Dirty Secret (27 page)

I wish we weren't always being urged to
buy, buy, buy, consume, consume, consume
. It's no wonder the United States has six million hoarders. That said, hoarding isn't exactly the sole province of Americans: It spans the globe, as well as the centuries. In Melbourne, Australia, one in four house fire deaths since the year 2000 has been attributable to hoarding. In Russia, hoarding is called “Plyushkin Syndrome” after the landowner of the same name—whose farm rots around him as he acquires more and more possessions—in Nikolai Gogol's nineteenth-century novel
Dead Souls
. And Dante reserved the fourth circle of hell for the hoarders and the wasters. Their punishment was to push massive boulders toward each other on a bright and barren plain, the hoarders yelling, “Why do you waste?” and the wasters yelling, “Why do you hoard?”

In fact, there have been cases of hoarding in almost every country, on every continent except Antarctica.

After David and I get home from our errands, we sort through our clothes and store away the winter things we won't need in Italy. We replace the caulk around the bathtub, install the new toilet seat, paint the windowsills in the front room,
dust, vacuum, sweep, and mop. For me, behind each action is the thought of our subletter running a white-gloved hand over every surface, of her blond friend in the champagne-colored suit walking through the apartment and judging, judging, judging.

I TALK TO
my dad on the phone at least once a day. We discuss the different medicines he's taking and their side effects (nausea, dizziness, headaches), his energy or lack of it, and the amount of pain he's in. I get into the habit of asking him what his pain level is on a scale of one to ten, just like my repetitive strain injury days. I'm concerned because his chest still really hurts, usually a five or six, and his doctors keep saying his pain level is abnormal.

I talk to my mother on the phone, too. She's completely fixated on the bugs. It's all she'll talk about—with a few minutes every other call or so dedicated to her lawsuit. I'm as determined to find a cure for the bugs as she is. But her incessant discussion of the minutiae, about every single doctor's appointment—and she's going two or three times a week now, showing up without appointments and demanding to see him—makes me not want to talk about it with her at all.

Whenever my dad is thinking about taking a new medication, I google it, trying to find out as much as I can for him. One day while I'm online researching a blood thinner, on a whim I type “hoarding” into the search engine, just to see what will come up. I've done it before, but it's been a while.

And this time, something new appears among the links: an online support group called Children of Hoarders.

“You're not going to believe what I just found,” I call out to my husband, who's in the living room. I'm in the front room, where I usually work.

“What is it?”

“It's about hoarding,” I say and get up so I can explain without yelling. It's not like I thought my mother was the only hoarder in the world, or that I was the only child of one, but I would never have guessed there were enough people like me to warrant an entire support group.

“You're going to join, right?” he asks.

“I'm not sure.” The idea makes me nervous.

I sit down in front of my laptop again. To partake in the message boards, even just to read them, you must be approved by an administrator, which entails sending an email stating your relationship to the hoarder: son, daughter, son-in-law, etcetera. But if I were to send an email,
I'm the daughter of a hoarder,
there would be written proof of who my mother is, of who I am. I'm not sure I'm ready for that.

I jump up from my chair and start pacing the narrow hallway between the rooms.

“Join,” my husband calls out. “It would be good for you.”

“I don't really want my name out there like that,” I say. “It's embarrassing.”

“Then get a new email address and do it anonymously.”

“Oh. Okay.”

I sign up for another Gmail address, one that has no similarity to my name, and then I gather my courage and write the required email. I sign out only as “Jess.” And I stare at the words for a full minute before I hit send.

Once I do, I'm so filled with nervous energy that again I can't sit still. I go to the gym across the street and run on the treadmill for half an hour. By the time I've come home and showered, there's already a response from the Children of Hoarders group—welcoming me and giving me the password so I can view all the pages.

And there are many pages. It's here I learn the term “Wonderful Stranger.” And it's here I discover that many hoarders are, or were, nurses, like my mother. It turns out her habit of moving things from one pile into another—rather than actually organizing or getting rid of anything—is known as “churning.”

It never occurred to me that a hoarder could have more than one packed property, but postings on the message boards reveal that many have storage spaces in addition to their cluttered homes. Or they'll inherit a house, but rather than moving in they'll simply fill it with junk. One poor woman has two parents who are hoarders: They have a hoarded house and
three
rented apartments. As I read these stories I'm almost glad my mother has hardly any money. She can't afford another place.

I get the impression that many people here, not just me, are reluctant to reveal their true identities—there are almost no real names on the message boards. Instead, it's full of nicknames like Near_Cat or Frosty999 or LaStraka, and there's one person who calls himself No Name Whatsoever. One of the most frequent posters appears to be Starlene, whose mother has Diogenes syndrome, which is characterized by severe self-neglect and is the most extreme type of hoarding. Starlene grew up among piles of dirty adult diapers and used maxipads and animal feces that covered the floors of every room. The house had no heat or running water. Starlene used buckets for toilets and took showers at her schools' gyms. She lives in another state from her mother now but has actually received angry calls from her mother's neighbors, chastising her for “letting” her mother live that way. They've called Starlene cruel and ungrateful. Reading that infuriates me. It reminds me of the guilt trip I received from Mean Lesbian Neighbor. If they only knew.

After years and years of pleading with her mother, and after countless unsuccessful cleanup attempts—each involving verbal
abuse (and threats of physical abuse) by her mother—Starlene has finally given up. As difficult as it is, she knows that she has to detach emotionally. She has to give up the hope of saving her mother in order to save the one person she can: herself.

I admire her. And I'm tempted to respond to her post, to tell her that she's brave and to wish her good luck, but I'm too much of a coward to post anything.

When my husband comes into the room, I'm sitting slouched over the bookshelf we've turned into a desk, still reading through the message boards.

“I have to run over to the library for a book,” David says. Our dressers are both in here because there's not enough room up in the sleeping loft; he begins rifling through his, pulls out a T-shirt, and looks over at me. “Are you okay?”

I nod.

“Have you been crying?”

“No,” I say, and laugh a little. “Yes.” I wipe the corners of my eyes with my fingers. “It's sort of overwhelming.”

“Maybe you should just look at it in small doses at first,” he says, peeling off his T-shirt and putting on a new one. He immediately puts the old one in the laundry bag and then goes into the bathroom to wash his hands. It's part of our new protocol, because of the bugs—changing clothes a few times a day, placing all worn clothes directly into the laundry bag, washing our hands in the hottest water possible after taking off the clothes or putting them into the washing machine. We're so used to these ridiculous measures that we don't even mention them anymore.

My husband leaves and I close the browser window. It's comforting to have found others like me, but also unsettling; cowardliness isn't the only thing that kept me from posting anything. I'm not ready to betray my mother like that.

When I think about how alone she is in that crumbling
house, surrounded by unfinished projects and undiscarded trash, I feel so sorry for her. And while I realize that the amount of energy I spend trying to change my mother is excessive—even if my dad and Sandy hadn't been telling me so for years I'd know it—I just don't think I'll ever be able to stop.

DAVID LEAVES FOR
Italy on a Wednesday. The first thing I do is strip the mattress pad from the bed and carry it down the loft stairs to the living room. Then I go back up to the loft with the vacuum cleaner. When I'm done sucking up every bit of dust, I wrap the mattress with the most expensive allergen-and-bedbug-protective cover I could find (shockingly, I couldn't find one that specifically protected against scabies), and put a clean sheet on top of that.

I won't sleep up there again. I'll sleep on the mattress pad on the living room floor and right before I leave for Italy, I'll scrub down every surface in the apartment and carry the mattress pad out to the garbage. That way, by the time the subletter gets here six weeks after we've gone, no one will have slept in the bed for nine weeks. Supposedly these things can't live on surfaces for longer than seventy-two hours, so maybe I'm being overly cautious, but I don't care. I would never forgive myself if someone got these things from me.

I'M LIVING A
monastic and lonely life. My friends all know I'm leaving soon for six months and they want to see me to say good-bye, but I'm terrified of infecting people with the bugs and I'm too ashamed to tell anyone about them.

It's impossible to avoid everyone, though: I agree to meet an old friend and her fiancé at an outdoor bar in my neighborhood
and I spend the entire time trying not to accidentally brush up against her or let any of my skin touch the bench's fabric. By now I'm a pro at this, always wearing long sleeves I can pull down over my wrists, always making sure my shirts don't ride up in the back and expose any skin that could then touch whatever chair or couch I'm sitting on. When I flew to and from Minneapolis last time I wore a hooded sweatshirt and put the hood up so my head wouldn't touch the seat. At the outdoor bar, my friend tries to hug me as we're parting and I say, “I've got a cold.” If she wonders why I haven't been coughing or sneezing at all for the past two hours, she doesn't say anything.

After three years of working together, the students in my private writing class have become my friends and they want to have a good-bye party for me. We have it at the same bar we've been meeting in for the last three months (after the initial excuse of potential bedbugs, I continued to say we didn't know if our apartment was clear and no one pressed it). We're all squeezed into a small banquette area. I'm hardly present as I sip from my pint of Guinness, trying desperately, once again, to make sure I don't accidentally touch someone's bare skin. And while I laugh and joke with everyone, I'm actually focusing on not scratching. Because I itch all over: my scalp, my neck, my waist, my ankles. It's torture.

At the end of the night, after fending off a round of good-bye hugs, I walk home through the dark West Village streets, feeling lower than I've ever felt. I'm not sure how much longer I can take this. Between dealing with the bugs and worrying about my dad's heart and my mother's hoarding, I'm being crushed.

THERE'S A REASON
I couldn't bring myself to tell anyone about the bugs. The shame and embarrassment of the bugs became
entangled with the shame and embarrassment of my mother's hoarding, which runs deep. It runs back to before she was hoarding-hoarding, back to when I just knew there was something different about her—when I was ten years old and her house was the junk house that I didn't want to be associated with.

Though I'm not sure I knew the word “stigma” back then, I feared it, and in many ways still do. Because in spite of the many advances in understanding and treatment for mental illness, the stigma surrounding it remains. And as Susan Nathiel writes in
Daughters of Madness,
“The bond between a mother and her children is an idealized one in our culture, and that bond is assumed to be strongest and most mutual between mothers and daughters. Sons are expected to grow up and away from their mothers, but a daughter is expected to stay close, to learn from her mother [ . . . ].”

That's why telling someone that you have a family member who is mentally ill might attract curiosity, but admitting that you're the
daughter
of a mentally ill
mother
almost certainly earns a look of sympathy, then of suspicion. If my mother is mentally ill, then I must be, too.

If I forget this guilt by association, it's never long before I'm reminded. At a friend's party someone I didn't know well was describing someone I'd never met. “She's a little odd,” the woman said. “She must be, because after her parents got divorced she lived with her
dad.
You have to wonder what was wrong with her mother.”

I wish I'd said, “I lived with my dad, too. So what?” or “Even if her mother's a complete nutcase, that doesn't mean she is.” But I was caught off guard. And the longer I waited to say something, the more impossible the task became.

Sometimes, without realizing it, I even act as if I have a
mental illness to mask: Recently I realized that before I leave the apartment I'll often ask my husband, “Does this outfit make me look like a crazy person?” the same way another woman might ask if an outfit made her look fat.

The stigma attached to being the daughter of a mentally ill mother is the reason I kept my mother's hoarding a secret, the reason I kept the bugs a secret, the reason that for as long as I can remember, I've felt like I had a secret.