The Vine: September 2, 2009
Dear Sars,
I have what I consider to be rather sticky situation. My policy up to this point has been to keep my big mouth shut, but I’m not sure that I shouldn’t say something, so here goes.
I have a long-distance friend who, despite the distance, has been a good friend for several years. She’s in her early twenties and is honestly usually quite lovely, but recently there have been some changes in her family and she is not handling them well.
I’m sympathetic to her situation, which is kind of sucky, but nothing that would make the local papers or anything. Her mother died many years ago, and her father has recently remarried. My friend, who we can call “O,” has stubbornly refused to make a place for this woman in their family. She’s done this to a really extreme degree, in various ways that make me physically cringe when she relates the stories. She refuses to even call the woman by her name, and instead refers to her as “the troll.” She has assured me she does not do this to the woman’s face, thank the Lord.
To be fair, her father didn’t necessarily handle the situation all that well either. He got wrapped up in courting this new woman and spent the bare minimum of time with O, which O found very hurtful. O claims that her siblings also strongly dislike the new woman, but I don’t know them, so I can’t testify to this myself. She has said things that lead me to believe that she resents this woman for “replacing” her as well as the memory of her mother.
I can’t even imagine how painful it is to lose your mother at a young age, so I understand how it must hurt to have a new woman in the picture. However. However, O is taking her response to a really extreme, unkind, petty place. For example, she refused to attend her father’s wedding because the new wife (“the troll”) had decided that she wanted a wedding ring. I was confused by the relevance at first, but O explained to me that her mother had not had a wedding ring, though she had apparently wanted one in later years. The fact that the new wife would have a wedding ring when O’s mother had not was declared to be unforgivably insensitive and offensive to her mother’s memory. She said she knew her mother “would have been upset” about this.
Their compromise involved O’s father buying her a new dress and shoes and paying for her to have her hair and nails done so that she could sit in a coffee shop during the ceremony and read a book. She attended the reception, but flat-out refused to watch her father and the new woman exchange rings. The rest of her siblings, as I understand it, were present at the ceremony.
O had been living in her family’s secondary residence while construction was completed on her father’s primary residence, but she has recently moved in with her father and his new wife, since she managed to find a job in the city where they live. Since she moved in, the problems have become worse and more extreme. She complains that the new wife sounds stupid and speaks poorly and walks around too loudly and slams doors.
This morning she presented me with two new issues: the first, that “the troll” has appropriated a briefcase for her own use that once belonged to O’s mother; and the second, that the troll insists on putting the toilet paper on the roll incorrectly. Since O obviously feels powerless to change the first situation, she has resorted to an unpleasant passive-aggressive battle over the second. She changed the toilet paper to face “the correct way” and then, when “the troll” changed it back, O elected to remove the toilet paper from the roll entirely and take it with her to her room.
I have tried since the beginning to be out-and-out supportive, and not to call her on any of her shitty behavior, but I find myself completely incapable of acting like feuding over toilet paper placement is in any way rational or mature behavior. I tried to very gently remind her that regardless of the greater issues, this issue was about toilet paper, and perhaps she should not stoop to a level where she is actually fighting over which way to hang something you wipe your ass with, but she just said she knows I “think it’s stupid” but that she is “just rebelling.”
Honestly, I think that she is making herself unnecessarily miserable and taking everyone else with her. Her mother is dead; I understand that it hurts and that she’s not embracing the change in her family, but the fact remains that her mother is dead and that her father has the right to have a relationship and to conduct himself in it as he sees fit. O is the youngest of all of her siblings, and as she is in her early twenties, it’s not like her father remarried while any of them were still children and thus were forced to accept a new “parent” into the situation. The new wife is simply that: O’s father’s new wife.
She’s so miserable that I am heartbroken for her, but…come on. I obviously don’t think she’s being fair to anyone, and am kind of appalled that she’s conducting herself in this manner. Up to this point, I’ve been maintaining a strict policy of listening and sympathetic noises and offers of long-distance hugs and making sad-faces at her over messaging services when she’s upset. I agree that her father did not handle the situation particularly well, but she has carried “not handling the situation particularly well” to new extremes.
My question is…should I even say anything? Should I start trying to gently present another point of view when she gets freaked out? (Example: maybe her father regretted not agreeing to rings with O’s mother and now is trying to make up for it by agreeing with the new wife’s desire for them?) Should I just keep making sympathetic noises and encouraging her to become financially independent and move out?
Mum’s The Word
Dear Mum,
Yes, you should say something.O’s behavior is childish and obnoxious, but leaving that aside, it’s also inappropriate in a way that suggests arrested development — I mean, “rebelling”?She’s in her twenties; the time for that is over, particularly if she’s still living at home at her father’s expense.
But that isn’t why you should say something; the immature reaction is not that of a happy or well-adjusted person, or one who’s even conscious that she’s behaving like a furious toddler.And part of the job of a friend, alas, is to take one for the team sometimes by pointing out jackassery like O’s.Do unto others, in other words — if you had started behaving like this, in a way you’d cringe at later, wouldn’t you want someone to tell you, so that you could stop before you alienate everyone in your life with it, and try to deal with what’s really bothering you?
Yeah, you would.You’d resent it at the time, but you’d want someone to save you from yourself.
What you say, and how, is another story, but telling her — gently — what you just told me is a good start, I think.”Look, it’s obvious that you’re in a lot of emotional pain, and I’m on your side, but I don’t think you realize how over the line you’re going with all of this, and for your own happiness, maybe you should either start cutting the wife a break, or talking some things out with a counselor, because you deserve better than to devote this much mental energy to this stuff.”
She does need to see a therapist; the territory issues with her father need sorting out, on both sides (that he’s tolerating her bratty nonsense when she’s living with him, presumably rent-free, is no more appropriate to her age than her behavior is), because something in the past is not getting dealt with productively.And whether she sees a professional or not, she does need to stop with the petty lines in the sand.The trick is in phrasing it so that it’s about her emotional well-being, versus her acting a fool — but if some “you’re acting a fool” sneaks into what you say, well, so be it; it’s true.And sometimes this is what friends are for — to tell you that, so that you can get a timely grip.
Hey Sars,
I’m sort of at the end of my rope here, and am really grasping at straws to try and deal with this situation.
On Inauguration Day, I was let go from my job, along with a good chunk of the employees at the company I worked for. This led to a whole slew of problems with my previous apartment complex, but that’s really left for another Vine. The main result of my dismissal was that my husband and I ended up moving in with his family, my brother-in-law, mother-in-law (M), and grandmother-in-law (G), to make ends meet.
Now, this has been an amazing help, and I’m unbelievably grateful for the roof over my head. There’s just one problem: the house they live in is completely overflowing with useless crap, they want to move when M finds a new job, and I don’t know how to help anymore.
I’m incredibly grateful for my in-laws opening their home to us. But just to illustrate how cluttered this house was, my husband’s and my rather meager possessions (we couldn’t fill a one-bedroom apartment with our stuff) got shoved into a library already so packed you couldn’t reach the back shelves, and the bedroom we claimed had maybe six square feet of walking room in it when we got done putting our belongings in there. The one large piece of furniture we had aside from our bed was my grandmother’s couch, which is currently residing at my parents’ place.
What clutters my in-laws’ house is basically arts and crafts odds ‘n’ ends, as well as four households’ worth of furniture. Over the course of her life, G has done everything from knitting, sewing, woodworking, crocheting, beadwork, and finally, the current hobby of making lampwork beads with M. Her habit whenever she starts a new hobby? Buy up as much as she can supply-wise, and keep it after the hobby has lost her interest, “just in case” she wants to start it up again.
Sars, the driveway is filled with warped and useless wood that isn’t even worth burning, it’s so waterlogged. The upstairs closets were full to bursting with buckets upon buckets of yarn and wool (at last count, there were 30 huge Tupperware tubs full of yarn scattered throughout the house and in the storage unit), the back room is so full of glass rods for lampworking you can hardly walk, and there is just no room in this house, there’s so much junk.
The outlying buildings are just as packed full of crap, mostly furniture odds ‘n’ ends that aren’t worth the effort it would take to clean the mouse poo and spiderwebs off them to make them useable again. The greenhouse is useless, the garage has had so much stuff just thrown in there that my husband can’t even access the woodworking tools, and I’m at my wit’s end figuring out how to deal with it.
While I was looking for work, my husband and I worked hard getting things to a point where we could actually breathe upstairs. At this point, a closet’s been cleaned out of yarn and other crap (The yarn alone took up seven eighths of the closet. There was over 15 separate tubs of it in there, which stopped us from using it until we took them out), the library has an actual usable couch now, and we have a hallway. However, the upstairs office is still full of yarn and an unused knitting machine, you have to hop over crap to get to the computer, and while the bedroom is the cleanest place in the upstairs save the bathroom, it gets boring staying in there every evening.
Sars, I just really don’t know how to help them and keep my own sanity. I’ve now got a part-time job that has me working the afternoon hours, which is when I’m most productive. I no longer have the energy to come home and clean, but if I don’t, I get incredibly claustrophobic and twitchy because the clutter is just too much for me. I barely earn enough to afford our bills and help out with finances, but my husband and I are doing our damnedest to set aside some savings so we can move out.
Neither G nor M are physically capable of helping clean for long periods of time; they are both in the morbidly-obese area on the overweight spectrum, and M suffers from fibromyalgia on top of it. What time they have that can be used productively tends to go to their lampworking business, as that’s putting food on the table (out of the five of us living there, I’m the only one working a “traditional job”).
Of the other two physically-fit members of the house, my husband is doing the best he can when he has no help and a fused spine. As for his brother, it’s like pulling teeth to get him off the computer long enough to get the garbage taken out, let alone help with major cleaning projects.
The best we’ve been able to do so far is get G to sell off some of her yarn, and start cleaning out some knick-knacks via eBay. A friend of mine also came over and got part of the overgrown yard cleaned up and organized. But it’s still not enough to get this place in shape if they plan on moving in the next year. And as it stands, I can’t even do laundry for my husband and me because the machines are covered in crap, the room they’re in has floors filthy enough to shame dirt floors, and I can’t see the controls enough to even work them properly.
Right now, the only solution I can see is finding a full-time position somewhere, anywhere that will hire me, and moving out ASAP. However, that still leaves G, M, and the brother-in-law in a house that’s falling apart around their ears, and no relief from the clutter in sight. Is that the best course of action? Is there anything else I can do to help them? Am I being crazy and should just suck it up and deal? I’d really appreciate another viewpoint.
Desperate For A Change
Dear Change,
The good news is, it sounds like your in-laws understand that there’s a problem, and are willing to address it, or to let you address it more or less as you see fit.If this isn’t the case, and you have to battle G and M for the right to list each item on eBay, then the problem is bigger than you, and you have to call the producers of Hoarders and then move out ASAP.
(On a side note: Do any other Hoarders-watchers find themselves gripped, during the show, with the urge to hit pause, rush into the bedroom, and begin weeding their possessions down to two books, two pairs of undies, and a single pair of earrings?”Fuck shirts!I’ll sleep on the sheets and wear them as a toga!”Is it just me?)
But if they want to straighten up, and just can’t, it’s time to budget some money and call in professionals.At the very least, call 1-800-Got-Junk or your local equivalent and get an estimate for hauling away the crap in the driveway and the busted furniture.Another option: I Sold It On eBay (or QuikDrop, or a similar service), which offers in-house assessments.Arrange for one of their employees to visit the house, price various objects, and handle their disposal; I Sold It On eBay should do most of the heavy lifting, literal and figurative, for you.
Concurrently, set up a schedule for going through portions of the house with M and G, one portion per day.Make the portions small and manageable, i.e. one closet, one quadrant of the laundry room, et cetera.Make it clear that nobody has to move anything or do anything; they just have to decide what stays and what gets thrown out, given away, or sold, and put the appropriately colored Post-It on each item or pile.Remind them during this process that, the more they can part with, the more money they can make on eBay — and save when it’s time to move house.I would start with parts of your current living area, which will show an immediate positive result for you and thus motivate you to continue dealing with this.I would also strongly suggest to someone in a position to enforce it that either your BIL helps with clean-up, or he pays into a dumpster fund and finances a few hours’ work from some local college students to haul shit outside and chuck it.
There does come a point with certain tasks where you have to call in professionals and consider it an investment in your sanity; this is one of those times.Someone has to take charge of the situation, so if your husband’s family is okay with it being you, get everyone to put together a few hundred bucks and get it done; if they’re not, use that money on an apartment deposit.
Okay, here’s a short-ish description of the situation:
Coworker has always been odd (like many who work in my department).In the last year she went from a “bit annoying but harmless odd” to “annoying and a bit creepy odd” to, in the last couple months, “creepy and kinda scary odd.”
I never knew her well, never saw her outside of work, never would have called her a friend or even a close acquaintance, and never particularly liked her, even in the BABHO stage.
Two weeks ago Coworker did something (I won’t go into details, it was creepy bad) that got her asked to leave work and not come back without a note from a doctor.The following Monday we were told she was found dead in her home.I don’t know that we will ever be told more details but I would be surprised if it was anything but suicide. I heard some details of her last few months and it wasn’t pretty.In my completely untrained and unprofessional opinion it sounds like paranoid schizophrenia.
I feel bad that Coworker’s life turned out the way it did and that she didn’t get the help she needed.And I definitely have some guilt over not seeing how bad it was in time, but I’m not sure I was ever in a position to be able to help her.I don’t think Coworker was particularly close to anyone here at work but I know of a couple times someone had tried to approach her about getting some medical/psychological help and it did not go well.I have to admit that I think that a lot of the “grief” showing in the department (and actually there isn’t a lot) is more guilt.
The family isn’t holding any service here (no family close by) so next week our employer is holding a Coworker Memorial Service for employees. My problem is that I don’t know if I should go or not.
The thing is, my reasons for going wouldn’t really be the reasons I think you should go to a memorial. Basically: I would feel bad for my coworkers who have organized it if no one but them shows up for it (a bit of a possibility); a memorial where no one comes is a really sad thing; and I don’t know that I want to deal with the aftermath at work if I don’t go.(I don’t think it would be too bad, but some coworkers would make it awkward and annoying for a while.)
But it seems hypocritical to go to a memorial for someone you didn’t like just to make your coworkers happy. (Although I have to admit if the family was going to be there, I would go just to make them feel better.)
So my question is, which is worse — going to the memorial for the wrong reasons or not going at all?
There’s a fine line between being well-mannered and being a hypocrite
Dear Sometimes There’s No Line At All,
Not going at all is worse.My father once told me, about a somewhat similar situation, “When in doubt, show up.”Like much of my father’s advice, it sounded too abstract to mean anything at the time and then I found myself applying it to dozens of different situations, but the gist (I think) is that we usually regret not attending things more than we regret attending them.
It’s a memorial; it doesn’t require you to sign an affidavit stating that you liked or disliked Coworker, and you don’t have to speak warmly in remembrance of her.All you have to do is go, so, not least because it will make your work life easier: go.Sit, listen, sign the book, and leave.Life is full of events like this, events we attend for courtesy’s sake, compulsory weddings of spouse’s tacky bosses; going when you don’t want to isn’t hypocritical.It’s life.
Tags: etiquette friendships the fam workplace
@ O’s friend:
My cousin’s behavior was almost identical when her father got married several years after her mother’s death. It is almost spooky how similar the behavior is. But she was 14 or 15.
I am not sure if that means the behavior is common in these circumstances, if these behaviors represent stages some people go through, or if it is simple immaturity on the part of 0.
I’ve been thinking about the first letter, and it occurs to me that O might have felt neglected by her father after her mother’s death because her father’s own grief, over his dead wife, kept him from being as engaged with his children as he “should” have been. Everyone involved is human, after all.
“”Waste” just isn’t a valid option, and waste on a scale like that isn’t justified by its ease. Holy smokes. FREECYCLE can rid you of anything and everything, with the beautiful advantage that everyone does their own carting and carrying. All you have to do is agree on contact and pickup methods.”
I think this is a great theory, and I think avoiding waste when you can is a great idea. But if you are talking about an entire house full of crap, including half-used supplies in plastic bags, stuff that may be tangled or rotten or smelly or faded or weakened from age, there may indeed be stuff that nobody is going to want, and I think not allowing yourself to acknowledge that this stuff exists will only keep you from getting started.
The statement about Freecycle being a foolproof way to get rid of “anything and everything” is not consistent with my experience; I tried very hard to get rid of a desk chair with but a single missing bolt, hoping someone would take it and find a bolt for it. Repeated postings did not scare up anyone who would take it. I see things go by all the time that are never taken. A little sample: My last three Freecycle digests showed, respectively, 14 “Offer” postings and 8 “Taken” postings, 8 “Offer” postings and zero “Taken” postings, and 11 “Offer” postings and 8 “Taken” postings. That’s a total of more than twice as many things being offered as taken, and even if you assume that some people never get around to posting that things are taken, I think you can assume that some stuff simply doesn’t get claimed, even when it’s available for nothing.
The reason for the numbers is just to point out that in fairness, not everything has a potential good home, particularly absent an investment of time for research and logistics that the people involved may simply not have. I remember being chastised for putting outdated textbooks and mildewed paperbacks in the recycling instead of researching libraries that would take them, only to find out that if libraries can’t use donated books and don’t have a place to give them to, they also recycle them. It happens.
I think it’s a little too rigid to summarily declare that throwing things away is not “a valid option.” I absolutely agree you should do what you can to minimize that (that’s why I use Freecycle myself), but I don’t agree that you can state categorically that all waste is unnecessary. These folks may not have the resources to become full-time Craigslist operators until they empty the house of stuff, and might not get rid of all of it even if they did. I think Change is to be commended for wanting to help, and any time she has to help is a good thing. I would hate to see her dissuaded by the idea that she’s going to be put down if she doesn’t spend the time on Freecycle to locate a home for every single thing in the house.
I totally agree with Sars’s advice to “There’s a fine line between being well-mannered and being a hypocrite”.
I actually don’t think you’re a hypocrite anyway. Who says you have to like someone in order to feel badly at their untimely death? Your response is completely appropriate. You weren’t friends with your co-worker, but I agree that a memorial with no attendees is the worst thing ever.
It seems that the only thing holding you back from going is the fact you didn’t like your co-worker. I really think that it’s okay. Your reasons for wanting to go are not wrong – go to the memorial.
I think we can all agree that its great to give away useable stuff. Its bad to give moldy, smelly, torn, dirty stuff to charities. Yeah, sometimes charities seem to have a lot of picky rules, but you should give your stuff at least a basic sort so you’re not giving moldy, buggy books to the library because it will infest the other good books if they don’t catch it right way. If you give a charity a bunch of stuff they have to throw away, then you’ve actually taken money and time away from the charity (garbage service…its not free).
In the face of a house packed full of stuff that is overwhelming…if a of couple useable things get thrown away, I’ll give the person a pass. Among other things, the great thing about giving stuff away is it saves you money in trips to the dump. But sometimes…you’re just tired of sorting…posting on craiglists/freecycle and dealing with flakes…making sure its in decent shape to take to Goodwill, etc. Like with most things in life, there’s a balance.
@Change Something I forgot from when I was cleaning out my dad’s house. Do you have any nearby friends or other relatives that might come over for a cleaning day? Is there a room or area that G would trust other people to help with? G could be the decider (don’t throw that), but you could get a hand with the grunt work. They might take home some goodies (if there are any, “hey we need an extra lamp”) and you could spread the work around. Clearly, you’d need to go with friends/extended family who understood beforehand that there was a lot of clutter, but its being worked on and wouldn’t be all, “Oh god, you people are slobs” and wouldn’t mind being “paid” in lunch and an ice cream cone or something.
When I cleaned out my dad’s house, I had some friends come to help a couple different weekends and it was really great. The joke was that if you expressed any interest in something, it was your’s. I had also gone through beforehand and picked out the most important stuff for me to keep. But there was additional stuff that they would check on as we went.
Crap. I put an apostrophe on yours in my post. What was I thinking?
Sars I so hear you on the effect Hoarders and its ilk (my personal favorite is Clean House–which deals with much the same sort of problem)has on “normal” people. I am propelled off the couch each commercial break to sort tossing shit into the dumpster. And I feel deeply guilty that I’m so far behind on my five-year plan for sorting my two sons’ school papers and art into a manageable number of boxes. Hee!
Nicki, I would say you’re right on both counts – it’s common AND it’s due to immaturity.
When my father remarried after my mother’s death, my four siblings acted atrociously from the point of being introduced to his new wife (with whom I get along very well) and haven’t really stopped being brats about his remarriage. And the youngest of us was nineteen when my mom died, twenty-two when he remarried.
I would say it was a combination of things that contributed, but a heightened sense of entitlement and the assumption that Dad would wear sackcloth and ashes and spend the rest of his life growing his kids’ inheritance (rather than ever having sex again) definitely figured into it. It was like talking to very cleverly costumed 12-year-olds sometimes.
I had the same experience Linda (above) had with Freecycle — however, the “Free stuff” listing section on Craigslist has been very useful for me. I’ve been cleaning out the back room sections of the store my partner and I run; we closed one location, so we were dealing with two stores’ worth of desk organizers and various sorts of things like that. I would take a picture of a collection of assorted items (which weren’t new but were in good shape), post it and by the afternoon it would be gone (however, there is time invested in answering the emails that come in.) This worked for many things — and I felt much better about not tossing anything.
But I also second the advice that if something is dirty/moldy/urine soaked, why, just get rid of it. A friend of mine who studies feng shui told me something (which I will probably muddle in the retelling) that there’s something like an invisible cord going from you to every possession in the house. It’s why it’s hard to get rid of these things, but it feels so good once you break that attachment. It’s also why it’s much easier for an outsider to come in and clear things away — when it’s your stuff, you can so easily be overwhelmed by sitting in the middle of all the clutter. I used to visit a friend who wasn’t a hoarder, but damn near (cereal bowls in his bed, etc.) He just needed the emotional support and prodding to clear everything out. But – as successful as I was clearing HIS place out – I still needed friends to come over when I cleared out my place. I told them that their job was just to sit there with a glass of wine and keep me company while I sorted & tossed — their presence made it possible for me to work and not get overwhelmed.
For the friend of the woman with the new stepmother: well, speaking as one who had a terrible stepmother as well, I can certainly sympathize (as we all do) with the feelings it brings up. However, I do hope you say something. And it might not need to be that gentle. I had friends who (not in relation to my stepmother) one day had to say, You know you’re being an idiot. It stung, but they were right. This bizarre petty War of the Roses she is waging… there is no denying that it’s absolutely strange, over the line, and a symptom of something much deeper. It’s just not adult behavior.
And the memorial: yes, just go. Your presence means something to those who organized it. There is no test at a memorial service: “Did you care for this person enough to wail and rend your garments?” You are acknowledging their passing, not declaring them to be your closest friend.
I am twitching like mad here, because I’m visiting relatives (first my husband’s, and now mine) and my urge to clean and declutter is driving me INSANE. Now, my sister has three kids under the age of five, so clearly anything more than “path to the van” is a pipe dream, but my mother’s storage rooms of CRAP make me want to buy a small torch and “accidentally” light up her piles of junk ( she actually told me that “we’re planning a yard sale”–it would take a seasons worth of flea marketing to sell all this stuff.) I’m the opposite of a hoarder, I go on purges, because I cannot bear watching clutter pile up, with the exception of personal notes, a few scrapbooks, etc.
And Change, I hate to tell you, but if you have a rodent infestation you need to strip the place down and than get an exterminator. If you want to sell the house, no realtor is going to list it for any kind of good price if there’s mice having their annual jamboree in the walls. Think of it as an investment.
Sars, I am SO in agreement about the effect of watching Hoarders. I always feel a bit…icky…after watching other peoples’ major dysfunction, but if it motivates me to get up off my ass and do something about my own, then its worth it. And without fail, Hoarders has prompted me to get rid of at least a grocery bag worth of crap within 24 hours of viewing. Well, get rid of things other than shoes or books – those are sacred.
Here’s a nasty piece of hoarding…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5GmIuo0OQc
Linda, obviously I wasn’t advocating any sort of pretense that urine-soaked goods are un-trash-able, and I would have hoped my reference to Freecycle wouldn’t have been taken a some sort of decree from On High. It just leaped to mind – particularly since, at least in my local Freecycling community, activity is extremely lively, and it IS an excellent way to get rid of second-life items which I don’t personally want, need, or have much way to cart around/desire to try to sell. YMMV, I didn’t mean to imply or demand that all experiences match my own. The point, of course, is that chucking the non-urine-saturated HOUSE FULL of items is ridiculous.
For those who find my last comment extraordinary – please understand that I happened to find the comment about trashing an entire household full of items (with no comment regarding condition) to be at least as shocking as the idea of NOT throwing 100% of it away.
Lisa over at Filthy Commerce just tackled the hoarding thing too–fascinating reading.
http://schmeiser.typepad.com/filthy_commerce/2009/09/surprise-one-mans-trash-is-another-mans-trash-too.html#more
@Sarah, I haven’t watched Hoarders, but I feel that way about Clean House (Style network). I’m guessing it’s a similar story, but it has me itching to get rid of the few odds and ends that remain after my husband and I combined households. Their process is pretty much exactly what you described — go through the house and mark everything “keep,” “sell,” or “trash.” I’m doing that now with the goal of a yard sale Sept 26 and I can’t wait to see my house after it’s all gone!
Oh my God, the hoarding. Both of my parents are/were hoarders – my dad’s house was such a disaster that it actually had to be torn down after his death (he was renting from a friend; he didn’t own it), and, if it weren’t for the fact that she lives in a duplex, I’m sure the same would have to be done to my mom’s – besides the stacks of old newspapers, piles of unwearable clothes, bags and bags of yarn, etc., she also has 11 cats. Argh! Breaking free of the tendency to let my own home fill up with crap has been one of the major goals and struggles of my adult life.
I have to agree with Grainger, unfortunately – I did not start making any real progress until I gave up on the idea of selling my stuff and just started giving it away to friends and neighbours and then throwing it away by the bagful. (Those who say that “don’t throw it out! someone might want to use it!” have never actually tried to get rid of things on a major scale, I’m sorry – I have a ton of female friends and still only managed to half-empty one of the four large shopping bags of high-end, brand-new or barely-touched cosmetics and toiletries I had. If I can’t get a bunch of models and burlesque dancers to take MAC eyeshadows off my hands, you can bet it won’t be easy to get rid of a bunch of moldering yarn.)
When you have a lot of stuff – and I live in a studio apartment by myself, so I’m quite sure my “lot of stuff” has NOTHING on Change’s in-laws – going to the effort of creating listings online, taking photos of things, etc. just feels like so much to do that it becomes really easy to put it off indefinitely, which of course solves nothing. If Change is willing to devote all of her free time to doing this, that’s one thing – but I can say from my experience with my family and myself that the rest of the family won’t be much help, not when it’s so much easier to just live in filth than to go to all that trouble and then wait for the things to slowly, piece by piece, move out of the house. Meanwhile, spending several weekends frantically throwing away almost everything I could get my hands on, until my place was practically empty, ended up being an ENORMOUS help – it’s so much easier to maintain cleanliness and order, and really notice when things start piling up again so you can stop before it gets nasty, when you start with a clean slate.
Yes, the process of cleaning out is wasteful and it sucks, and I kind of want to cry when I think about how much money I could have theoretically made selling all the clothes and books and electronics I got rid of (especially when I’m really broke, like, say, right now), but it was worth it. My place is practically Spartan now, but I’ve learned the hard way that I really, really can’t have it any other way.
Now I’m thinking about watching that Hoarders show, but I suspect it would hit too close to home…
I just read E.L. Doctorow’s “Homer and Langley,” his fictionalized take on the Collyer brothers. The real Collyers and the fictional ones were hoarders. (Well, Homer was blind, Langley did most of the active hoarding.) As the book neared its end, I was feeling as claustrophobic as Doctorow’s version of Homer was; he was blind, had gone deaf, and surrounded by stacks of newspapers.
To the hoarding family – you can donate the crafts to an organization that promotes the arts
@Isis Uptown: If I remember right, the real Collyer brothers did end up getting seriously ill from the environmental effects of their hoarding; I remember that one of them did end up permanently stuck in the house, but I can’t remember if he went blind, or if he lost the use of his legs. I think it was the legs, though. The other one got killed by one of the booby traps that they’d set to protect their hoard, which meant that the disabled one starved to death. Not a pretty end, for either of them.
@Mum: Seriously, she’s fighting over *toilet paper*. And over briefcases her mother used to own. And over whether or not she was going to attend her father’s own wedding? Bloody hell.
It’s past time to start calling her on this. In a way, like Sars said, that makes it more about her emotional health than about the fact that she’s “rebelling” over friggin’ TP, but still in a way that actually calls her on it.
Try something like, “O, I know your mother’s death makes you very upset. But clinging to her memory like this worries me, because it doesn’t seem to be healthy behaviour for you. You’re getting into fights about which way is ‘right’ to hang toilet paper, for crying out loud. And I just want you to be healthy, and happy – which is why I think maybe you should talk to a therapist about these things.”
Seriously, though, she needs to start letting go of the whole “I shall rend my garments, and wear naught but sack-cloth and pour ashes into my hair, and wail in grief for the rest of my life” thing; there’s a reason why, up until WWI, people considered it to be normal to be in mourning for two years – and after that, you were expected to start returning to normal life, maybe even find someone new. (During WWI, it fell out of favour, because of how many people died during the conflict; it was seen to be in poor taste to dress in black all the time.)
If anything should be brought back from the Victorian era, it’s the mourning period; we, as North Americans, seem to have lost our grip on when, exactly, we’re supposed to let go.
@Change: Backing up asiyah; check the local listings, and see if there’s any groups looking for arts-and-crafts material donations. Maybe there’s a YMCA that runs a summer camp, or an after-school daycare – they’d definitely appreciate the yarn and beads, if they’re accepting donations. The rest of it? Make *one* good-faith effort to donate it or sell it; if no one wants it, then toss it. Same goes for the furniture; if you can’t find a home for it (and I doubt you will, unless you stumble onto a group that’s really into rehabbing furniture), then send it to the dump.
It’s going to be difficult, I know – you don’t want to “waste” any of this potentially-useable stuff. But. Like Sars and so many others have said, if you keep hanging onto it, waiting for someone to come along and say “hey, I could use that!” …well, you’re never going to clear the place out.
So, tough love time. One good-faith effort, and then pitch it if it doesn’t get taken by someone. No going “well, maybe one more try” or “well, maybe the people interested only look on X, Y, and Z days, and I was selling on B.” No – if someone was interested, they should have said so when you were offering. If no one speaks up, toss it.
I’m a little late to this Vine, but wanted to pipe up re: hoarding and clutter and the disposal thereof.
My grandparents were Depression-raised packrats who would not get rid of anything that could possibly be useful. When my grandfather died, I started planning to move in with my grandmother. Clearing out space for me was agonizing with her insistence that there was no place to put this or that, and me trying to explain that I was going to be moving myself from a 3-story townhouse to two rooms already full to the brim and like it or not some things had to go. She expected me to just move in on top of the clutter, which in the “guest room” gave me (without my stuff) about three feet to walk around a twin-sized bed.
She died not long after this, and I did move in on top of the clutter to deal with the estate. I can well understand the claustrophobia of living in such a house. I can also understand the feeling of hopelessness when trying to deal with it. Even when you’re successful at dealing with a small area and getting that clean, there’s always so much more! It’s depressing and disheartening and it’s easy to lose the willpower to keep going on it. In my case, I had to be careful about sorting because, since my grandparents were dead and couldn’t tell me if something was important/valuable, I had to examine things well and would often find treasures mixed in with trash.
I finally took the pay-to-help-my-sanity route. I called 1-800-GOT-JUNK and they hauled off four full trucks. And when it came time to sell the house, instead of an estate sale I found a company who does fair-market appraisals and gives you a tax deduction worksheet to submit while the items are donated to charities that work with that company. That company cleared out the house in three days. And they even cleaned it! And while, no, I wasn’t able to sell the stuff, which would have taken forever piece by piece (and in an estate sale, for far less than the worth), I had a $30K tax deduction. It’s just another option that’s out there, though it would obviously vary for its worth.