The Joyful Housewife

It’s been abut six months since I received my Clutterer’s Anonymous Starter Kit and I finally opened it up yesterday read through the materials, and put each page in a separate sheet protector in a new binder. I ordered the kit for $15 because there are no face-to-face meetings here in Denver and I thought I might start one myself. Hoarding has been in the news a lot lately, and we’ve been struggling with it personally, in my family. I’m trying to decide whether I have enough time to try to start a CLA group here in Denver before my husband and I move for his job. I’d like to spread the network of support. I think fellowship for people with similar problems has the potential to be very helpful.

After I went through the material, I called my mom and had a circuitous, roller-coaster-of-emotion conversation, that began and ended well. She is exhausted from our recent trip out there (in which we sorted through unbelievable amounts of stuff) and she is quite depressed. (I also suffer from bouts of depression and am suffering from my own mishap this week, in which I accidentally took my sleeping pill for two days instead of one of my antidepressants! Doh!)

The issue that made our phone conversation so difficult yesterday was as follows: Mom was able to accept the label of hoarder for a time, but now it makes her feel very bad. Strangely enough, it was she who first labeled herself as a hoarder! I remember speaking to her on the phone a couple of years ago when she pointed me towards a Compulsive Hoarding website and some articles.  But, it is difficult to find a balance between giving a problem a name so that you can treat it, and giving it a label which is counter productive. I think with all of the current publicity about hoarding, she doesn’t want to be seen, even in her own eyes, as being like those people on tv.

Don’t be mislead by my somber tone! I’m very excited about the possibility of starting a new CLA group in Denver and I am quite grateful for the time that we have been able to spend together working on mom’s storage units and talking about our hopes for her future. It’s just that the issue of dealing with hoarding, or with a recovering hoarder, is complicated for a family and it is a constant struggle for everyone in the family to reach common ground on this issue. There is no one right way to do it, and what is acceptable one day is not going to work on another day.

So I’m trying to move more in the direction of talking about chronic disorganization and excessive cluttering. Cluttering which is out of one’s control and has a negative affect on one’s life, possibly interfering with use of certain areas of the home. CLA is a 12 step program, modeled after AA, and is not for everyone. My mom does not find it helpful. I might give it a try though.

Oh, and as for the title of this post - I truly believe that Life is not a race!!! It may have taken me a long time to finish my education, to get married, to have kids (haven’t actually done that yet), to start a “career” (nor have I actually done that), to open the CLA packet, but what is the hurry? Life is the process, not the product. I like who I am and where I am right now. I don’t need to have “accomplished” more than I have, or to have reached any milestones quicker than I have.

This is especially true with getting control of chronic disorganization or compulsive hoarding. Some family members just want to throw out a lot of mom’s stuff without sorting through it, but if we race through the process, we won’t have lasting results. There needs to be an inner change as well as an outer one.

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One of the tons of wonderful things I’ve learned from my husband is how to make vinaigrette. He’s very anti-bottled-dressing (I’ve gently reminded him that I grew up in a single parent home and wasn’t even aware that there was an alternative, aside from ambitious, gourmet types).

It’s incredibly easy and it’s almost the only thing we put on our salads. The only bottled dressing we’ve used this past year is Annie’s Goddess dressing (and ranch, which we don’t put on salads, but which I use to dip many, many different foods into, from veggies to pizza.)

Anyway, it’s so easy that, although we were too tired to cook tonight and Tim picked up pasta from our favorite Italian restaurant on the way home, I still made a salad AND a dressing.

So how does one make a vinaigrette, you ask? The materials I like best are a small teacup (see photo), because I’m usually making a small salad for two people, and a fork to whisk with. I’ve tried a bowl and a real whisk, but for me, the fork works better (I also use it to scramble eggs for french toast batter).

Next, choose your vinegar. We have been using sherry vinegar lately, but in the past we have used red or white wine vinegar, or balsamic vinegar. I’ve also heard you can use lemon juice, but I haven’t tried it. For myself, I’ve used a fancy fig flavored balsamic vinegar that I bought for my husband and he never used once. I put this on a salad that featured strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries.

Put one or two tablespoons in the cup or bowl (eyeball it.)

Next, add seasonings that you would like to dissolve in it. I always add salt and cracked black pepper. You can mix it up by adding a dash of cayenne, as well, or white pepper instead of the black. This is also when we often add garlic. Usually a fresh clove pressed in a garlic presser. Raw garlic is very good for you but causes potent burbs, so beware!

The final ingredient before the oil is a tiny bit of dijon mustard. We sometimes leave it out, but it’s very good in the dressing. Try not to use too much.

Whisk a bit with the fork to mix the additions into the vinegar.

Finally, add extra virgin olive oil. A good rule is about 2:1 oil vs vinegar. If you are using a teacup, completely cover the top of the vinegar with the oil. Whisk, whisk, whisk, and taste. Add whatever you think is missing, toss on salad, and enjoy!

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We are back from helping my mom, resuming our normal workaday lives. I have lots to say about the hoard-busting process - much of it not yet processed in my own brain yet though.

As I’ve said before, my mom has a bit of a hoarding problem. She has several storage units and garages filled with piles of intermixed stuff that we are trying to get rid of so that she can live a functional life. We set up a triage to sort through as much as we could in one week and managed to get rid of 80-90% of what we went through. The problem is that for various reasons, (e.g., her having to move quickly without help over a decade ago, chronic disorganization, etc….) the stuff is all mixed up. There are books, clothing, magazines, knick-knacks, baby clothes, childhood toys, dishes, and anything else you can imagine, all mixed together in each box.

Our goal was to toss, send to Goodwill, or auction most of the stuff, while getting out any childhood treasures or pictures that each of us daughters (or mom) wanted to keep - saying goodbye to the rest.

The above picture is of my Holly Hobby doll that mom gave me when I was five and home from kindergarten with the chicken pox. I have strong memories of it because it was almost as tall as me and I loved it! It was something that I was hoping to find. After doing so, I walked around our sorting area, hugging it for about five minutes, got pics of me holding it, then took pics of it in the Goodwill pile and said goodbye.

So, goodbye, Holly Hobby! You are fondly remembered, but we don’t need to keep you anymore.

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This was Casey yesterday. I found him nearly sliding down behind the couch pillow, belly up, fast asleep. He woke up when I got out the camera. And now I am here, sick on the couch again.

It is time to be getting ready to go home to California for Christmas. This has always been a bit of a stressful vacation because of my mom’s illness. But it’s been getting worse, so this year my older sister is coming out for the second time this year (and the second time in a decade) so us sisters can all help mom get rid of stuff.

You may remember our first hoard-busting trip last summer. Now it is time to continue the journey.

I need to be doing laundry and packing, but after spending the past two days grading papers, I feel I deserve one casual relaxation day before I go to California to meet my sisters at my mother’s house and deal with Part Two of the Hoard-Bust-a-Thon.

But first a couple pictures of my kitchen for me to look at while I’m away.

I need to get up off my bum and get some stuff done. My flight leaves tomorrow afternoon and I’d like to be finished packing tonight so I can spend the morning with my husband before I go.

I’ll do my best to post while I’m there. I’d really like to post more about the actual process of dealing with a  family member who is trying to recover from compulsive hoarding, but unless you are on A & E’s Hoarders, which I KNOW you all have seen by now (how odd that something that made me self-conscious and different my whole life, became a TV show the very same year I discovered that there was a real name and therapy for it!) it can be very difficult to betray someone’s privacy. While going out there and helping mom is MY life and something I’d very much like to blog about in detail, it is HER house and HER stuff, and I have to be respectful of her right to not have photos of it posted all over the internet.

So, argh!

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How to avoid doing housework #1: Get really sick. 

I’m sick today. Thank you elementary school kids! Sitting around in my PJs, coughing and feeling sorry for myself, I’m reminded of all the things I have to do. My computer has finally been fixed (Sort of - Hubby spilled liquid on it and the internal airport card no longer works and cannot be replaced - thank goodness they have this wireless USB thingy that allows me to use the Internet!). Anyway, I’ve always gotten some twisted (sick?!) pleasure out of getting sick. Before college, it meant that I could get out of going to school and turning things in on time. (In grad school, that never worked though.) And now, I feel like I’m actually justified in laying around feeling sorry for myself (heaven for a chronic depressive). But, I’m weird, and somehow, as I feel my body ache and tingle with fever, I manage to get into a meditative state and reflect on life and even feel some sort of pleasure and positivity. Maybe it’s the forced rest. 

And yet, my house looks like drug addicts live here. I’m serious. I was watching season five of Nip/Tuck on DVD yesterday, while imobile on the couch after work, and one of the charaters and his wife are addicted to meth and live in a pig-sty.

I looked into my kitchen….There isn’t a room in this house that isn’t riddled with clutter and neglect. 

If I were feeling better, I’d take a candid photo (see also) of it. But I’m sick and it’s just too much trouble (which is just an excuse, albeit a good one, because I don’t know if I’m brave enough to take a picture of all this). 

I talked to my mom a couple of days ago and she’s really struggling with work and trying to make progress on her house and hoarding situation. I wish life weren’t so cluttered with one thing after another, after another. I thought that going home with my older sister to help mom with her hoarding at the beginning of the summer was a life-changing event, but now, I’m almost worse off than I was before that. 

I know it’s just transition and not permanent, but damn it’s hard to keep it all together sometimes. How will I ever survive kids if I can’t even keep it together with just Hubby, Doggie, and me?!?

On a happier note, here is another beautiful mountain photo from our last summer trip:

PS. The title of this post came from an old nightgown I got for Christmas when I was thirteen and had stopped eating meat. It had a Far Side comic of cows standing on hind legs. One of them was grilling a hamburger and caption was of the other cow saying “You’re sick, Jessie! Sick, sick, sick!”

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Hey y’all. I have lots to catch up on on this three-day 4th of July weekend. As I’ve said, I had to go back to California for another week to help out with my mother’s house. The experience has been life changing and a great bonding experience for my whole family. Now it’s great to be back at home chilling with my husband and our dog. 

Here is a little example of the kind of stuff we did while we were in Cali - several before and after shots of the kitchen (the before pics were taken during the day and the after pics at night):

Enjoy your 4th of July weekend!

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In my last post I finally brought up my mother’s hoarding problem - which was the original raison d’etre of this blog (see my About Page). On our journey we have discovered two invaluable books that will help all of us work through the emotions and reasons behind the obsessive collecting. Overcoming Compulsive Hoarding, by Fugen Neziroglu, Ph.D., Jerome Bubrick, Ph. D., Ph. D., Jose A. Yaryura-Tobias, MD and Buried in Treasures: Help for Compulsive Acquiring, Saving, and Hoarding, by David F. Tolin, Randy O, Frost, and Gail Steketee.

They are both excellent resources for recovery from this particular affliction, and we are buying both books for mom and each of us sisters. 

They aren’t like your average, ubiquitous clutter-busting books, which talk about organizing and getting rid of stuff, but don’t really help the person with a bonafide compulsive hoarding problem. These books have proven techniques for getting to the root(s) of the problem: the emotional issues and erroneous beliefs that cause behaviors of acquiring and not throwing away to get out of hand.

We’ve also found a website - Clutterer’s Anonymous - which has lists for face-to-face suport groups as well as other resources. My sister and her good friend (whose mother we have recently discovered has the SAME PROBLEM!) took my mother to a meeting last Saturday and said that it was great. I’m so excited to hear what it was like and how it went!!!

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Okay, okay, okay. I’ve been meaning to fill you in about why I haven’t been posting for weeks. My family is currently in the process of getting my mother help for her compulsive hoarding. My husband and I, both of my sisters, and the older sister’s husband and four kids, went out to California to visit with each other and to assist mom with getting organized. I hadn’t seen my older sister since my wedding two years ago!

Well, when we got there, it quickly became apparent that the situation was way worse than some of us had realized. Not only was my mother’s apartment full to the point that one could not walk freely in it or sit on or sleep in any of the furniture, she also has filled several garages and storage facilities with stuff.

On to the next plan: Killing the Hoard Beast

This has involved me extending the first leg of my trip several extra days (while my husband came back to Denver alone) and then returning for the last week of July (I leave in 2 days) and for my oldest sister’s family to stay out in California several weeks longer than they had originally planned. 

And difficult as this process is, we have grown closer together as a family and manage the most poignant moments with a dose of humor. For instance, as we were driving to mom’s house for the first day of cleaning I was trying to find a way to describe how bad the conditions have become - I go home to mom’s every Christmas, but he had only been there once three years ago - when I came up with a perfect analogy.

My mom’s house is like the Swamp of Sadness in The Neverending Story. You cannot let it get you down or you will lose all hope and be unable to move forward. It is no wonder that compulsive hoarding and depression go hand in hand.

I did a little Internet research to determine if the swamp is called the Swamp of Sadness or Despair (I’m still not entirely certain) and I stumbled upon a website that does a Jungian analysis of the movie:

Atreyu did not enter the Swamp of Sadness alone, he rode on Ortex, his trusted white horse. The horse, friend of his youth, did not make it through the Swamp of Sadness. Ortex was overcome with grief which lead him to a state of immobility. Without movement he became stuck, slowly sinking to the depths of the swamp. “For whoever let the sadness overtake them would sink into the swamp.” (Petersen/Weigel)….Atreyu pleaded for the life of Ortex, “I understand it’s too difficult for you. Fight against the sadness, you have to try. You have to care. You have to move or you will die.”(Petersen/Weigel) A sad or fearful experience is often that which initially propels a person onward to self discovery. It is this experience which makes people aware of the weaknesses and frailties within ourselves which need to be confronted….It is in a Swamp of Sadness where many also get stuck and go no further.

~ Jungian Interpretation - Noel Clark

Oh, what memories of childhood tears that scene evokes! 

But, the truth is, coming up with that analogy actually helps the sadness, despair, and hopelessness that mom’s house can evoke to dissipate. 

My sisters and I have started a private blog post pictures, to post before, during, and after photos, and to allow a little bit of humor to get us through this overwhelming and unending process.

More to come….

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