8/11
My mom saves newspapers because she says someday she’s going to clip things out of them she wants. She has huge stacks of them throughout the house and actually pays to store more in a storage unit. She also saves magazines and old catalogues. She’s got Christmas catalogues from more than 10 years ago (which she got upset when I tried to throw away). She’s got an entire closet and part of a room stacked with empty boxes that she says she wants to use for things. When she grabs a pen to write with & it no longer works, she puts it back in the cup instead of throwing it away. You can barely walk into her home office and she has so much paperwork and crap piled on her desk that she barely has any space to work. Her bedroom is full of piles of clothes stacked around. Only her office has pathways through it. The rest of the house is pretty well contained but she refuses to believe there is any sort of problem and subjects my poor step-dad to her craziness all the time. They actually have two or three storage units full of all the stupid Christmas and Halloween stuff she has collected (along with her stacks of newspapers). She likes to say that someday all her decorations will be mine and I just tell her I’m not interested.
I remember my childhood home being cluttered and remember her newspaper problem back then but she has definitely escalated since I’ve been an adult and been on my own. She started this many, many years ago. My biological Dad remembers her newspaper and empty shoe box problem when they were married and they got divorced when I was 2 years old. As far as I know there has never been a traumatic experience that caused her to start this. Her sisters say she’s always had a tendency to collect clutter. Her home is not bad enough to be on any TV show and if 5 is the worst, I would expect people would say she’s a 1 to 2. I know she know’s it not right because when she has company over, she cleans the house and moves all the clutter into other rooms which she does not let anyone into. She likes to make it look like she’s normal.
I can’t help but get really angry and resentful of her. She’s in her 60s now and I know when she dies I’ll have to deal with going through all her useless crap. Especially since my step-dad doesn’t do anything at all about it. He doesn’t like it but it’s easier to let her just do what she wants because she get’s really nasty if you try to talk to her about it. I don’t even like going to her home because she always has so much dust all over that it makes my asthma kick in. I just get so mad at her because of her complete selfishness of living like this and basically not giving a crap at all about anyone else in the house. I just can’t understand it. I know I’m a neat and tidy person in my own life because of her and I get terrified of someday ending up like her. I get very uncomfortable when I start feeling like I have too much stuff. My house is very clutter free except it is small and my spare bedroom closet and deck storage closet have a lot of things in them. Nothing compared to how my Mom would have them jam packed, but I still feel like they’re too cluttered. I will definitely be doing another organizing weekend soon and taking things to Goodwill that I haven’t used in a while. I rarely regret anything I’ve taken to Goodwill and always feel kindof cathartic about getting rid of things I no longer use or need. I guess it’s because my Mom cannot do this at all and it justifies in my mind that I am normal.
Sorry for such the long post but I just found out about this site after the 20/20 story and was amazed that this group was out there. I’ve held all this in for so long it just feels really good to get it off my chest especially to a group of people that know EXACTLY what I’m talking about
