Hoarders

A friend came over last night, she had asked me to record “Hoarders” for her and wanted to watch it after dinner. So I gathered my knitting and settled on the couch to watch it with her. After 20 minutes, I had to ask her if we could PLEASE turn it off. It was really freaking me out.



Here’s the deal. I grew up in a home that maybe wasn’t as bad as the homes featured on the show, but was most certainly somewhere in the middle. If a typical home featured on “Hoarders” is a 10, and a normal home is a 1, my childhood home was a 7. I rarely had friends over, and if guests were coming or a holiday were approaching, it entailed a massive effort of epic proportions to get the house to a reasonable state. The “holly jolly” togetherness of this group effort was not something that usually resulted in a perfect and magical holiday. It was quite the opposite. The effort of cleaning the house, finding the china, assembling the perfect table linens, and locating the flaming gravy boat (that’s another legendary story) almost always entailed yelling, snapping, hurt feelings, exhaustion, and extreme anxiety. Now that there is a grandchild, limiting the visits is extremely difficult, and even worse, I actually LIKE these people. I love spending time with my parents, unless we are all screaming at each other. Then it kinda sucks.


The biggest issue behind the mass production that it takes to manage the home where they live is the sheer volume of STUFF that is crammed into the house, and THAT’S what’s really weighing heavily on my mind this year. We have a small family. On my maternal side it is my grandmother, my mom, and me. And now Grace. 4 generations of bossy, moody females who all love to gather STUFF, and resist throwing anything away. My poor dad deserves a medal.


My grandmother moved to my parents’ town about 15 years ago, and the process of moving her there from Texas was complete insanity due to the sheer volume of stuff that she owned and needed to have sorted, sold, given away, and then moved. So her current home is fairly large and filled with a lot of stuff. I’m not talking about trash or piles of newspaper, although you might find that as well… but collectibles, sentimental belongings, retro-chic clothing, silver/crystal/china, lots of stuff that is old and has no real value or even usefulness. (Like the flaming gravy boat) Regardless, it’s all there in a house that is now empty, as Gammie was forced to move to the nursing home last week. I don’t know if I’m ready to see her in the “Leisure Homestead” instead of the Country Club, with a “hoveround” instead of a golf cart, wearing her shiny silver sneakers and crooked lipstick instead of her fashionable skirts, bouffant hair, impeccable makeup, and high heels that were the style of the grandmother I grew up with.


I’m going to visit there this weekend, as the small town holds its annual “Octoberfest” consisting of a short parade, some class reunions, a beer garden, some funnel cakes, and a football game. We are planning a fun trip to the Pumpkin patch a few miles away that is a special trip my parents want to do with their granddaughter. And when we aren’t having fun and being festive, we’ll be going to sort through stuff, negotiate for the jewelry, determine what to keep, sell, trash.


Some of it is stuff my mom will want to take home with her. Some will be taken by me if a)it has a purpose or a “story”, b)I have room for it, and c) my mother doesn’t get it first. Whatever my mom takes will end up in her huge house that is already packed with stuff. Neither my mother nor I have siblings to help sort and clean and process all of this. It’s a huge job that will fall mostly to my parents by sheer proximity, and I’ll help when I can get away from school and make the 4 hour drive down there.


Regardless, I’ve been dreaming of STUFF. I feel intensely overwhelmed, because I know that like my grandmother’s large collections, my mother has much, much more. And it makes me want to run screaming through my own house filling boxes to donate to the Social Service League, trash, or sell on Craigslist or Ebay. If I should pass this crazy cluttered stressed out anxiety ridden overwhelming life on to my daughter I will never forgive myself. My own home has fluctuated through the years between a 6 and a 3. I’m not sure I’ve ever really had even a 2, unless it was just after I’d purged and moved and organized. The basic management of a household, the ability to refrain from buying things that one does not need or that one already has lots of, the ability to perform general upkeep of the house and keep it reasonably clean are all things that I think many people take for granted. They aren’t easy for me at ALL, because I did not grow up that way and I did not learn how to run a home.


So “Hoarders” did not do anything for me last night except raise my blood pressure and cause me to berate myself for my own shortcomings in managing a household, and to dread the household craziness that I have to deal with in order to spend time with my family and to have Grace spend time with them. I’m trying to lower my own expectations of how the next visit, and then Thanksgiving and Christmas will all play out. It is my mother and grandmother’s unreasonable expectations of a “perfect” holiday that have always imploded into a swirling mess of STUFF and emotion and anger; I am trying to talk myself off of that same ledge of having unreasonable expectations and worrying so much in advance that I’m completely overwhelmed with headaches and anxiety before I ever even pack up the car for a visit.


I’ve realized that my own expectations and anxieties often don’t even make sense to myself, and I often sentence myself and my family to an excruciating get-together without even realizing I’m doing it. This is the part where managing expectations, feeling gratitude, practicing meditation, getting outside of myself and trying to be helpful would be very useful if actually put into practice. I’m not ruling out pharmaceutical intervention if necessary. And I’m going to try to live “in the moment” and enjoy it instead of beating myself over the head with “what-if” and “I don’t wanna…”. With holidays approaching, the job market still looking like suck, being broke, trying to get through a tough semester, and my kid having an average of 6 screaming, crying, emotional melt-downs per day, the future is a very scary place to me. I think I’d better work on staying in the present.