The House

I struggled with finding the right words to tell this story. There are some experiences in life that need to be told properly if ever told at all. This is one of those stories.

It seems fitting to start by describing a typical day in my current life. I wake up early to the orange rays of the sun flooding through my bedroom window, it’s one of those fleeting days of summer where the sun rises before I do. My bedroom window faces east so I get the treat of waking to a beautiful sunrise accompanied by the soft chirping of birds through the open window, the wind rustling through the leaves of the trees in my yard below. I roll onto my side to turn off the alarm, then lay still on my back for a few moments, arms stretched wide across the king-sized bed, sinking into the comfort of the memory foam mattress beneath me and savoring the feeling of the pillowy blankets on my skin. I love my room, the way the light bounces off the dark grey walls casting a glow across the hand selected paintings on the wall, how the breeze from the fan tickles the fringe on the cable knit throw draped over the end of the bed. After a few minutes I swing my feet over the edge of the bed and saunter into the master bath which I remodeled a few years back. It is tiled in varying shades of grey stone and has a rustic ocean appeal. I splash some water on my face and brush my teeth at the black double vanity sink. I grab a pair of lounge pants from my walk-in closet and head downstairs. The moment my bedroom door opens I am beckoned by the earthy smell of coffee that has just finished brewing. As I head down the curved stairway, I admire a painting of a couple standing behind a red umbrella beneath the Eiffel Tower, everything in the painting is black and white except for that umbrella. I love artwork, I fill my home with paintings; nothing pricey, just a lot of pictures that spark joy for me. I have had people tell me that I have too much art on my walls, my response to that is to say, “I do not have enough art on my walls, I can still see wall.” 

I let the dogs outside, grab my laptop from my office and pour a cup of coffee in my favorite mug; most of my mugs are my favorite mug. I smile as I open every blind in the living area of my home, I catch glimpses of the dogs in the yard, playing happily in the morning sun. I sit down on the couch with my laptop, as it boots up I take in all the special remodel projects that my 25-year-old son and I have done ourselves on the home, a labor of love. While I read through my emails and open my files for the day, I listen to the sound of passersby out for a morning stroll through the tree-lined neighborhood streets. My two matching white cats sit in the window leisurely eying a bug flitting around the leaves on the other side. I eventually meander into my office with its glass French doors and bright white wainscoting, I plug my laptop into my dual monitors at my desk to get ready for the more focused work of the day.

In the evening after work, I run my six-year-old son around to his various sports practices. After we’ve finally arrived back home and eaten dinner, I head back into the kitchen to prepare his lunch for the next day. When I first moved into this house my older son and I painted the kitchen cabinetry white, with the island and a row of accent cabinets painted olive green. I painstakingly antiqued the cabinet facing to give the kitchen a feeling of depth and warmth. It is a large kitchen, and many hours of work went into the process. If you look closely, you can tell the paint is a DIY job, but it looks great, and I am in love with it. It feels good to work in here. As I clean up, I watch my son playing with the puppy in the family room. He has the TV on and is half watching cartoons while he builds a zombie fortress, grunting “brains…brains…” and lurching after the dog. I revel in his squeals of delight as the pup jumps out of the way and he chases after her through the big circle that connects the downstairs rooms. 

After a while I usher my little one upstairs to his bathroom and dump his big bag of Pokémon toys into the tub as I turn the water on. He climbs in and I hand him a purple monster bath bomb with googly eyes that come off and float around the tub the second they are engulfed in water. He plays epic Pokémon battle until the bath water has turned cold, we wash his hair and dry him off with a fluffy grey towel. “I’m a superhero and this is my superhero cape, ” he tells me with a grin. It’s time to brush his teeth and read a story before bed. I tuck him into his old-time airplane themed bed, taking note of how adorable and tiny he looks in his red fire engine pajamas. I turn on his starry sky night light as he asks Alexa to play his favorite playlist on Spotify. I kiss his forehead and tell him “I love you more” as I close his bedroom door. I pause for a moment outside his door, my heart is full of warmth and happiness from this beautiful life we live. I head back down the hall thinking how much I love my little family and the wonderful home we live in.

But not every house is a home. Some houses are monstrous villains that swallow childhoods whole and leave them to rot in their belly along with the rest of the chyme. This is the story of a house like that, a house that wasn’t a home.

I wish that I could start at the beginning, but I do not remember a beginning to the house so instead I will give you the tour. 

My mother and I lived in my dad’s house off and on from the time I was born to when he fell ill shortly after my 15^th birthday. If I had to identify a place as my childhood home, my father’s house would be it. I will take you back to a time when I was living there:

The house sits on a third of an acre, a corner lot near Silver Lake in Everett. The yard is overgrown with blackberry bushes and other bramble that partially covers the multiple rusty old cars abandoned there. As we walk through the overgrowth around to the side of the house, we make our way past the old cars and other junk that clutters the property. There are several cats, some feral some not, many missing tails or legs or pieces of ear, roaming around our feet and poking their heads out of broken car windows. We make our way back to a small wooden enclosure hidden from the street. We are met by the eerie sound of desperate whispers coming from the 3 large dogs who cannot contain their excitement at having visitors approaching, their raspy attempts at barking muted by the lack of intact vocal cords. The dogs have been debarked in an attempt to hide their cries for rescue. The enclosure is about 8×8 ft square with a wooden floor and 6 ft tall wooden rails forming the walls. The walls have been extended up several feet farther using wire fencing to prevent the dogs from escaping. An opening at the back of the enclosure leads to a doghouse barely big enough for the 3 large dogs that are housed there. The dogs are mangy, their nails are overgrown and curling around their toes in wide twisting arcs, they are covered with feces. The feces that is piled up on the wooden floor of the enclosure is mixed with urine and some recent rainwater and forms a thick, defecation puddle half a foot deep. The dogs slide around on it, sprawling themselves across the slick floor in their desperation. The smell is overpowering. People rarely enter the enclosure and the dogs never come out. Their names are Socks, Misty, and Dynasty. We have had them for many years.

Further back on the property, behind the house, sits a small paddock with a miniature horse inside. The paddock is approximately 10×15 ft, it is made up of 4×4 posts connected with two rows of 2×4 rails. There is no shelter, the ground is a mix of mud and horse dung over a foot deep. We gave up mucking it out years ago. We used to occasionally fill up large plastic bins with manure but we never emptied them anywhere so they would just sit teeming with maggots, and we eventually stopped trying. The horse is named Spooky because she is afraid of people. Spooky’s mane and tail are horribly matted, and her coat is caked with manure. Her hooves are so overgrown they are misshapen, cracked and curling up at the edges. She looks back at us with sad eyes from the corner of the pen where she has spent years standing knee deep in her own waste.

 Back around front, to the right of the house are several fruit trees. They are almost completely covered in blackberry bushes now, but I sometimes force a little pathway in and pretend that I am a fairy living in an enchanted orchard. We approach the house which is partially covered in peeling blue paint. The roof is sagging and caved in in spots. Several yards from the front stands a large fir tree, under it sits a small dilapidated wooden porch with a few broken stairs leading up to the front door. If we open it, we have to go inside… Come along then.

As I reach for the knob which hangs loose in its hole and rattle it around attempting to turn it, you notice the curtain hung on the inside of the small window cut into the door, once white floral but now stained a watercolor mix of patchy yellows and browns. Finally getting the knob to catch I swing the door open, but it is less of a swing and more of a push that is stopped after just a few inches. The door has caught on debris from the floor. Even with the door open only inches you can see a wall of what you will soon figure out is a collection of boxes, furniture, papers, food, garbage, animals, knick-knacks, feces, and anything else you can think of rising up from floor to ceiling. I push the door harder, freeing it from the debris, it opens wider revealing a narrow path through the dark room. The makeshift walls of haphazard waste continue along both sides of the path and you can see now that the entire room is filled, leaving no space whatsoever to do anything but make our way through the room single file along the little path. We make our way through the sea of rubbish looming up around us, solid in a sense, but made of so many pieces, sagging, poking out: old cans, a 19^th century school desk broken and on its side toward the top of the heap, moldy blankets, coats, and baby dolls stuffed in the cracks between the bigger items. The whole thing threatens to come toppling down on us if we were to grab the wrong place to try to stabilize ourselves. The neon glow of glinting eyes is caught in its midst, peering out at us from deep within the hoard. The occasional hissing of cats can be heard, you are a newcomer here and you are not welcome. You trip as you step into the house, you hadn’t noticed that the ground requires a large step up after the clearing that is left to open the door. The pathway is covered in layers upon layers of newspaper laid flat, one piece atop another. The various animals that roam the house, mostly cats and a small dog, defecate here (as well as other places) and we occasionally cover the mess with another newspaper thrown down on top of it. There are many, many years of newspaper that have been laid down here. The ground gives a little as we walk, but it has mostly become a solid mass much like papier mache, with the binding being urine and feces. I have been known to occasionally add to the binding myself when I don’t feel like making my way into the bathroom. The path is a muted brown color, a yellow brick road of sorts, leading us into the house.

I can only imagine that you were hit hard by the stench when I opened the door. I can’t smell it as I have grown accustomed, but I know that it is a mix of mildew, dust, defecation, decay, and death. Animals die here in this mess; we can very rarely find them or access their bodies for removal. Sometimes one dies just out of reach, and we have the treat of watching it decompose, belly swelling and hair sinking into flesh, followed by swarms of maggots teaming amongst the bones and finally a dusty powder mixed with dried leather collapsed around the remains. The dead stay like this indefinitely when they are in this house, becoming just another brick in these towering walls. I can sometimes smell the house myself, in the hot months of summer when the insides begin to bake, but it is not summer now and for that we are lucky. It is late fall, and in the cooler months the flea population is kept to a minimum. If you look down at your body now, you will only see 10-15 fleas attached to your clothes and skin. If it were spring or summer, we would have been greeted by hundreds upon hundreds of fleas when we opened the door, our legs and arms would be coated in them like a shiny black suit of armor, they would be hopping all over our faces and necks leaving little red circular bite marks on our skin. But it is not spring or summer, it is late fall, and for that we are lucky. There are no lights in this room, but it is daytime, so although not much light gets in through the mess, we can still make our way. If we could see the walls, you would see that they are covered in a strange black and white jungle animal wallpaper, but we cannot see the walls. This is the living room. Welcome to my home.

At the end of the living room, off to the right is an opening that leads to the rest of the house. We walk through that opening and find ourselves standing in the dining room, or at least on the path that passes past the dining room. The dining room itself is a mound of garbage much like that of the living room, only not as tall. The room itself is not accessible as the path does not go into it, but the junk piled up here only comes to about eye level in most places allowing us to see the opposite wall as well as into the kitchen which has what was once a pass-through wall leading to the dining room. The walls in this room are covered in a red, white and blue barber shop inspired wallpaper that is now flecked with millions of tiny black dots, fly poop. We turn to our left to head toward the kitchen coming around the corner to an old wooden highchair with a little bear decal on the back rest. It is pushed up against the wall across from the dining area, the first in a row of random items and rodent cages that line this wall and form the left side of the path past the dining room. The highchair is small and very worn, its surface covered in a thick, black, sticky film that has collected over the years. The seat of the chair is not big enough for more than a small child to sit, but I am a very slight girl, even at age 14 and it is the only accessible chair in the house, so I spend most of my time sitting here. I like this little chair; it allows me a dedicated space to exist in the house and I find the little bear decal comforting. As I sit in it facing the dining room, there is a glass tank with a ferret named Sheba (Queen of Sheba, named after one of my favorite books) to my right on the other side of the path from the chair as you enter the room. The tank sits atop various other clutter as all things do in the house, and because of this it stands around 6 feet high. To my left are some wire rodent cages containing a few rats that have lost most of their hair, the cages are filled halfway to the top with filth as they are never cleaned. The one closest to me is a black and white female who tries to clean her own cage by chiseling off sections of the filth with her teeth and attempting to push them through the bars. I like watching her and I sometimes help her by pulling on the pieces that she is trying to push out; she bit me good once though, when I was trying to help, so I am more careful about it now. Across the path from the highchair is a little cabinet of sorts, it’s small and made of a wood similar to that of the chair. It was probably once intended to be a bedside cabinet or a small television stand and, like the chair, it is the only functioning cabinet in the home. Its two tiny doors swing out away from each other and there is just enough room to open them while sitting in the chair. This chair is mine as I am the only one who fits, and this cabinet is also for me. I keep a few tiny things that I hold precious inside, safe from the rest of the house. There is nothing of value in here: a small teal plastic container from the dollar store shaped like a garbage can in which I keep small items like dime store rings and Garbage Pail Kids cards. There is a My Little Pony and a Troll doll. I have a couple of Christmas tree ornaments that are shaped like horses and some hair bows that I like to imagine wearing while doing normal little girl things. I usually keep a snack in here as well, one of my favorites is a box of Better Cheddar crackers. There is also a third ornament in here that is shaped like a small thin twisting glass icicle with a droplet at the bottom, when rotated it gives the illusion that the drop at the bottom is dripping down. I often sit here, turning this icicle in my hands for hours, dreaming of magical far-away places.

The path past the dining room ends in what we call the kitchen, although there’s nothing much kitcheny about it. It is galley style, not that it matters because like every other room in the house there is just a pathway going through it anyway. There is trash piled up on all the counters covering the appliances. Old rotting food boxes and debris are piled among sticky pots and pans, grease-covered stuffed animals and boxes filled with various old things are also among the items reaching up toward the ceiling. I think there is a sink on a counter along the back wall and a stove on the counter across from it, but neither one has worked for years, and both are hidden from view now. You can still see an old refrigerator at the far end of the back wall, but it is blocked from opening and as you probably have guessed, hasn’t worked for many years. There are old brown strips of fly paper hanging from the ceiling in this room and the dining room, they are covered with flies and haven’t been changed out in ages. The flies in the house are so abundant that every single item is covered with a speckling of their droppings, tiny perfectly round black dots. This house is a good reminder that everything poops. The papier mache flooring is even thicker in this room and I’m not quite sure why, my guess is that many moons ago when the kitchen was still functional, my parents put down newspaper in here to cover up spills as well as feces. The walls in this room are covered in a dark wood paneling making the already claustrophobic space feel even darker and more closed in. 

There is another door that you can see which leads to a back indoor/outdoor room of sorts, it was probably once a kind of mud room. Although the door is stuck partially open the opening is completely blocked by junk and the entire room is filled floor to ceiling with it, we never go in there. I do not remember that room ever being accessible. I did once make a hole large enough for my small frame to squeeze through so I could get back and check it out. My parents weren’t home at the time and once back there I found myself stuck amongst a very rickety pile of junk within a tiny cavern I had carved out. It was even more treacherous back there because moisture from outside freely flowed in and had rotted everything that was piled up and filling the room so much that something broke underneath me and I got trapped within the broken rotting debris for a little while. I managed to get out but not without cutting my leg, it scared me enough that I filled in the gap I had made and never attempted that exploration again. There was nothing back there worth my trouble anyway.

This concludes the tour of the main living space of the home. I’d offer you a seat and a snack but unless you have a very small, highchair-shaped rear end or a hankering for a Better Cheddar, you’re out of luck… We can move on to the bedrooms now.

The door to the larger of the two bedrooms is directly across from the kitchen, to the left after you pass the dining room. Just outside the bedroom door is an old rotary dial telephone that used to work. When it was functional, I loved to stand and talk on it. It gave me something to do here, a connection to the outside world. I didn’t have many people to call but at least I knew it was there if something really scary were to happen. But like everything else in the house, it eventually stopped functioning. The house was old enough that the phone cord was hard-wired directly into the bedroom wall on the other side of the door. Over time the door rubbed the protective coating off the wire and the phone stopped working, taking any connection to the outside world with it when it died. Yet it still sits here on its little pile of junk. Sometimes I pick up the receiver and wiggle the cord hoping to hear life crackle back into the handset, but it never does. The house does not create life, it only takes it away.

Like the front door, the bedroom door only opens part way before hitting debris and stopping, however the gap that allows passage to this room is even smaller. I can pass through fairly easily and my mom can make it in, but my father can only stick his head in the door which he does from time to time to tell us a joke or see what we’re doing. This is my mother and my room, but we don’t sleep here anymore. After squeezing through the door, we find ourselves standing on another pile of Lord knows what on the floor, but this pile is even more squishy and consists largely of dirty textiles. This room is actually one of the clearer spaces as the forgotten items in here only reach the ceiling around the perimeter. Or at least that was the case when we were using the room. There is a large wooden bunk bed against the far wall. It is made of a light-colored wood and has a twin bed on top with a queen underneath. The lower bed is completely covered in junk that touches the bottom of the bunk above at the back but then trickles down to just a foot or so above the mattress near the edge and continues from there down onto the floor blocking the door.  The end of the upper bunk where your feet should go is piled to the ceiling with items that cascade down along the side walls of the room. But there is room to curl up on the top end and I can usually get my lower half partially shoved under the things at the bottom in order to lay mostly straight. This bed is covered in a mint green velvety blanket that hasn’t been washed in probably 10 years since it was first brought home. It has been saturated again and again by my own urine as I still wet the bed almost nightly. It is also coated with fly, flea, rat and other various rodent and bug poop and the parts that aren’t covered have become more yellow green than mint and the velvety softness has either rubbed off completely or been replaced by hardened dried goop of some form or another in most places. But this is one of the largest places to be in the house and I like it here. When I was younger, I would often tell my mother about my dreams to have a big room decorated in light pink and mint green as we would lay curled up here escaping to some mystical realm or another as she read to me. I like it when my mother reads to me, it melts away the closed-in walls, the smells, the sounds, and the disaster. I am carried away to someplace better, a magical world where I belong and am less afraid.  

The walls of this room are lined with cages, birds mostly. There are parakeets, finches and lovebirds, there is even a Blue-Fronted Amazon parrot. We never clean their cages, and their waste is piled high and spilling over onto everything within a few feet of the walls. Their feathers are worn and missing in places. They make a terrible racket at all hours. The parrot, whose name is Hobo, mimics the sounds of the other birds as well as cats, dogs and my father’s laugh. He can say “Hobo good bird” and “Polly want a cracker”. He is kept in far too small of a cage, he bites if you go near him, and he imitates my sobs when I cry. I tell everyone at school that I have a talking parrot, but truth be told, I kind of hate this bird. 

There is a TV in this room, up high atop a pile next to Hobo’s cage, an old tube TV about 20 inches or so that while it still worked, I loved to watch. It could pull in a few channels, and I was able to watch Saturday morning cartoons on it almost like a normal kid…almost. Hobo gets all worked up when the TV is on and squawks frantically trying to mimic the sounds.

The smaller bedroom is located at the other end of the house next to the bathroom. The bathroom is small and contains a tub, a toilet, and a pedestal sink. The floor in here is covered with the same newspaper flooring as the rest of the house, but in here it is even more rotten, probably due to plumbing issues, and is usually fairly slick and goopy. This room is unique in the fact that it has virtually no junk piled up in it save some random trash along the walls. It is a very small room which is probably part of the reason but aside from that I am not sure why we don’t pile things up in here. The sink does not have running water anymore though I do remember a time when it did. The bathtub has running water but does not drain. The toilet drains but does not have running water. It works out okay though because we keep a large bucket in here and scoop buckets of leftover tub water into the toilet in order to flush. The tub always has old water in it. The only way to drain it is to scoop buckets into the toilet. As I have told you before, I don’t bathe. My mother does occasionally, she usually empties a portion of the dirty water prior to adding new hot water for her bath. The tub is also where she washes clothes, when she does that, which is not often. She uses a mix of old tub water and new hot water and rubs the clothing with a bar of soap prior to rinsing them in the filthy water then draping them over the trash around the house to dry. It is not a very clean way of cleaning our clothing. The water that sits in the tub is a deep grey brown and has a thick foamy film at the top. We often find big black dead rats floating in it, sometimes multiple at a time. “Presents from the cats” my mother tells me, but the truth is that the tub is easy to fall in and probably hard to climb out of so they may just jump in and swim around trapped in there until they get tired and drown. I’m not entirely sure. 

The door to the little bedroom also does not open fully. You have to squeeze through it and then take a ginormous step up onto the papier mache floor. A queen-sized bed takes up most of the room and the space left around the foot and side of the bed is piled with old newspaper and trash that comes up level with the top of the mattress. The small space between the bed and the far wall, maybe a foot wide is actually completely clear. There is a baseboard heater there and we still use it, it is the only working heat source in the house. This space is where my father will eventually become stuck, wedged between the wall and the bed, prior to his cancer diagnosis, it is the heater that will cause the festering burn on his left hip. There isn’t much else in this room other than the bed and the trash, the trash piles up halfway to the ceiling or more in the corner by the head of the bed opposite the heater wall. The room is otherwise remarkably clear from the bed up. There are no sheets or formal bedding on the bed and no pillows. The mattress is very old and worn, it is stained dark brown and has water rings where I soil it. There are rips in the cover of the mattress and loose springs protrude through some of them. Sometimes we all 3 sleep in this bed, even though my parents have been divorced since I was 3 and I am now a teenager. A small picture portraying the sacred heart of Jesus hangs on the peeling wood-paneled wall; sometimes at night I can feel him staring in judgment and sorrow at us while I lie awake in the bed listening to my father’s snores.

This is my home…my cage. I exist here amongst the garbage. I walk along the little trail that leads through the rooms. I sit in my tiny spot on the highchair or curled up in the small space left at the head of the bunk bed in the room I share with my mother. It is sweltering in the summer and freezing in the winter. There are very few light sources and nothing whatsoever to do. I sit here alone much of the time, and stare at the piles towering up around me. I see things in the debris that aren’t there. I find corners of windows to count, over and over again until I drive myself mad. I tap my teeth together gently as I go around the window with my gaze, 1 tap, 2 tap, 3 tap, 4 tap, start again, 1 tap, 2 tap… I bite my nails and worry my hair to pass the hours. I snack on bologna that has been sitting out for 5 days and has been gotten to by the bugs. I get violently sick to my stomach 5 or 6 times a year and I think this is normal. I don’t leave my spot for days on end sometimes. I am afraid much of the time. I am afraid of monsters and murderers lurking in the depths of the junk piles. I am afraid when someone comes to the door to sell us something, or the electric guy tries to fight his way through the blackberry tangles outside to read the meter. I sit stiller than still and hold my breath until the danger passes. I am afraid that someone will know I’m here and they will take me away. I am terrified they will hear me breathing. I try not to exist when anyone is near the house for fear of what will happen if they know. I live in fear of the next time someone comes near the house. This is an awful and lonely place, but I don’t know that. This is my home, and these are my parents. I am so very afraid that I will be taken from them. I am so very afraid.

Afterthoughts:

My mother and I spent the better part of a year sleeping in a small dome tent in the yard because it was more comfortable and roomier than the house. While living out there we would wake up in the morning to a tent filled with earwigs, they would be coating the inside and crawling across our faces. We lived in the tent until an angry neighbor (I’m guessing) scared us to death one night by banging and scratching at the sides of our tent for several minutes causing us to retreat into the house.

We spent over a year living in the back of my mother’s brown Ford Escort in the front yard. We would curl up in blankets in the back and she would read to me by flashlight until we fell asleep. In the morning we would step outside to pee and then crawl into the front seats and head to work and school.

We spent another year or so living in an old RV that was parked in the front yard along the street. It was also piled with trash inside but one entire fold-down bed was free and we would sit there and read or watch VHS movies on a little TV my father bought for us. The stove worked too in there and I was able to heat up Noodle Roni or instant mashed potatoes for dinner; I once ate almost an entire bowl of noodles that I thought were seasoned with dried herbs before I realized the herbs were actually little dead bugs. There was a tiny room with a toilet next to the bed, the room was packed with junk but we would open the little door and stick our rear ends through to use the toilet. No one emptied the waste, so it was filled up and overflowing. We would hover over the large mountain of poop that filled the toilet and was piled up over a foot above the rim, we would try to aim our poop in such a way that it stuck to the pile and didn’t slide all the way down and onto the floor. It didn’t always work. In summer, the tiny room would heat up to over 100 degrees and the smell made me gag every time I walked in the RV and literally burned my nostrils when I opened the tiny door to use the restroom. Occasionally when I was really fed up with it, I would put a plastic grocery bag on each hand and start digging into the pile through dry heaves, scooping the old rotting poop and urine stew into more grocery bags to be carried, dripping, through the RV and outside.

There was no trash service at the house and frankly we didn’t even have garbage cans or dispose of trash at all. On occasion my mother would attempt to pull up a few trash bags full of the newspaper flooring that lined the trail through the house which made no impact whatsoever. We would then put the trash bags in her car and drive to some fancy neighborhood on trash night to dump our trash in their bins after dark. Several times we got run off by an angry homeowner. We would take off down the street with the homeowner yelling after us “What is wrong with you people?! Don’t you know that someone pays for this service?!” When this happened, I wished I could disappear, I would cry but I didn’t let my mother see.

My parents were level 5 hoarders. Hoarding in itself is a mental disorder and for many people, my parents included, it is accompanied by other mental illness.  Most people who suffer from hoarding disorder never seek treatment. This was the case with my parents as well. Neither my mother nor father were ever diagnosed or treated for their mental illness. Although they both knew that society did not accept people living the way we did, they did not believe that there was anything wrong with the situation. I grew up with the understanding that we were just different and misunderstood. I was taught that the rest of the world was bad and out to get us. I was trained to lie and to hide. As I grew older and began to want to conform to a more normal way of life, my mother became angry and resentful toward me. She believed that the “others” had gotten to me and that I was becoming one of them. In her mind I had turned on my values and had let her down. I was eventually left completely alone. I once had a phone conversation with my mother about the house I was raised in. I am not sure what I hoped to gain by talking with her about it, maybe I wanted her to see what she had done and say she was sorry. Instead, she told me that she did not know what I wanted her to say. She told me that I was saying now that I didn’t want the house to be that way but that every time she had tried to clean it up I would pester her and ask her to play with me. She said that I blocked her from changing the situation. She said I must have wanted it that way.

Untreated mental illness is a funny thing sometimes. Not funny weird or funny haha, just funny sad, funny scared and funny alone. No mother, I didn’t want my childhood to be that way. Like any other child, I just wanted to be safe and loved.