I don't remember when it started or what the house looked like before the hoarding. It's been so long and the hoard is so intense that the present reality is the only reality I know. My mother is a Hoarder. I'm the Adult Child of a Hoarder.
When I was a youngster my mother had "rhyme and reason" to her cleaning. First, she removed throw rugs and cleaned cloth-covered furniture. Struggling with a heavy, metal, egg-shaped vacuum cleaner and too-long "wand," she ran the attachments over cushions and counted her passes while making maid-cut lines in the fabric. Then, she spent an inordinate amount of time shaking the rugs ruthlessly or--throwing them over a wash line in the yard--beating the dirt from them.
Back inside, my mother used a cloth-swaddled broom to "knock the cobwebs" from the corners of the ceiling. Afterward, she removed the cloth covering her broom's bristles, folding the "dirt and bacteria" inside and delivering it immediately to the washing machine. With a bucket of Lysol water, painfully hot to the touch and a new, pristine white washrag, she wiped the walls from the ceiling corners down to the baseboards. Jumping on and off a kitchen chair doubling as a step stool, standing precariously on the edge of its seat, stroking the plaster in neat lines and overlapping them just enough so the edge of the previous line was her guide, my mother ensured that every portion of wall was touched by her cloth and that "cracks of dirt" would not be left behind (a kind of maid-cut technique on the walls). After changing her wash water and hand scrubbing her rag, she attacked the baseboards, quarter-round, and floors.
In our small house, my mother occupied herself with a 6-hour cleaning ritual. One room per day, each day of the week. It was intense. And, as a child, the only way I could garner any attention from her was to participate in the cleaning ritual, which i did... desperate for her attention and in need of her affection, neither of which I got. This was my relationship with my mother: Cleaning Assistant. From when I could toddle until I finished grade school summers, my mother just wanted me to sit with her or stay with her while she cleaned. She didn't trust me to do any actual cleaning, so I didn't necessarily learn how to clean. As a young adult, I knew the routine, but it was so intense and rigorous that I felt overwhelmed by it. Today, despite my exposure to the cleaning ritual, I feel frequently overwhelmed by the thought of cleaning my own home, not knowing or feeling secure with "shortcuts." I often don't vacuum, change bed sheets, clean the kitchen or bathroom for a month at a time, and this scares me... leaving me with thoughts that I too will one day live in filth; the kind of filth my mother now embraces.
My mother's "OCD" approach to cleaning not only deprived me of a parent to tend my mental and emotional needs, it left my physical and social needs untended as well. While my mother was present every day, she was an absentee parent for all the energy she put into the cleaning ritual. As I grew up watching my mother's behavior, I grew to resent her and her ritual: assuming she was trying to escape her role as a parent by throwing herself into the act of scrubbing the house "clean." It didn't help that she often said the house was cleaner before she had kids, that it was because of "the kids" that she had to do so much cleaning, and that she wished she hadn't "had" kids. It was hard to hear and a burden to believe.
