On Hoarding:

Having experienced a real life hoarder has made me extraordinarily clean. I enjoy the tv Hoarding:  Buried Alive and Hoarders, maybe a little too much. I DVR them because they usually come on at times I'm unable to watch. I've always enjoyed watching these shows, and I felt like it wouldn't be a big deal to experience a hoard in real life. So when a friend asked me to help clean their house for a decent payment, I didn't turn it down. I've seen it on TV, right? As much as I've watched, I might as well be a certified professional organizer, haul-away expert, and therapist all rolled into one convenient package.
I went through all the motions, sort of mentally preparing myself. I'd known this person for awhile and I thought they might be over-exaggerating their mess. I expected unopened boxes and bags and maybe some dirty laundry and probably some dishes. I was told it was bad, but I had a hard time believing it. We shopped prior to the reveal - trash bags, gloves, bleach, glass cleaner, very basic, important cleaning supplies.
I WAS NOT PREPARED.
The conditions were deplorable at best. This beautiful, modern home was filled with filth and garbage. The air was stagnant, warm, and worst of all filled with gnats. The corners were thick with cobwebs, every surface had rotting food stuck to it, cups and bowls filled with molding and rancid liquids, plates with molding who knows what, and the corpses of thousands of gnats, maybe hundreds of thousands. There was no visible floor. 20+ bags of garbage were in the floor besides the floor being covered in a carpet of fast food wrappers, garbage, crackers, chips, and cookies that had been walked on and crushed, spilled liquids, sticky, and clothing. The kitchen had more filled garbage bags all over the floor, the plates and dishes that had made it back into the kitchen were covered in gnats, flies, and dried food. The half bathroom adjacent to the kitchen had never been cleaned. The toilet was breeding gnats and the water was brown. The bowl was stained. The sink looked slimy. It was disgusting.
But, even this was nothing in comparison to the upstairs.
Upstairs was a breeding ground of filth unlike anything I'd ever witnessed before in real life. You see, on the TV shows, I've seen older adults who have let themselves go, let their homes go, they use adult diapers and then pile them in the corner of their bathroom. It's gross to watch, but they can't show but so much of the muck on TV and still be able to show it on TV, and of course, you don't witness the smell.
This person's child at 5 years old is not potty-trained and still uses pull-up type diapers. By uses, I mean, this child uses them as diapers, as in regular urination and defecation, not containing accidents. There was a pile of these used diapers nearly three feet tall and 5 feet across along one wall in the upstairs hallway. There was another pile inside the master bedroom. The smell stench was reprehensible. I gagged. I heaved. I had to go back downstairs. Downstairs smelled like a dumpster, upstairs smelled like a port-a-john without a flush in 110 degree heat after being used by 20 truck drivers after 10 hours of bean burritos and driving. I could deal with the dumpster.
I cried. I asked the person why they were living like this, how they deserved better. And then, over the course of the next few days, we cleaned it up.
It was tragic, really, being invited into someone's house, experiencing their own personal hell, and holding it inside. I came home after this experience and didn't talk much for a few days. My husband asked if I was alright and I told him, very honestly, that I felt I'd been scarred for life. I was paid well, mind you, and maybe the scarring was worth it.
Before, I was a mediocre housekeeper. I kept the dishes washed and put up, I made sure the laundry was done. I vacuumed once a week. I dusted if I noticed dust.
Since then, I bleach every surface in my bathroom and kitchen almost daily. The rest of the family hates it, but they didn't have to witness what I did, and at least the strong, chemically, bleach-y scent of Clorox Clean-Up lets me know it's disinfected. (I'm not paid to endorse Clorox, by the way, or any retailer that sells Clorox, it's just what I use, and I purchase it in the bulk size indicated in the link at the local Sam's Club in my town.) I dust almost every single day. When I see a gnat I immediately throw out anything that could possibly be bringing them in and then stress over it for days. I had to wait for some bananas to over-ripen recently so that I could bake banana bread - I was stricken with overwhelming anxiety as I thought about the then-spotting bananas drawing gnats or fruit flies, reflecting back on the air quality in the hoard house - so thick with gnats you couldn't breathe without a cover over your nose and mouth. I made the bread that evening, and then took the trash immediately outside.
I don't know if we are born with obsessive compulsive disorder, if it lays dormant and waits for a trigger, or what - I'm definitely not a psychologist. I don't know if I can be classified as obsessive or compulsive because of my new cleaning habits after having dealt with a real, true-to-life hoard. I haven't seen a therapist although maybe I should. I sometimes dream about it, or maybe it's nightmares. I still can't come to terms with how anyone can exist in such conditions, because even though they're alive, they're not "living" in those conditions.

I don't allow comments!

Did you notice?

I hope so, because there's a reason for it. I don't want your comments. I don't care what you think! I don't write this for you, I write it for me. So your comments, approval, disapproval, and remarks are totally unnecessary!

On Morning Radio:

I drive my kids to school in the morning. We listen to the radio like most people probably do. We don't use the CD player or iPod because I don't like the crap my kids listen to and they don't like the actual music I listen to, so the radio is our happy medium. I have 4 stations preset into the radio that we go between in the morning on the way to school:  Pop, alternative rock, mixed genre, and classic rock.
Out of these four stations, I have discovered the first 3, despite not having an actual "morning talk show" which, by the way is possibly the worst idea ever, talk incessantly. Nearly non-stop. It's not rehearsed as a morning show would be, at least to some degree, nay, these first three stations continually blather about complete and utter nonsense, and then have callers they put on air to blather along with them. The last thing I want to hear is some half-awake dolt dotting the already boring conversation about [insert idiotic cultural/gender/sexual stereotype fad topic here] with "uuuuhh, ummmm, aaahhh" as they try to think of something clever or witty to say.
"Turn the channel!" you may say. "Don't listen to it if you don't like it!" I do turn the channel because I don't like it, why else would I be sitting here bitching? So we end up on the classic rock channel, which offers 100 minutes of commercial free music. Thanks. But often, the music is not upbeat. At least it's music though, right?
Here's the thing:  If you're a music station, play music. In between the 5 minutes of music you do actually play, you're barraging us with at the minimum 5 minutes of advertising of products we have to call or go online to order for our erectile dysfunction, to enhance our libido, or download to our phones to listen to you when we don't have a radio nearby, repeating telephone numbers over and over and over until I even have some of them memorized if I ever need some herbal erection medication (I don't have a penis.) Then you talk for another 10 minutes. If I wanted to hear talk, I'd listen to NPR (I do, from time to time.) Play music. You're not really funny, or witty, or interesting. Your callers are less than bright. Your commercials make people wish mental anguish upon the creators of their money sink products.

How can they wonder why radio is dying?

On My Mother:

I often find myself comparing how I do things to the way my mother does them. I'm sure, to some degree, this is perfectly normal, however, I may take it to another extreme.

See, I'm not good friends with my mother, as many mothers and daughters are. I don't depend on my mom for priceless advice, recipes, or support. My mother broke me at an early age in regards to my feelings for her - rather than someone I enjoyed spending time with, doing things with, or being around, I find myself doing everything I can to not deal with her at all.

I think it started when I was young, probably 5, and my mother started making me feel bad about myself. I came down with chicken pox. I was covered in itchy bumps and, being 5 years old, had no real way of coping with this other than to scratch and be miserable. I stayed with my great-grandparents since I couldn't go to school and my father slept during the day since he worked third shift.

I remember vividly, my mother coming home from work that day, and looking straight at me and saying "I saw the cutest little girl at McDonald's today when I went to lunch. She was so pretty. She wasn't ugly, all covered in scabs and sores like you." Yes, 30 years later I still remember that. I'll never forget it.

That's when I began to dislike my mother. 

She took great pleasure in abusing me in ways I didn't understand to be abuse then - pulling my hair out when she brushed it, hitting me hard with objects like boards, switches, fly swatters, her hand, whatever was handy. 

My mother didn't teach me how to cook, or how to sew, do laundry, iron, fold clothes, or even how to keep house. After the incident where my mother told me I was ugly I began to steal from her. Makeup, mostly, and I thought that was the answer. When she found out she beat me until I bruised and demanded I tell no one, especially my father. She hated me. I hated her in return.

I lost respect for and overcame my fear of her when I became a teenager. She thought she could still bully and hit me, scream obscenities at me, name call, and put me down. When I was 14, she swung at me, intending to slap me in the face. This time, I swung back. I connected with her chest firmly, and she was finally in her place. The physical abuse stopped. I was old enough and smart enough to fight back and now she knew. However, her tongue lashings continued well into my adult life.

My mother took some kind of strange, sickening glee in abusing my brother as well. My brother had digestive issues when he was a child, and would frequently become constipated. My mother seemed to love giving him enemas, it was her way of forcing herself on someone else again. She used to beat my brother when he was a baby, just 2 or 3 years old, for crying. For being afraid of the dark. Her favorite words were "I'll give you something to cry about" and she loved to follow through with punishing blows and hateful words. Sometimes the abuse would seem so horrible to me that I'd run in screaming for her to stop. She would hiss at me that I was next. I was older, so I'd tell her to bring it. She didn't.

Flash forwards to my adult life. I graduated high school at 17 with no honors or accolades, just a basic diploma. I worked full-time at a department store. I wanted desperately to get out of my parents' house because of my mother. I looked into renting a trailer home with a roommate, but no one was willing to fully commit. I ended up dating a man 5 years older than me, and became pregnant. At first I didn't tell anyone. Then my mother noticed. She told me that she knew I was pregnant. I could not stay in their house. She was not going to have to deal with a baby. I was no longer welcome there. I needed to marry the father.

Stupid me, for the last time, took my mother's advice. I married him and moved in with him and his parents.

My husband abused me physically and emotionally. Beatings were something I was accustomed to but of course I feared for my child. Several times I had no choice but to go back to my parents' house and spend the night, and was always met with the contempt of my mother and harsh words. 

Of course, in my married "home life", I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't know how to cook much of anything outside of boiling water and tacos from a box. I knew nothing about cleaning up after someone else, or how to work the washing machine. I was 18 years old, and this was what my mother had suggested to me. After two and a half years, two children, and more beatings and abuse than I care to remember, I finally left. I had no choice but to return to my parents. My father was fine with this. My mother continued her disgusting behavior. I was condemned to the partially finished basement of their house. At first I slept on the floor in the den, later my father helped me clean out the spare, partially finished bedroom which had served as my brother's playroom until then.

I fell into depression. 

My mother fluctuated between tolerable and unbearable, as usual. I did my best to avoid her for a long time. With my bedroom being under the kitchen I knew when she was upstairs. She seemed to relish in dropping pots and pans on the floor and stomping. When she was angry and I was in the room downstairs, she would slam things and drag the chairs across the floor, so any peace that I could have wished for was ruined. If she knew I was trying to get one of the children to sleep, she would redouble her efforts, pausing only to listen for a few seconds for the sound of a crying child.

I loathed her.

I saw my out in a man that I worked with. He had shown me attention and made it clear that he was interested in me. He was also 10 years older. I viewed him as stable and mature, but of course, my mother hadn't explained things to me that I have since explained to my daughters - men are capable of putting on a fantastic show when their penis tells them to.

He promised to take care of  me. I believed him. I moved with him to another state, and became pregnant again. I guess now is the time, 3 pregnancies later, to inform you, dear reader, that my mother never discussed birth control, sex, love, or anything else with me. Why would she? She hated me anyway, and I'm sure she enjoyed my suffering.

I probably don't have to tell you how my relationship with this older man ended, but I will tell you anyway. It ended with him dumping me off at my parents' house, seven and a half months pregnant, and never coming back until a week before I was due. He came back and stayed with me in the dank, disgusting basement of my parents' house, and I thought he was back for good. He wasn't though. He was in a relationship with another woman, in fact he was living with her up until the period when he decided to come and stay with me until I bore his son. I still wonder what he told her to this day. No, no I don't. I don't wonder, not anymore, really, because I don't give a shit anymore.

Of course, after I gave birth, he went away again, and only came back when it was convenient for him. I eventually told him to not come back. I wanted to get out of my parents' house. It seemed like I was destined to stay there forever. I went through depression, and then drugs. The drugs were a good self-medication. I mainly smoked pot. Occasionally I'd take pills, if they made themselves available. My mother continued her horrendous behavior. I wanted to get a job, but I knew that a job without someone to watch the kids would be nothing more than a job that paid for daycare. My mom refused to help, of course - she had things she wanted to do, a life she wanted to live, she was "active" and "social" (she was neither in reality) and she was done raising babies. "Besides", she countered, "you won't make enough money to get out, there's no way you can get a job that will pay for rent and lights and food". And again, I was trapped in the basement, no help, no assistance, very few friends (of course I was humiliated by my living arrangements and lack of family support). Please, dear reader, do bear in mind, throughout this whole, disturbing story, that my father is my saving grace, had he not been in the picture I'd have been homeless and on the streets. I know I haven't mentioned him as much, but this is entitled "On My Mother:" and that's who I want it to be about today.

Today I am better aware of the things I have gone through as a child and young adult. I'm still bitter to some degree, I won't deny. I feel like I lost a good portion of what should have been fun years - going to college, establishing myself, having fun being a young adult. What I ended up doing was having babies and being abused, even fighting for my life at times. Now I can't wait until my kids are grown and out of my house. I'm finally out of my parents' house, but it took 10 years after the last failed relationship to get out. I don't contact my mom very often, in fact I don't contact her at all unless I absolutely have to. I now watch my brother go through the same motions that I did, just older than I was - mixed up with bad, evil women, getting them pregnant, working a dead end job, moving in and out of my parents' house, depending on the the mood of the whore he keeps making children with, and whether or not she can access her dope supplier. He's been living in my parents' basement for about 3 weeks so far, this go around. He hates his kids, and he doesn't try to hide this. In fact, when he has his kids, you can hear him screaming in my parents' basement, "I F###ING HATE YOU, SHUT THE F### UP!" 

 If you think it has nothing to do with our mother, you're insane.