Yesterday I got a long worried email from a relative, asking me to investigate the scholarly literature on hoarding. My correspondent wanted to know specifically about strategies for supporting kids being raised in a home where hoarding is an issue. All right, said I to myself, let's do some searching.
But
oh
my
goodness.
I did not anticipate the physical reaction I would have to reading those papers, the intense need to get up from my seat and start eliminating stuff.
So. All of the kids' dressers have been purged. The wrong-size/wrong-season storage has been purged and reorganized. The puzzle box has been purged. The giveaway shelf has been emptied. A couple of spectacularly wrong Christmas gifts went straight from the "what the heck do I do with this?" spot on the counter to the trunk of the car. I made a thrift shop run in the freezing cold and filed the tax receipt on my return.
How, then, is there still so much STUFF in my house?
It's a clutter-y time of year. My kids are generally pretty good about keeping their possessions stripped down (with occasional exceptions), but this is the time of year when new things are jockeying for spots in a small house. Pete was given an origami book and a package of origami paper for Christmas, with the result that the coffee table was covered with an armada of origami birds and pianos. New books are resting on end tables. Games are everywhere because people have been playing them with siblings. I'm not going to be the mom who says NO FUN ALLOWED PUT IT ALL AWAY.
Unless I keep reading about hoarding.
Fact I didn't know: hoarding seems to be highly heritable. My kids have multiple relatives with worrisome acquisitive tendencies. My great-aunt Mary Bob is the only one I know of who would definitely have met diagnostic criteria. She wound up in the hospital with a gangrenous foot (the consequence, it was said, of poor circulation resulting from her refusal to turn the thermostat up above 55), and while she was there my mother and my aunt spent uncountable hours cleaning her house. This was in the early 90s, I think, before people were really aware of hoarding as a form of mental illness, and they were stunned by the fury that erupted when she learned they had disposed of her collection of 40-year-old newspapers.
Probably the one kid who seems to like to pile stuff up would not appreciate it if I regaled him with tales of his great-great-aunt Mary Bob, any more than the kids who seem to struggle more with emotional regulation appreciate it when I regale them with tales of family substance abusers. One of the things that's most distressing to read about is how often hoarders are resistant to treatment. How does a person wind up living in an unlivable situation? I don't really get it. I think I might have to stop writing this post and go do some more purging.
But maybe I should send a reply to that email first.
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