Below is the result of your feedback form. It was submitted on Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 06:32 PM.


Relationship : daughter
Source : found it on a internet search
Message :

My mother was the oldest of 7 children and from a completely disfunctional family. She never had anything she could call her own. Her mother was a terrible housekeeper, grossly overweight and too busy working to clean the house or look after her children. The apple didn't fall far from the tree.

Like her mother, my mother was a terrible housekeeper and an unattentive parent. She spent most of my early childhood years on the couch watching soap operas and the Price is Right and reading True Romance magazines while the dishes built up in the sink and the laundry built up everywhere.

One thing she would always do is fill the sink with hot soapy water and then drop as many dishes as she could fit into it and then return to the couch as if she expected the dishes to wash themselves. She'd leave the dishes there for hours, rinse them and put them in the dish drainer dirty. She also had a very expensive vaccume cleaner that never got used.  Another thing was that she would leave perishable food out on the bench top all day and night. It's a wonder I didn't have chronic gastroenteritis.

As my sister and I got older, the responsibility of cleaning the house was given to us. We had a list of chores to do daily. If for some reason we didn't do them, we'd get in trouble. As soon as we cleaned, the house would be messy again with dishes, food all over the bench etc...

My mom also began hoarding. Her first thing was Tupperware which she started collecting in the 1970's. She has 3 huge shelves in the basement filled with Tupperware, some of it never used. She has boxes and boxes of romance novels, piles of clothes that still have tags... She will buy a shirt that she likes and purchase every color in the range. She collects fabric for quilting - a whole room filled with it. She has drawers and drawers full of makeup. She likes buying Clinique and Lancome when there is a free gift and her drawers are full of that stuff - some never used. The closets are full of clothes and shoes. She has hundreds of cookbooks but rarely cooks, 3 treadmills that never get used, heaps of other exercise equipment that gets no use whatsoever. Bathroom and hall cabinets full of hair products. She has more shampoo and conditioner than the average hair salon!

To top it all off, she and my father are dog people. Dog people are the worst! They put the needs of the dog before the needs of human beings. I live on the other side of the world these days far away from them, but when I last visited with my baby daughter, the house was a complete disaster. It smelled of dog poo and urine as they had 2 dogs that were not housebroken. There was poo and urine everywhere and she made no attempt to clean it.

It's just embarrassing. When you travel half way across the world to visit with your husband and new child, you expect some effort to be made to make the house presentable. My mother made no attempt and I had it out with her. I said that she could live in squalor if she wanted to, but I would not subject my own family to it. That was 4 years ago and I have no plans on returning.

She broke down into tears and got upset with me for confronting her. She is the sort of person who falls into the category of feeling safe with all of her things. She likes that they are all hers and does not want to give anything away or share anything with anyone. I attribute that to her upbringing, not having her own things.