my mother is hard. She
wants to keep things of my fathers because “he would want that”. He
left 18 years ago and she sees him on a regular basis, if he really
wanted these possessions, I’m sure he would have asked.




We recently tackled my mother’s room. She wanted to switch to another
one, so of course she began  piling it up with crap. He bed broke and
she began to sleep on the couch. For 1 year she kept on saying she was
going to “clean it out”. she would start to clean it out, and just
begin piling the junk in the common areas. She has her own living room,
and so do we; hers is filled with all this crap which makes it
impossible to clean.  About a month ago my fiancé and I just tackled the
room, within 1 week it was done. Over 15 garbage bags. 20 trips to charity
drop off’s and her bedroom was done.   We have since moved in and are
renovating the room she wants to move in to.  

I’m trying to plan for the future, and take care of my mother. I have
decided to make a stand now, as opposed to 10 years from now when
I’ll have to dig her out…literally.  It’s very hard and emotional for
me. Sometimes I feel like a horrible daughter for throwing out her
things. I do it behind her back, she will make a box for garbage, and one
for storage. I take them both to the dump.
I don’t understand why she needs all this stuff? Why does she want to
insist on living where entire rooms aren’t being used because they
are holding all this precious “stuff”?  I guess I will never know.
To me it’s just what it is “Stuff“. It has no meaning. Yes if
something I admire like a vase breaks. I’m sad for a minute, but
c’mon…it’s a vase. I pick it up and throw it out. I don’t save it for
later to “fix it”. It was very hard growing up with this problem, it
affected my relationship with my mother, and it is a constant struggle
in my life. There is only a few rooms left; however they are the ones
  that require the most work. I know I have the motivation, but I just
wish I could have my mother there helping me; but she can’t because
she doesn’t know how to throw things out. Like so many things in life
I am again being left alone to figure it out by myself. Sometimes I
just really miss my mom, I think she’s buried under the mess. Maybe if I
can clean it out, I’ll find her again.