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hoarding items and the bigger issue

August 11th, 2008 at 03:41 am

I am watching TLC's "Help! I am a hoarder!" (Dont deny it- you have watched it too- at least wanted to watch it.) Now here is my little confession- this is the 2nd time I have watched it. I just find this lifestyle fascinating.

Now here comes my bigger confession- My mom was a hoarder of sorts and I am very afraid I will turn into one myself.

My mom was "diagnosed" with Bi-Polar about 3 years before she died. I quote the 'diagnosed' term because according to her therapist there is no way to really tell if you have the disease, they diagnose you if you display symptoms and respond to treatment. My mom never really responded to drug treatment, she just yo-yoed all around on different drug cocktails. And the therapist who 'diagnosed' her happened to be a Bi-polar specialist.

But who knows? She could have legitimately been Bi-polar. And the diagnosis brought her peace of mind and freedom to continue her ways, so there it was.

I compare my 'Bi-polar' mother to the hoarder because my mother was the shopaholic type. I bet she would have been 'diagnosed' as a shopaholic or compulsive spender if she had seen a different specialist that day.

Anyways, the house was filled to the gills with 'stuff'. If it was old, she kept it. If it was broken, she kept it. If it was useless, she kept it. On top of that, she was shopping constantly. It would take many many paragraphs to really convey how 'hoardishly' serious the situation was. Just 'stuff' piled to the ceiling in every room. All of it with price tags still attached!

After she died I did educated guessing based on receipts, paperwork and bank statements. The last few years she was spending nearly a hundred thousand dollars a year. She still had about 1 or 2 yrs left before she would have cleared her retirement account bone dry- the scary thing was it was escalating! Like the last year she nearly DOUBLED her spending!)

During this time I had no idea the numbers was that high. I was convinced I would inherit debt, but we had the typical mother/daughter relationship where she treated me as a child, and I acted like a child. I threw up my hands long ago and let her spend, spend, spend. Because she loved it so much and it kept her out of my hair.

Now, I see little 'hoarding' tendencies maybe coming out in me. I have kept a lot of my toys from childhood. (I cannot picture a situation they would ever come out of the box again, but I refuse to let them go.) I got rid of more than half the stuff, but kept about 2600sqft worth of stuff that I refuse to consider getting rid of. (It's very high end stuff and I cannot recoup a reasonable amount of the money.) But really, there is zero chance I can afford 2600sqft of living space when house hunting. Baseball boy and I argue back and forth if the guest bedroom will be filled ceiling high with 'stuff' or if we should get a long term storage unit. In the interest in saving money I argue against the storage unit.

And I combat the fear that I will turn into my mother by routinely going through all drawers, paperwork, freezer, closets- everything- and regularly clear everything out to bare necessities.

Baseball boy is constantly annoyed I have tossed something he needs. But clutter makes me anxious. And clutter in drawers is the worst. I 'know' if a drawer is 'junky' and it irritates me so badly.

And the most ironic part of all is that if I do end up having a hoarding problem, or a bi-polar problem, or a whatever mental problem- there is no way to even know! Baseball boy has repeatedly assured me he will sit me down for 'the talk' if he ever thinks I am mentally 'not right.' He met my mom, saw the house. It's really overwhelming to an outsider. Neither of us wants to deal with that again. I was never terribly sympathetic towards my mom, and wouldn’t it be karma for me to get the same tendencies as her.


So yeah. That's my little story. It's not at the fore of my brain regularly, but shows like this TLC special reminds me that my brain might be a time bomb waiting to go off and lead me down a very destructive path. Yeah. I have weird paranoias.

11 Responses to “hoarding items and the bigger issue”

  1. gruntina Says:
    1218424400

    Thank you for sharing your story. My mother has an extreme case of bipolar. It was just me and my mom growing up because the rest of the family couldn't tolerate living with her. I felt so bad to see my mom alone and I was able to see through her illness so I decided to stay with her while my brothers and sister went to their father. In my mother's case it did take a very long time before she got treatment or got anyone to understand what she was going through.It was hard enough to get her to a doctor and convinced her that she needed help. There is test you can take for bipolar to see if you have it or not. Technology has come a long way.

    In my mom's case, it was severe enough that she was laughing this minute and you look away for a few second and to find that she is balling her eyes out. It was tough. Her shopping sprees were a big problem but it was a tiny issue compared to the rest of the nature of her illness. There were many attempts with suicide and hanging out with the wrong people. There has been time when she stops traffic in rush hour because she was upset about something so trivial.

    In general just because someone is a hoarder or goes on shopping sprees does not mean they are bi-polar most of the time. It is usually for the rush or just like having things. So I would not worry about it too much.

  2. gamecock43 Says:
    1218425332

    gruntina~ your story reminds me a bit of my mom, though not quite as severe mood swings. Maybe thats why I had less tolerance...she seemed able to control it alot of the time, then she would just go feverishly manic for a day, be exhausted the next day and back to 'normal' for the next few days. Sort of normal.
    Anyways, you dont worry you will inherit the disease?

  3. boomeyers Says:
    1218425917

    Wow! It sounds like you are trying to be the extreme opposite, but there is nothing wrong going for the minimalist look! I would definately just keep trying to pare down, especially before you move! You don't want to have to pay to store things.

  4. Broken Arrow Says:
    1218427037

    Wow, your mother has a serious issue to be sure. Anytime you will or will not do something against perfect reason, there may be an issue there....

    However, the fact that you DO toss away stuff indicates that you may not have what she has. Or, at least you are fighting it, which is a very healthy sign.

  5. gamecock43 Says:
    1218427271

    Yea- I just called Baseball boy to see if I have been sporting any symptoms- He says I'm perfectly fine. He thinks if anything the environment will bring it out in me- so far- very stable environment looking future. He's not worried.

  6. swimgirl Says:
    1218433542

    I think it's okay for you to keep those things that you feel you need to keep. You might not know now why you want to keep them, but the reason may become clearer at some point in the future. My mother was the opposite. She didn't save anything from my childhood, which is no less settling. I would love for my super-reader daughter to have all my Nancy Drew books, but they are long gone. I barely have any pictures. My mother had terrible and very selfish spending habits, so I am pretty sure she was selling of my stuff and my sister's stuff to buy more for herself. She is all about image, never mind my sister and I wore seriously torn clothes all the time (which she criticized us for, but wouldn't buy new ones). She looked like a million bucks, though.

    Oops. Off-topic.

    Keep what you want to for now. If it gets to a point where it's costing tons and tons, you can re-evaluate. But I would give yourself more time.

  7. gruntina Says:
    1218435643

    game- I have been tested frequently and do not have bi-polar (aka manic depression) However I do have some form of depression from dealing with hardship. Now I only get depressed once in awhile but it’s more of an exhausted feeling rather than mood swings, disorganized thinking and the like.

    In the past I have had teachers and counselors tell me that they are very surprised on how well I handle the situation and that I do not seem like a person growing up with a mother with bi-polar. They knew my mom as well as the whole town.(I was alone with my mom starting at age 7 when she was really off and no one knew why at that time). It is more common when a parent has bi-polar, the behavior rather than the illness itself is inherited in the children. This is probably why I ended up marring my first husband which turned out to be a domestic violence relationship. He needed a lot of help so I automatically took over the roles of being a person who is a helper out of habit due to the long time experience of helping my mom. It was second nature to me. I ended up enabling him and hurting myself big time.

    After a divorce and a lot of hard work paying off debts and working 3 jobs and leading a disciplined lifestyle with goals, I grown out of my old self and became a person with empowerment. I dedicate 2 years to myself which I was not to allow myself to date or even go on a date to get to know myself and learn what I enjoyed. I will never forget the day when I purchase an email pager to communicate with other deaf people; I went to a store to buy a sticker to identify my pager since they all look the same. I was standing in the long isle of sticker and searching for something I like. After an hour I left without a sticker because I was overwhelmed and I absolutely had no idea of what I liked. That is when it hit me that I needed time for myself to play, try out different food, clothing’s and etc. I had finally broken free from my chains.

  8. greengirl Says:
    1218442055

    hmmm. it's not really the same thing, but my mother has issues with alcoholism, and i personally react the same way as you - the complete opposite of what my mother does. i only drink occasionally, and i'm terrified of being the same as my mother and terrified of acting toward people the same way she has in the past.

  9. momsents Says:
    1218464550


    I believe that everyone has some trauma at the root, and the behaviors that manifest themselves are the symptoms.

  10. thriftorama Says:
    1218473685

    My hubby's aunt is the same way. Her house is floor to ceiling boxes filled with stuff. She just walks through little paths she's made between them. She's addicted to QVC. For our wedding, she bought us paper plates and plastic silverware (so we wouldn't have to do dishes?). she is strange, lonely, diabetic and unhealthy lady with nothing in her life but stuff. It's really depressing

  11. ceejay74 Says:
    1218559474

    Oy, your post resonated with me! I don't think my mom has bipolar or any really serious mental illness (she's a sweetheart and everyone loves her including me). But she is a hoarder extraordinaire. If my dad wasn't there keeping a modicum of order, that house would be full to the point you couldn't walk in the door. As it is, there are three bedrooms, a washroom and a large basement area that are basically floor-to-ceiling junk. My poor dad keeps his bedroom and workroom very orderly; I think it's his haven from the rest of the house. So yeah, I watch those A&E shows, "Clean House" on the Style network, etc. It helps remind me to keep purging the junk. I can't tell if I'm a natural hoarder but I did grow up with no sense of how to keep things clean, so that's a constant struggle for me. And when I feel an emotional attachment to an inanimate object, I tend to want to break that right away.

    Her other big flaw is that she refuses to go see doctors for anything. Her knees went bad about 20 years ago and she just barely hobbles around. She also doesn't like to leave the house and is pretty overweight. Oh yeah, and she doesn't eat healthy at all, or sleep regular hours. I guess she's pretty screwed up, but she's just so darling despite all that, and seems pretty happy with her life. I just don't want to take on any of her bad lifestyle habits.

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