Freedom from Squalor

My apartment was getting into the disaster-area zone again recently. Well, almost, anyway. I had cleaned well a month or so ago, but didn't keep up with the cleanliness, as this is something that goes against my constitution, apparently. My case manager came over on Monday, and, knowing she would be coming, I spent Sunday cleaning. This is how it went: do dishes. sit on couch and drink iced tea, because I need a break from the dishes. clean kitchen counters. turn up the music playing on my computer so I can distance my thoughts from the act of cleaning. sit on couch a few minutes listening to Bright Eyes. straighten living room up. get tired. get depressed. "How will I ever get this done???", I think. Get up. make a sandwhich for lunch. sit down, and eat it. tackle the bathroom with toxic bleach-filled cleaner spray because I hate germs. get bored quickly with this. thinking again, "I can't get the rest done.". then, get the rest done.

Moral of the story: It took a while, but by Monday morning my case manager said this was the cleanest she's ever seen my apartment in the three years I've lived there. She was impressed. I was proud of it, having bought a few knick-knacks for decor at the Goodwill and other cheap shops since last time she was there, so I showed her, "Look at my kitchen," because I remember the days I was too depressed to make a decent space out of my kitchen, too psychotic to deal with the dishes, and too apathetic to really care. I care now. So I showed her my kitchen. My kitchen looks darned nice. I once took pictures of my apartment when it was sparkling clean and posted them on Facebook. Nobody probably understood why I did this. It's called motivation. Something I really need in ample supply when it comes to cleaning.

Perhaps you have seen the new show called "Hoarders" on the A&E network. It was on again last night. Exploring the links on that show's website, I came across this Children of Hoarders site, which is excellent! Even better, I found Squalor Survivors, a site that contains information I relate to on more than one level. My mother lives in squalor all the time. Occasionally, I do too, albeit to a slightly lesser degree. I have lived in Level 1 and Level 2 - as rated on this site - on my own, and my mom lives in worse. From that site I also found this Stepping Out of Squalor message board community, which made me feel like there are others out there who actually understand this problem. On TV, you see horrid examples of hoarding gone way out of hand, but you don't see examples of extreme messiness which isn't as bad as the hoarding but is another degree of the same exact problem. I'm convinced that in my mom's case, and in my own, and in my sister's, there is a biological element. As hoarding has been proven to be a form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and genetic as well. Meds for OCD can, supposedly, help with the problem.

I've met all kinds of hoarders through the NAMI support group I used to go to. I didn't realize there were so many of us around. There was a guy whose situation was worse than mine or my mom's. He said he had no working plumbing in this house. He used a bucket to go to the bathroom. He went to the YMCA to take a shower. And he wasn't worried that someone was going to lock him into a state hospital, as I thought might not be a bad idea for him after I heard him describe his place. He just got used to living like that. So that's how he lived.

People who don't have this problem don't seem to understand it much at all. I understand it. I think it's partly a learned behavior and partly the OCD connection, in my family. My one family member hoards in the refrigerator and closets, but also keeps her house very clean and it doesn't look cluttered until you really start looking into things. My other relative, on the other hand, lives in a dump. Her house is owned by her father, and so, she's lived there for about 16 years. But he's never seen how it looks. He's dying now, and hopefully he'll never know about how bad her house is, because I'm sure he would be horrified if he had ever seen it. My relative's house is at the level where she can't have repair people come in to fix things. It's been like that for at least ten years, I think. She has a shower and sinks and an entire bathroom that can't be used. She used to have it worse than that, but she did get some repair work done in the past couple of years.

It's something that shames my relative. She is ashamed. When we see it, we are embarrassed (meaning people in my family). It's easy to blame her or assume she's lazy. But I know it's not that simple. She's not lazy. She's totally chaotic and disorganized and lives in squalor, but she's not lazy. She'll get a new job every month or two, and have fifteen other job interviews line up. She's bipolar. She needs therapy and won't get it. She needs her meds adjusted and doesn't care. But she's not lazy. My mother lives in a nightmare. You walk in and there are dishes in the sink that have been there for a month. You go to use the restroom and can't wash your hands because the sink in the bathroom hasn't worked in five years. For months, she couldn't take a bath or a shower because her drain was broken. So, she'd get the water out with a bucket after she took a bath, and then dump it down a sink that does work. She lived like that for months, because the place was in such bad shape, she couldn't let a plumber in to fix the drain, even when she had the money. A couple times she came to my place to take a shower.

It's hard to see your family member live that way. It's always been hard. Most of my life, I'm talking about, has been like this, but primarily it's been the past ten years. I don't really know what set it off. I don't know how things got so out of hand. I just know this is how she lives, and she doesn't know how to fix the situation.

But there are other people in this same boat. One of my online friends had a bad problem in her house too. I met numerous people through NAMI who had hoarding problems. The facilitator for the NAMI support group sometimes goes to their houses to help them throw things out. And, I will admit, my case manager has been to my apartment at times when literally, we just picked up stuff and threw it in the trash, bag, after bag of trash. I don't live like that now. But I did, and it wasn't that long ago.

My family member does try to clean up her mess. About a month ago, she had an entire dumpster delivered to her house, and she filled it up twice, with junk that was in the garage for years. She was full of energy and motivated at the time. I am not sure why she was able to manage that on that day, but she was. And she did a good job. Her place looks better now than it did a year or two years ago. She tries to fix it up. I have tried to encourage her to work on it. We've picked out fake flowers and vases and things together to decorate the place. It has white walls with almost nothing on them.

The house is, of course, just a sign of a more serious underlying problem. But regardless of the problems someone has, if a person is your mother, she is always going to be your mother. You can cut yourself off from people, but when I did that I was a very lonely person. I love my mom, and, if I could, I'd fix her house and the entire issue for her. But only she can do that. Just as, only I can keep my apartment looking good now that it's neat and clean again.