Too Much Stuff

Anyone who has read my work knows I had an unconventional childhood. And unconventional really is just a euphemism for really fucking weird. Biracial white-looking kid, black parents, parents old enough to be my grandparents, agoraphobic mother, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, well, they were also hoarders and that brought with it a unique set of issues.

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual - V (DSM-5), symptoms of Hoarding Disorder include:

Unable to discard possessions.

Severe anxiety over the idea of discarding possessions.

Limited living space in the home

Floor and counter space within common areas of the home (such as the kitchen and living room) are seen as storage space.

Isolation

Loneliness

Depression

Fear or embarrassment of having visitors in the home

Withdrawn

Disorganized

Indecisive about where to put things

Both my mother and father had varying degrees of each of these symptoms.

I can’t say living with hoarder parents was all bad. As a small child, it was pretty cool because I got lots of stuff. I mean LOTS. OF. STUFF. My father, in particular, could not bear to go to the store and not come back with the latest toy, game, doll, etc. for me. Christmases were epic events with dozens of presents under the tree for little ol’ me! There were so many toys, books, etc, that I couldn't possibly play with them all and many remained untouched in their packaging for years.

That being said, although I had a lot of stuff, it was isolating to live in a house crammed with stuff. We never had people over. There’d be no place for them to sit if we did. There was an underlying air of shame, an unspoken sense that what was inside our home wasn’t to be revealed to outsiders.

We never sat down at the dining room table as a family because the dining room table was covered in a 2-foot high pile of stuff. We sat in the living room, each with our own individual tray.

As I got older, I realized other people just didn’t live like this. I visited friends’ homes, and they were bright, clean and full of space. My house was embarrassing. It felt dirty. I felt dirty.

Every nook and cranny was jammed with something or other. By the time I was a teenager, our 4 bedroom home could barely contain the 3 of us and all the crap. The only clear spaces available were the couch, my mother’s easy chair, my bed, my parents’ bed (presumably, but I wasn’t allowed in their room, so I can’t really say), and a narrow path throughout the house that allowed us to get from one room to another.

My mother was the most extreme of the two. She held on to EVERYTHING. She had countless knick-knacks, dolls, books and other random things. But her real hoard centred around newspapers and catalogues, often months or years out of date, were piled high on the coffee table and covered by reams of paper towels (everything was covered in paper towels to keep the dust off). Inside the catalogues were countless scraps of paper, receipts, bills stamped paid and tax returns dating back several years.

I remember asking her why she kept them and she always said the same thing, because she might need them someday. I didn’t get it then, but I get it now, as an adult. As a black woman, she’d grown up learning that those pieces of paper, receipts, paid bills, completed tax returns were her evidence. If she needed to return something, if there were some sort of discrepancy or billing error, she knew, from experience, that she wasn’t getting the benefit of any doubt. So she hung on to all of it, just in case. When I packed up her apartment to move her into a nursing home, I came across telephone books from the 1980s with dozens of ancient receipts, etc. jammed inside of them. Some of the receipts were from businesses that had closed decades before.

She shrieked with protest as I tossed them out. She followed my brother and me around, hauling things out of garbage bags and furiously explaining why they were good and necessary. When that didn’t work, she became angry and started hurling names around and snatching things from our hands. Eventually, we just lied to her and told her we were taking the stuff to my brother’s place for safekeeping (it wasn’t a complete lie, we did take some of her dolls and stuffed toys, the ones she couldn’t take with her, there).

I found my brother’s birth certificate in her dresser drawer. I remember telling her, saying, “I’ll give it to him.” She refused, moving as fast as her tiny old body could carry her to take it from my hand, and told me he couldn’t have it because “he couldn’t be trusted to take care of it properly.” He was 56, had lived on his own, paid his own bills and worked for well over 35 years. I’m pretty sure he could’ve handled the care and custody of his birth certificate.

My father, on the other hand, hoarded food and supplies. Anything that might be necessary, canned goods, plastic bags, twist ties, toilet paper, soap, string, linens, whatever. And my mother, while not as focused on these things, was completely on board with him. Our cupboards were packed with canned food. There was canned food on a series of shelves in the basement. There were canned goods piled up underneath the dining room table. Soap and other toiletries overflowed in the bathroom, under the sink, in every dresser, on tables, in boxes, you name it. We had toilet paper, paper towels and boxes of Kleenex under that dining room table, in the living room and in various corners.

My bedroom closet wasn’t even my own. It was, aside from the actual bar where I could hang clothes, extra storage space for whatever would fit there. And god help me if I touched any of it! I got more than one slap from my mother for having the audacity to touch the things in MY closet that weren’t mine.

The sun porch was even suffered to the rafters. It was a large room, with huge windows on all sides. We never used it for sitting. It was the perfect spot for all the junk that couldn’t fit in the house, broken appliances, moving boxes full of sheets, towels and table cloths, paper products, toys, you name it, it was in there.

Looking back, I think both my parents developed some extreme anxiety issues surrounding their upbringing. They were both black kids who grew up during the depression. They both endured periods in their formative years in which there wasn’t enough of anything to go around, not enough food, not enough money, not enough clothing. Every scrap was saved and used back then out of necessity. I can only imagine what that does to a child’s mind. They both carried those issues with them into adulthood and I think, had a persistent fear of not having something they needed. They never sought help. They were of the generation that didn’t air their dirty laundry. There was a stigma associated with mental health issues.

I didn’t notice how dusty the house and everything smelled until I finally moved out. I shudder to this day even thinking about it. I’m embarrassed in retrospect, worried that maybe I smelled like that too.

As for me, I can’t stand to have stuff around. I’ve swung off into the opposite direction. I’m bordering on obsessive with respect to cleanliness and minimalism. I love the look of clean empty tabletops, countertops and floors, with only the absolutely necessary on them. My closets, cupboards and bookshelves are tidy and organized. There’s a place for everything and everything is in its place.

I wish I had known what hoarding was back then. I wish I could have suggested counselling or treatment. I wish I’d have had more compassion and understanding. But it was a different time and I was a kid.