I have a house full of work. There is a back story to the house work, really there is. No one cares though I'm sure. You'll just smile and nod and back away.
I don't want to get into the 4 kids argument because that one irritates me. I don't cook as much as I used to, not because I have 4 kids with active lives but because I literally hate the way my kitchen is set up.
I don't read as much as I used to - see active kids above- but because I just lost interest for a while.
I don't clean as much as I used to - see above - but because I actually hit a depression wall that led to chaos and that is what this post is about.
The reason I am being so defensive about the kids in this blog is because I get really, very, seriously, sickly, tired of people using it as my excuse without my permission. People who have fewer than 3 children (though you can substitute Labradors, boxers, and certain terriers here for children) just don't get that it doesn't change your life-style as much as people seem to judgingly think.
Anyway, I'm not sure how much back-story I feel like going into. Partly, because after years of trying to conform to the manicured house mania I finally became unapologetic. I don't do biological mess (pizza boxes, ants, diapers, cheetos on the couch) that does get me good and icked out.
However, I don't - honestly don't - care if I have a mountain of clean laundry to fold on the one day I get around to folding.
So there is a fair amount of realized, livable, clutter. Not hoarder clutter, just family clutter.
So I'm feeling unapologetic. I'm also feeling like many perky people with too much time on their hands won't get the story at all. Because you'll say things like "oh, I so would have dealt with that differently." Or "I'd have hired someone!" or "haven't you seen what Martha Stewart can do with boxes - you're so lame!"
To the rest of you:
Let me give you the shortest, least painful version possible. Let me excise as much of the emotional drama as I can for your taste (though this sort of defeats the purpose because the impetus behind not having dealt with stuff lies in emotional drama).
My mother died, huge trauma. I had to fight an insane fight with certain parties to be able to go through her stuff (most of which by then was boxed in storage). These parties would rather have let the stuff go (they were tired of paying) then either let me assume payments or let me sort the stuff. Eventually, I was given less than a month to deal with it. Upon realizing I couldn't deal with it all, I left anything non-essential and took the rest to an undisclosed location. Later, I was blamed for not taking everything. The parties who stopped paying the tab on the storage honestly thought I'd take it all and it would be at my house for them to sort through at their leisure. I'm not kidding. Even and including stuff these parties specifically forbade me from taking - which stupidly I DIDN'T take. What am I? Some kinda schlemiel.
Anyway, there is actually back story to this which kicks in around now. My former father's mother had died just previously and he had taken delivery of her household. Her daughters did not want to deal with it, so he got it all. Just a side note, kicks in sometime presently.
My grandfather, trying to do me a huge favor and trying to sort his stuff before he died sent me a semi-truck full of unknown items in dessicated cardboard boxes. Dessicated cardboard sets off my allergies. Oh, and before you laugh at me, I did have blood tests done, I'm allergic to most every mold and dust in the universe and pretty much every domestic pet or tree. I've learned to live with it.
Some part of me wanted to look in the boxes. I mean, some of the stuff in there was priceless. 90% of it was raw-hoarder-style-chaos though.
Setting the stage, we'd just bought a house and I didn't have tons but I also had things in storage from living abroad. I was happy to see my stuff. Ecstatic actually, and I had some pretty cool stuff. Some was clutter.
I was opening boxes and making my house all homey. I was in a honeymoon with my house.
Enter the stuff from my mother's box exodus, stuff from my grandfather and suddenly every square inch of my house was covered in things that made me cough and sneeze.
You might ask why I would do this to myself. Well, I was hoping to find family pictures and videos or diaries in my mother's stuff. I was too loyal to my grandfather to just take his stuff to the dump.
I'm also very much not kidding about the square inch thing. The semi-truck wasn't a joke either. There were boxes in every room, on every surface, floor to ceiling. The garage was shut so tightly we couldn't open any of the doors. There were boxes in the entryway and hall and down the hall and into my bedroom. There were so many boxes I didn't have room to even unpack the boxes. There were boxes across my back yard and into the patio.
Why didn't we get storage? What do you think I'm made of money? Plus, out of sight, out of mind. I wanted it dealt with.
However, I couldn't shake the vibe that my house honeymoon had just been taken over and killed smack dead with someone else's crap.
Enter the depression.
Wait it gets better.
So I started unpacking boxes - sorry no pictures - some part of me wanted pictures but some part of me never wanted to remember this in detail again.
The most I could do in a day was 80 boxes. It was no joke, 80 boxes in a day, how many do you think there were all together? I'm not talking 30 boxes, or a few hundred. I am talking we stopped counting in the high hundreds.
My mother's boxes were fantastic and indescribable and surreal. None of those are nice or pleasant descriptive.
The boxes had been packed by the same maniacs I've shed from my life. The people who could care less about my dead mother's sh*t and had just shoved stuff, wholesale, off tables and shelves and into boxes. At first I wanted to believe grief had led them to this packing style. Later, after reviewing years of my life I admitted it was typical of the personalities involved.
The most interesting box I opened was full of vitamins. That doesn't sound too compelling on its own. However, The box contained, I kid you not, 8 that I counted, species of creature. They had eaten most of the vitamins and left a thick 2 inch sludge of creature detritus at the bottom of the box. I started dry-heaving and I have a strong stomach. The creatures, the pupa, the maggots, the worms, the beetles, the 7 year old sludge, the smell.
I opened 2 boxes that day - go figure. I became afraid of boxes.
Then, one day 50 some of the 76 boxes I opened were not my mother's. This was one of the lowest blows. You mean you're going to add a 3rd person to the line of dead people boxes in my house - a 3rd person who despite speaking no ill of the dead I didn't even like or care about?
My father had no relationship with his mother. I was no relation to her at all. Even after he'd adopted me she would refer to me as his "Jewish foster child" in polite company. Charming. I tried to like her. I failed mostly.
He didn't want her stuff, he refused to take the boxes back. After those first 50, every time I opened a box and it smelled of her house I wouldn't even look further I'd just dump it at a charity shop.
It did not help that she had the kitchiest stuff on the face of the earth. I'm talking she owned every "as seen on TV" item there was known to man.
Plus, the wall to wall bags of stuff to be carted to reclycling or charity (my dust bin is not a bottomless pit and the city will take only so much - the creeps) made my house look even trashier.
I became even more afraid of boxes. Plus, the sight of boxes was depressing me, the smell of boxes was making me ill.
I was coughing a lot.
I began to wonder how much of it was the dust and mold and how much of it was the vitamin style surprise boxes still awaiting discovery.
Another of my mom's boxes contained food. Like someone had just emptied her cabinets of food. Boxes of rice and jars of tomatoes. Really? You box that stuff?
One box had what must have been on the kitchen table - including unwashed dinner plates and the current newspaper. I stabbed myself with a kitchen knife while pulling out the newspaper, the silverware also unwashed, you could even guess what had been dinner.
Thankfully, in the 20 days I was trying to empty the storage unit I had severed part of my thumb and several stitches later I was totally current on all my shots.
You can laugh now.... 2 years later....
Anyway, I couldn't shake the feeling that the house wasn't mine, it belonged to dead people and boxes. This is really probably when I should have sought help. Remember my neighbor from previous posts - him fretting about the outside of my house didn't help. That totally added to the vague vibe that I was living without permission to make my own space mine.
Not that by then in the depression I was feeling social but I stopped having people over. Entertaining was dead. My children longed for playdates but unless they could happen at a park or museum it was a no-go.
I called charity shops and quite nicely most of them told me they didn't want my trash. After 2 years of weeding I've found charity shops that are much nicer and more willing to accept anything. I will never forget the trite speech goodwill gave me over the quality of goods they accept. Damaged or old goods just make more work for them and aren't actually a charitable donation but more of a money sink.
I pondered ordering a skip and having it all put in there.
One day I opened a box of my mother's and finding things from the bathroom, (some of which made me cry, her perfume) I also found, in a file folder with nothing even remotely explanatory - the original copy of my birth certificate that was next to the toothpaste. Now just what the hell was I supposed to do with the boxes?
One day, out of the blue, I found some videos. Just some. However, any one of them I'd have given a limb for. The videos of the day Celia was born. Jesus, they still exist. Words failed me and I cried so hard you'd have thought it was a loss not a gain.
The boxes couldn't go in a skip.
Well some could.
Anyway, freecycle proved to not help much either. People reliably didn't show up for stuff and or proved that I'm a total crazy magnet. People would come and say "oh this isn't want I thought" and leave. Because my descriptions weren't good enough?
Okay, try this one - 70 boxes of old pulp fiction. Nothing of import, nothing of financial value. Dusty and falling apart. The glue has gone and the pages have all come apart. Originally cost 10c a piece, probably worth less now. Might make good kindling.
I got a million hits off that ad. No one took the books. 5 people came to look at them long enough to not take them though.
What pissed me off about that was it was FREE. FREE CYCLE. I had spent far too much of my anti-social time scheduling with these schmucks as well. Bastages.
That left me still sorting boxes.
One day I had 10 can openers and 8 spatulas and about sixty measuring cups. What did his mother used to do? Wait till she forgot where she put the can opener and buy a new one? No idea, maybe it was a fetish.
Gift horses in the mouth? I couldn't breath and every square inch of my house smelled of musty dead people. Humor me.
Which is what leads me to now. I NEED to take my house back. Almost all the boxes have gone - you can quote me on that. We never succumbed to storage. It took me years. I forgot to tell you about the boxes of my mother's I would open and then lose the next week to grief. I found the shopping list she made the day before she entered the hospital. She didn't know she was sick. That freaking kills me, and reading her recipe for the following Friday scribbled on the edge of the shopping list did me in for easily a week. No more boxes that day.
Now I have too many books (you can quote me on that). PLUS! I feel like I need to hide most of this stuff which really doesn't help you know. Lest the people I mentioned earlier some day find their way into my life and take them off my shelves as rightfully theirs. I have hoarded books into my closet for a while - how paranoid?
Pictures too.
I need to STOP. I NEED my house back. I need to see surfaces again.
Before you ask - yes that was the short version.
So I have this friend, she has a blog about getting the hell out of dodge, and it is mostly devoted to her progress (almost entirely actually) of sorting her own boxes and life enough to move. She refuses to cart stuff across country again. She says wonderful things to me like "I guarantee you that it is far better to throw something out and find later you have to pay to replace it than to have to deal with it now." I love it when she says this stuff, it makes me open another box. Granted I'm not a total neat freak but a lot of my hold-ups are actually my Mom and my severely misplaced family loyalties.
These are hold-ups like my estranged father's clothes, all on hangers all taking up closet space. We're not talking. We probably won't start - I'm past it. I can't throw the clothes out though, that would be mean. However, since no one would pay to store them, and the thinks they are gone anyway, and I'm the only person who ever wanted to open boxes - why can't I throw them out? Because I'm a sucker - duh.
Then, my Mother, who totally unbidden will start random conversations with me when I'm going through her stuff. That never helps. "Look, I don't care if you found the article interesting it is outdated. Look I know I'm going through your stuff and it is a privation but seriously who did you think would? No, I know you didn't PLAN on dying and you'd have tidied up a little. No one is blaming you. Stop, no really, I'm not saving the article - ok?"
Yeah, like y'all didn't know I was a little off my nut. Ha.
So I have these tiers of stuff. Stuff that can go to the trash/charity today. Stuff that I have to sort again until I'm strong enough for it to go to trash/charity. Stuff that I've told my kids they can throw out when I'm dead and my Mom is no longer in living memory.
Anyway, get the hell out of dodge blog (I won't link to it as I've not asked to) inspired me.
What if I shared with you my progress and somehow that made me feel accountable? Would you do that for me? You could just pretend you know, and click on those pages but not read them. I'm totally ok with that.
So soon expect to see pictures of unadulterated clutter that must die. I just want my space back - I'm not coping and I'm years into this stupid trial. (what have I learned? What have I - insert swear word here, I suck at swearing)
