Stuff (28 page)

Ashley could not understand her mother's need to acquire, although she marveled at Madeline's astute (albeit unusual) way ofobserving the world. "The pieces of the physical world she picks out to focus on are incredible, things I would never notice," Ashley explained, like the colors on a milk carton or the shape of a vitamin bottle. Madeline spent an hour trying to describe to Ashley why the contrast between the blue sky and an old building was so compelling in a photo she'd taken. "She's like a savant," Ashley said. "Her brain can see things mine can't. I can see the beauty in objects, but it's like she sees the atoms of objects. She sees more than anyone I know and attaches more meaning to each piece of it."

Madeline could not understand Ashley's point of view about possessions and sometimes got angry at being "betrayed." Once, after Madeline was able to clean a small corner of the bathroom—a major accomplishment for her—Ashley failed to compliment her or act excited about it. "To me it was unexciting, 'cause I knew it wouldn't stay," Ashley said. "She got mad, then I got mad. Most of our arguments were like this." When Ashley eventually found a therapist for her mother, Madeline again felt betrayed. "She felt I was handing her over to someone else and washing my hands of her. She didn't say, 'Ashley cares so much she's gone out and found a therapist for me,' but rather that I'm making her pay someone to work on this."

Ashley thought that perhaps at some level Madeline might have had an inkling of what her problem meant for her daughter, but "she's never been able to say that to me." In Ashley's view, her mother understood little if anything about the effects of growing up in such a home.

On the weekend of her college graduation, Ashley brought her mother to my office to meet me. As we chatted, the topic turned to hoarding. Madeline was open about her problem, but it was clear that she had little hope of overcoming it. I was surprised by the exchange between mother and daughter. In all of my discussions with Ashley, I had gotten the impression that even though she didn't like her mother's hoarding, she had resigned herself to not being able to do anything about it. "I had to live with it and not fight back," she had once told me. But in my office, she challenged her mother aggressively about her hoarding. Madeline tried to explain why she had five storage units, but Ashley interrupted, insisting that the stuff in them wasn't worth the money she was paying for them. "Why don't you just get rid of it?" Ashley asked. Madeline reacted stiffly, and I could see the pattern that had developed between them. Despite knowing from her study of hoarding that such a direct challenge was unlikely to help and might even hurt, Ashley couldn't seem to get past the years of frustration and worry.

Madeline, for her part, was as baffled by her hoarding as her daughter was. She didn't know she had a problem until late in life. She spoke bitterly about the failure of numerous mental health professionals she had seen to diagnose her problem and treat it effectively. Her recent therapy had left her with the realization that she'd been living with this problem since she was nine years old. Madeline thought that her own mother had a lot to do with it.

When Madeline was nine, her mother wanted her to clean the stuff off her desk. To Madeline, the small pile of odds and ends—school papers and Brownie clothes—hardly amounted to a problem. But a few days later, she came home from school to find all of the stuff from her desk in the trash can. She felt violated and reacted angrily, but the "invasions," as she called them, continued. Every day she dug through the trash to retrieve her stuff, and the yelling and screaming began. "I felt like I had no control," Madeline told me.

It was at about this time that her rituals started as well. She began with prayers. At bedtime, her fears were at their worst—spiders, fire, darkness, the possibility of not waking up. So Madeline prayed. When she finished one prayer, she prayed once more, and once more after that. "Soon I was doing the entire evening service," she said. When she became a teenager, it wasn't prayer that occupied her, but tapping and touching. She felt compelled to touch the marble-topped table beneath the mirror in the hallway. The number of taps was based on the date. She couldn't say exactly why she felt compelled, just that she had to do it to make sure she would be alive the next day. Her rituals helped her feel calmer, in control. Although her rituals were not as bad when I met her, she still had to touch certain things a prescribed number of times based on the date.

For a long time, she kept her rituals secret, not realizing that other people also suffered from such compulsions. After her husband left her, her therapist suggested that she read a book about Prozac, which made reference to touching and counting rituals.
Are you kidding me?
she thought.
You mean other people do that?
When she saw Jack Nicholson compulsively tapping his foot on the floor in the movie
As Good as It Gets,
she reddened with embarrassment in the theater. Then she got annoyed:
He stole my thing!

Madeline got her first period at age twelve, but her easily embarrassed mother said nothing to her about how to manage it. Madeline hid her used sanitary pads in a clothespin bag. She didn't know what else to do with them and feared that her brothers would see them if she put them in the garbage. More than that, however, her menstrual flow felt like a part of her, and getting rid of it made her uncomfortable. When her mother discovered the bag, she was horrified and forced Madeline to throw it away. Despite the drama, Madeline continued to save used pads secretly until the grossness outweighed the discomfort of losing these parts of herself. We have observed a number of instances in which people hoard used tampons, nail clippings, even urine and feces—critical parts of themselves, from their point of view.

During her junior year in college, Madeline started piling clothes, papers, books, and memorabilia such as playbills in a pile in the middle of her dorm room. She always meant to organize the stuff and put it away, but she didn't. Finally, the dome-shaped pile began to remind Madeline of an ancient burial mound, with an aesthetic mixture of textures and colors. Both Madeline and her roommate came to see it as an odd piece of art—a "stuff structure." The shape and colors pleased her, and the things sticking out seemed to contain the memories of the events they represented. Taking the pile apart was unthinkable. Even changing it was too hard to contemplate.

After college, when Madeline got her own apartment, she created another "stuff structure" from the dirty dishes in her sink. The mound occupied her kitchen for two years, and Madeline had to get by with only a single spoon, fork, knife, bowl, and cup. Stuff structures seemed to appear naturally in whatever space Madeline occupied. No planning went into them. They grew on their own until she noticed their aesthetic quality. Then they could not be broken.

Initially, her stuff structures posed few difficulties. Her first real problem began when she moved into a small studio apartment in New York City. Unread newspapers piled up, overtaking her small space. Depressed over the suicide of a close friend, Madeline just couldn't seem to dig out. She knew that those papers contained important information that could help her acting career, but she had neither the time nor the energy to tackle the piles. When she finally moved to a bigger apartment, her parents solved the problem by throwing the papers out despite Madeline's pleas. Once again she felt victimized by her mother and angered by her loss of control over things she valued.

At her new apartment, Madeline left everything packed in boxes, living as she had before, using only a few of her possessions. Soon pathways appeared, and, as with her stuff sculptures, once she created a pathway, it seemed impossible to change it. When she tried to unpack, she couldn't decide what to do first. She would start on a box, become distracted by a different box, and end up moving from box to box without accomplishing anything.

When she got married, she had more incentive to control her hoarding. "I can keep things clear for other people," she told me, "just not for myself." She and her husband had minor arguments over her newspapers, but she insisted that their apartment was clean enough for comfortable living and even having parties. This changed in the years that followed as life began to overwhelm her.

According to Madeline, she and her husband had few problems with clutter during the first four years of Ashley's life. Madeline had a career as an actress, and although she suffered from various physical ailments, she was happy. As Ashley got older and Madeline's acting career ended, she felt isolated and depressed. "She's not a networker," Ashley told me of her mother. The small piles of unread newspapers began to grow and, according to Madeline, merge with Ashley's toys, artwork, and clothes. Piles of unopened mail got stuffed into plastic bags and thrown in the back of the closet. When Ashley was five, the family moved to a new apartment, where most of their things remained in boxes so that Madeline could paint the walls. Her unreasonably high standards delayed the process, and they lived amid the boxes for years. She described the one wall she finished painting with some pride: "This was my perfect wall!" Caught by the perfectionism afflicting so many hoarders, she never painted the rest of the apartment.

At the time, Madeline didn't worry much about how her behavior might affect Ashley. She said that until Ashley was four or five years old, she had friends over to play at the apartment. One of them, Madeline claimed, lived in the same kind of cluttered apartment. The rest, she rationalized, had much more space in their apartments, so naturally they lived in less clutter. But by age six, Ashley no longer wanted to have friends over. Madeline felt relieved.

Madeline knew that the apartment was in bad shape while Ashley was in high school, but she couldn't control it. Her perfectionism meant that any project she began had to be flawlessly done. She couldn't just throw away the old newspapers; she had to examine them for important information. It would take years to go through all of them, so she avoided the task and went through none of them. When she got up the motivation to clean, she couldn't stay focused long enough to make any headway. Life events and illness always seemed to intervene. Whenever she was able to clear an area, the open space made her feel empty inside, and she refilled it quickly.

Only in the past few years had Madeline recognized what Ashley endured growing up, "but by that time," she said, "Ashley was in college, a little late for me to change the past." Recently, Madeline's own mother developed Alzheimer's. Madeline moved in with her mother to care for her. Ashley told me that her grandmother had thrown out Madeline's driver's license. Ashley thought it ironic that Madeline was once again going through the trash, making sure her mother wasn't discarding anything of value. She wondered whether, in addition to her license, Madeline was still retrieving plastic trays and old newspapers.

Ashley's independence didn't come until she left for college. Only then was she able to separate her interests from her mother's and let her mother struggle with hoarding (and life) on her own. Still, a legacy remained. Years of learning how to avoid her mother's tantrums had left her with an aversion to conflict. She would gladly suffer almost any consequences in order to avoid conflict. Ashley recently found herself in a park admiring a tree. She noticed the contrasting hues and textures of the trunk and leaves, and she thought,
I am like my mother. She's given me an appreciation of the physical world that I would not have had without her, but without the bad parts.

The impact of growing up in a hoarded home can be substantial, so not surprisingly, Internet groups have been formed to provide information, comfort, and support. Overcoming Hoarding Together (O-H-T) was created by the leaders of a hoarding self-help group to provide a place for hoarders and family members to interact with one another in a supportive and cooperative way. Children of Hoarders (COH) was started by adult children of hoarders who recognized a need to share their experiences of growing up in a hoarded home. The COH Web site has expanded to provide a comprehensive overview of hoarding, including synopses of current research and information about hoarding. In a COH survey, more than 80 percent of the group's approximately fourteen hundred members reported that when they were growing up, they thought their family was the only one that lived amid extreme clutter. The founders of COH hope to ease members' isolation by providing a forum for people to share their stories and hardships.

As with any endeavor in which people expose the secrets of their youth, emotions are sometimes raw and unfiltered. This has explosive potential, especially since some children of hoarders struggle with the same problem themselves. On one online discussion board, a member vented her anger about how her mother, and by extension all hoarders, put her own interests ahead of those of her children. Another member, a mother with a hoarding problem, took offense. The conflict erupted into a nasty dispute. Such conflict notwithstanding, it seems that the majority of posts on such sites are expressions of gratitude and relief at finding others who not only understand their experiences but also share them.

We recently conducted a study of relatives of hoarders that revealed the harmful consequences of growing up in a hoarded home. We found that the effects varied depending on the age of the child when the hoarding began. Children who lived in a hoarded home before the age of ten were more embarrassed and less happy, had fewer friends over, and had more strained relations with their parents growing up than did those whose parents' hoarding began later. As adults, they were more likely to experience social anxiety and stress and continued to have more strained relationships with their parents. Children who spent their early years in a cluttered home held more hostile and rejecting views of their parents than did children whose parents' hoarding was not apparent at that time—but even the latter group expressed a very high level of hostility toward their parents, higher even than that expressed by the relatives of people with other forms of serious mental illness. It is clear that the negative effects of hoarding stay with many of these children for a lifetime.