47. Divorced. Unemployed. Unlovable. Child of hoarder.
Posted: May 28th, 2013, 12:24 am
Long time listener, first time poster, yadda yadda.
I started to write a short introduction, but it just kept getting longer and longer. I'm going through a major bout of sleep irregularity so I'll just post what I've written so far. It's long. There will be more to come. You have been warned.
The family I was born into wasn't the same one that started out twenty-one years earlier. Photos from before my birth show a, well, fantastically cool-looking Greatest Generation couple with two baby boomer kids living the classic 1950s Orange County suburban lifestyle. My parents came west during the post-war boom and my dad just made it happen through a little luck and hard work - eventually starting his own business, buying a house, and raising a family. My birth comes much later. When I'm born in 1965, my dad was 50 and a workaholic, my mom was 40 and a compulsive hoarder, my brother was 18 and already having run-ins with the police, and my sister was 16 and counting the days until she can leave for college. We own a very small light-industrial corporation - most of the time, the only employees are ourselves.
Very early on, it's clear to everyone that I'm off-the-chart smart. I start reading at age two and don't let up. I'm like one of those baby animals that has to eat constantly, only I need to eat to eat twice my body weight in information every day. I'm never at a loss because there's newspapers and books everywhere. Everyone in my family reads. I start kindergarten early at age four but am soon bumped up into 2nd grade reading and English classes.
These days, I'd be diagnosed with Aspergers/Little Professor Syndrome. Back then, I was simply a four-eyed "weird" kid - a high-value target for bullies and a source of exasperation for teachers ("how do you know all these big words?" "how can you fail P.E. if you're so smart?). That part of the story plays out as you might expect… no friends, no one to trust, and no self-esteem. I have trouble speaking and have to go to a school speech therapist. I fail at sports and am sent to a special class to help my coordination. I'm shy and don't smile. I'm afraid of the dark and have to sleep with the lights on. My mom makes me feel bad about wearing glasses - she continually points out that I inherited her eye color but that it was all spoiled because I had to wear glasses. Having my picture taken becomes more frightening than going to the dentist. I'm terrified to see myself in a mirror and when I go to the bathroom at night I run past the mirror over the desk in the room I'm sleeping in (an important distinction). Often I'd just crawl on the floor.
I don't know where to begin with my mom's compulsive hoarding except with this story. A couple years before I was born, my dad bought my mom a brand new Jaguar. Every inch of the garage was filled with newspapers, so he threw them all out, put a big red bow around the car, and then when she came back he handed her a little box with a matching bow that contained the key. She opens the garage and the first words out of her mouth are "where the hell are all my newspapers?" True story - confirmed by everyone, including my mom. I think she's still mad about it.
Hoarding as we know it now didn't exist when I was growing up in the 1970s. Of course people hoarded, but there was no psychological vocabulary for the phenomenon. If you've seen any of the Hoarders shows, you know the story - entire rooms of the house fill up with you-name-it: newspapers, old clothes, multiple sets of dishes, old magazines, discarded accumulation from other people's garage sales, consignment stores, and estate sales. My sister and brother flee to college out-of-state as fast as they could and my mom replaces them with more crap. My parents stop traveling together because my mom brings her horde with her in the car. My dad spends more time at our office and occasionally sleeps there. She makes all the now-familiar excuses we've heard on the reality shows - the initial "oh I'll clean it up someday" escalating quickly into "it's *my* stuff!" defensive anger. Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners are dutifully executed but you can only hear "don't go downstairs/open that door" Soon there's no room for a Christmas tree, but by then we'd given up on Christmas at the house. Later we'd give up on the holidays completely.
Certainly no one had a clue as to how severe hoarding could affect a little kid growing up in it. I'm born into a Family Secret already in progress that has metastasized into Family Shame. No one knows what to do. Every so often someone would notice a newspaper article that mentioned something like “10 tons of trash removed from suburban home” and we would all nervously laugh. Someone would say "at least the food garbage gets out and there's no cats." No one knows what do to because they had already been dealing with it for twenty years and simply gave up. I don't complain because I had a bed to sleep on, clean clothes, and never went hungry. Kids grew up in far worse conditions. Past the outlines of that bed I had no space of my own, no real way to establish an identity or even know what identity is. I'm only seven, I don't know what existentialism means.
Asking about by mom makes my dad sad. My brother tells me that I was a "save the marriage" baby. Kids at school call me an "afterthought" and at least that feels truthful - my presence didn't save the marriage. I made it worse. My dad likes me and is happy to be with me, but I feel bad for him. My birth kept him in an unhappy and loveless marriage.
My parents didn't just sleep in separate beds - they sleep on separate floors of the house. My mom isn't My role model for how a loving relationship is supposed to work is severely flawed. I'm terribly shy and am disturbed by social settings. Being smart doesn't help. I learn how to avoid these situations by not participating in anything. My report card comments typically start with "he seems to have problems making friends."
Things come to a head just after my eighth birthday. My mom and I went to Europe for a couple months and while we were gone, my dad cleaned up the house top-to-bottom: new carpeting, paint, the whole works. I remember it being the nicest the house ever looked. There was a lot of yelling. My dad left and got an apartment of his own.
They never divorced - my mom threatened to take every single last thing he had, so they lived out their own personal Cold War that lasted for the rest of their lives. My dad soon had health issues and eventually had to have open heart surgery. He drank by the standards of the era, but I wouldn't label him an alcoholic. I stay at my mom's house for three more years, and watched her fill it up to the rafters. A King Tut's Tomb of garage sale bullshit. Somewhere in there I begin to self-harm by punching myself in the head in the hopes of making myself stupid. I have my first suicidal thought on my eleventh birthday. I'm terrified of any sort of attention upon myself and run away from everyone. My sister says that they should have thrown the cake at my head.
When I was twelve, my dad said that it wasn't right for a kid to live in "the warehouse" so he picked me and my few things up and I went to live with him. By then he gave up the apartment and moves into the commercial building we rented for our business. There's enough room for a small mini-apartment (think of a subdivided loft) and my dad builds out a kitchen and shower. I sleep on a couch that expands into a folding bed. I learn how to cook for myself, do my own laundry, and do everything adults do.
Eventually I get it together enough in junior high to at least make a few friends. When I'm thirteen the kid who would qualify as my best friend is suddenly hospitalized. He has leukemia and never makes it back out of the hospital. I later learn that his parents knew from an early age that he was going to have a short life so they stayed together solely for him - after he passed, his parents quietly separated, left town and went their own ways. I don't know what happened to them. I'm probably the only person who remembers their son now.
Eventually I was sent away to a private boarding school for high school. I finally have a room to myself, but it costs a lot of money and I'm acutely aware of that. Both of my siblings are jealous that I got to go to a better school. I'm unengaged with classes, but I learn how to program computers and playing the guitar. Everyone else in my family thinks that computers are a colossal waste of time and actively dismiss my efforts. My mom doesn't understand why I would pick up the guitar when piano lessons were such a failure (long story there). Computers and music offer unconditional friendship, predictability, and a creative challenges. Most important of all, they will never be mean to me. Later my mom would ask me that if I was so good at computers then why aren't I rich like Bill Gates.
I get accepted into quite a few colleges, but as it becomes pretty clear that I'm going to have to pay for college all on my own, I keep it local and hit the ground running. I went away for high school and came "home" for college. I work graveyard shifts, get a car, and make the car my home. I never own more than I can carry in it. I love punk rock and join a band, only to be disillusioned when punk rock values become violent and conformist. I flunk out of college and I work several jobs until I can get back in. I move around constantly - sleeping on couches, hidden spots in the college library, my car, and eventually an upstairs loft added into the family business. I constantly feel like I'm barging in on some other family. My dad's health gets very bad and I help take care of him. Eventually, he passes away in his little mini-apartment at age 73. The only person in my family who gave a shit about me is gone. I'm twenty-two.
I don't mean for this to be a complete autobiography, but I can easily trace how the threads of my childhood personality wear and fray in my life now. I'm 47. Divorced. Unemployed. Unloveable.
Continued in next post...
I started to write a short introduction, but it just kept getting longer and longer. I'm going through a major bout of sleep irregularity so I'll just post what I've written so far. It's long. There will be more to come. You have been warned.
The family I was born into wasn't the same one that started out twenty-one years earlier. Photos from before my birth show a, well, fantastically cool-looking Greatest Generation couple with two baby boomer kids living the classic 1950s Orange County suburban lifestyle. My parents came west during the post-war boom and my dad just made it happen through a little luck and hard work - eventually starting his own business, buying a house, and raising a family. My birth comes much later. When I'm born in 1965, my dad was 50 and a workaholic, my mom was 40 and a compulsive hoarder, my brother was 18 and already having run-ins with the police, and my sister was 16 and counting the days until she can leave for college. We own a very small light-industrial corporation - most of the time, the only employees are ourselves.
Very early on, it's clear to everyone that I'm off-the-chart smart. I start reading at age two and don't let up. I'm like one of those baby animals that has to eat constantly, only I need to eat to eat twice my body weight in information every day. I'm never at a loss because there's newspapers and books everywhere. Everyone in my family reads. I start kindergarten early at age four but am soon bumped up into 2nd grade reading and English classes.
These days, I'd be diagnosed with Aspergers/Little Professor Syndrome. Back then, I was simply a four-eyed "weird" kid - a high-value target for bullies and a source of exasperation for teachers ("how do you know all these big words?" "how can you fail P.E. if you're so smart?). That part of the story plays out as you might expect… no friends, no one to trust, and no self-esteem. I have trouble speaking and have to go to a school speech therapist. I fail at sports and am sent to a special class to help my coordination. I'm shy and don't smile. I'm afraid of the dark and have to sleep with the lights on. My mom makes me feel bad about wearing glasses - she continually points out that I inherited her eye color but that it was all spoiled because I had to wear glasses. Having my picture taken becomes more frightening than going to the dentist. I'm terrified to see myself in a mirror and when I go to the bathroom at night I run past the mirror over the desk in the room I'm sleeping in (an important distinction). Often I'd just crawl on the floor.
I don't know where to begin with my mom's compulsive hoarding except with this story. A couple years before I was born, my dad bought my mom a brand new Jaguar. Every inch of the garage was filled with newspapers, so he threw them all out, put a big red bow around the car, and then when she came back he handed her a little box with a matching bow that contained the key. She opens the garage and the first words out of her mouth are "where the hell are all my newspapers?" True story - confirmed by everyone, including my mom. I think she's still mad about it.
Hoarding as we know it now didn't exist when I was growing up in the 1970s. Of course people hoarded, but there was no psychological vocabulary for the phenomenon. If you've seen any of the Hoarders shows, you know the story - entire rooms of the house fill up with you-name-it: newspapers, old clothes, multiple sets of dishes, old magazines, discarded accumulation from other people's garage sales, consignment stores, and estate sales. My sister and brother flee to college out-of-state as fast as they could and my mom replaces them with more crap. My parents stop traveling together because my mom brings her horde with her in the car. My dad spends more time at our office and occasionally sleeps there. She makes all the now-familiar excuses we've heard on the reality shows - the initial "oh I'll clean it up someday" escalating quickly into "it's *my* stuff!" defensive anger. Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners are dutifully executed but you can only hear "don't go downstairs/open that door" Soon there's no room for a Christmas tree, but by then we'd given up on Christmas at the house. Later we'd give up on the holidays completely.
Certainly no one had a clue as to how severe hoarding could affect a little kid growing up in it. I'm born into a Family Secret already in progress that has metastasized into Family Shame. No one knows what to do. Every so often someone would notice a newspaper article that mentioned something like “10 tons of trash removed from suburban home” and we would all nervously laugh. Someone would say "at least the food garbage gets out and there's no cats." No one knows what do to because they had already been dealing with it for twenty years and simply gave up. I don't complain because I had a bed to sleep on, clean clothes, and never went hungry. Kids grew up in far worse conditions. Past the outlines of that bed I had no space of my own, no real way to establish an identity or even know what identity is. I'm only seven, I don't know what existentialism means.
Asking about by mom makes my dad sad. My brother tells me that I was a "save the marriage" baby. Kids at school call me an "afterthought" and at least that feels truthful - my presence didn't save the marriage. I made it worse. My dad likes me and is happy to be with me, but I feel bad for him. My birth kept him in an unhappy and loveless marriage.
My parents didn't just sleep in separate beds - they sleep on separate floors of the house. My mom isn't My role model for how a loving relationship is supposed to work is severely flawed. I'm terribly shy and am disturbed by social settings. Being smart doesn't help. I learn how to avoid these situations by not participating in anything. My report card comments typically start with "he seems to have problems making friends."
Things come to a head just after my eighth birthday. My mom and I went to Europe for a couple months and while we were gone, my dad cleaned up the house top-to-bottom: new carpeting, paint, the whole works. I remember it being the nicest the house ever looked. There was a lot of yelling. My dad left and got an apartment of his own.
They never divorced - my mom threatened to take every single last thing he had, so they lived out their own personal Cold War that lasted for the rest of their lives. My dad soon had health issues and eventually had to have open heart surgery. He drank by the standards of the era, but I wouldn't label him an alcoholic. I stay at my mom's house for three more years, and watched her fill it up to the rafters. A King Tut's Tomb of garage sale bullshit. Somewhere in there I begin to self-harm by punching myself in the head in the hopes of making myself stupid. I have my first suicidal thought on my eleventh birthday. I'm terrified of any sort of attention upon myself and run away from everyone. My sister says that they should have thrown the cake at my head.
When I was twelve, my dad said that it wasn't right for a kid to live in "the warehouse" so he picked me and my few things up and I went to live with him. By then he gave up the apartment and moves into the commercial building we rented for our business. There's enough room for a small mini-apartment (think of a subdivided loft) and my dad builds out a kitchen and shower. I sleep on a couch that expands into a folding bed. I learn how to cook for myself, do my own laundry, and do everything adults do.
Eventually I get it together enough in junior high to at least make a few friends. When I'm thirteen the kid who would qualify as my best friend is suddenly hospitalized. He has leukemia and never makes it back out of the hospital. I later learn that his parents knew from an early age that he was going to have a short life so they stayed together solely for him - after he passed, his parents quietly separated, left town and went their own ways. I don't know what happened to them. I'm probably the only person who remembers their son now.
Eventually I was sent away to a private boarding school for high school. I finally have a room to myself, but it costs a lot of money and I'm acutely aware of that. Both of my siblings are jealous that I got to go to a better school. I'm unengaged with classes, but I learn how to program computers and playing the guitar. Everyone else in my family thinks that computers are a colossal waste of time and actively dismiss my efforts. My mom doesn't understand why I would pick up the guitar when piano lessons were such a failure (long story there). Computers and music offer unconditional friendship, predictability, and a creative challenges. Most important of all, they will never be mean to me. Later my mom would ask me that if I was so good at computers then why aren't I rich like Bill Gates.
I get accepted into quite a few colleges, but as it becomes pretty clear that I'm going to have to pay for college all on my own, I keep it local and hit the ground running. I went away for high school and came "home" for college. I work graveyard shifts, get a car, and make the car my home. I never own more than I can carry in it. I love punk rock and join a band, only to be disillusioned when punk rock values become violent and conformist. I flunk out of college and I work several jobs until I can get back in. I move around constantly - sleeping on couches, hidden spots in the college library, my car, and eventually an upstairs loft added into the family business. I constantly feel like I'm barging in on some other family. My dad's health gets very bad and I help take care of him. Eventually, he passes away in his little mini-apartment at age 73. The only person in my family who gave a shit about me is gone. I'm twenty-two.
I don't mean for this to be a complete autobiography, but I can easily trace how the threads of my childhood personality wear and fray in my life now. I'm 47. Divorced. Unemployed. Unloveable.
Continued in next post...
