wherein I can’t deal with reality television (long personal ish; feel free to skip)

So whenever Nic and I are bored/there’s no football on/feel lazy about cleaning, we watch an episode or two of Hoarders. I only saw my first episode of the show last month when we were moving, and I figured at some point I was going to see something that hit a nerve badly enough to turn it off. I’m not sure why I do this to myself, but mission accomplished.

Y’see, my mom was a hoarder. Not as stereotypically bad as most of the people on the show - our house was probably somewhere between severe second-degree/mild third-degree squalor.* Bad enough that I was never allowed to have friends over, bad enough that broken appliances and fucked-up furniture stayed permanently broken, bad enough that my mom threatened to call CPS and have us put in foster care whenever my brother and I acted fools, and it wasn’t an idle threat.

This particular episode (the “Judy” segment) was bothersome because I swear to god, that woman looks and sounds exactly like my mom did toward the end of her life. Mama lost 90% of her hair in chemotherapy, and it grew back baby-fine and patchy just like that, and while I’ve forgotten exactly what her voice sounded like, that pleading, infantile tone edged with desperation will stay with me to my deathbed. I was always the parent in our house, even when I was barely more than a baby myself.

The physical and aural resemblance shook me a little bit, of course, but I didn’t make it past the introduction of the segment, when Judy describes her resentment of her adult daughter, who ran away from home as a teenager: “She left the house in a shambles, too! She should be helping me!” Ok, I’m done. CLICK. The state of our house was always someone else’s fault, namely my brother and I. Neither of us were particularly neat, but how were we supposed to learn? Cleanliness is a fucking learned behavior, like riding a bike or brushing your teeth, and if it’s not taught or enforced, good luck instilling it in your children.

Whenever she was mad or fed up about the mess, which was pretty much all the time, Mama would banish me to the kitchen and forbid me to come out until the whole thing was cleaned up. This was a kitchen which probably hadn’t been cleaned in months, with weeks worth of dishes piled up, god-knows-what living in the fridge, and I was supposed to clean it up alone. At seven or eight years old. Even as an adult who’s had years of experience cleaning (which I had to teach myself, since I never learned as a child), I’d nuke that shit from orbit before I’d attempt to clean it. I won’t even get into the vermin infestations we had, which plague my nightmares to this day.

Also, god forbid I try to get rid of anything. ANYTHING. As a teenager, I kept my bedroom antiseptically clean, since it was my one refuge in our hellhole of a house, but I had to sneak things I wanted to get rid of out of the house. Dried-out pens, empty plastic shopping bags, broken dishes, didn’t matter. Mama would go through whatever I’d taken to the trash can, pull it out, and dump whatever she deemed irreplaceable (read: pretty much everything) back onto my bed. Once I was trying to help her get caught up with the laundry, and she threw a four-hour shrieking fit because I argued with her about taking baby clothes to Goodwill. My baby clothes, from 1983. I was sixteen then.

So, where has all this left me? I taught myself to clean and pretty much how to run a household, although I still struggle with untidiness. I have to work seriously hard to maintain a neat domicile, but I thankfully didn’t marry a man who was allergic to cleaning. Sometimes I have trouble seeing when stuff needs cleaning - I guess my messiness threshold is higher than most people’s, given the shitholes I lived in for seventeen years. Long story short, if you’ve ever visited me and been disgusted by my bathroom, this is why, and I am trying. Also, no more Hoarders for me, I don’t think.

*Yes, I’m aware that I’m admitting on the internet that there were animal feces in our house. Shame is a big component here.