#a. was a hoarder herself and our apartment was full of so much garbage I had to leave mpst of my clothes behind when we moved bc i just

[queeriboh]

if I could go back in time and tell my younger self 2 things they would be:

you're going to be hot some day, but like, when youre 30. yeah, I don't get it either

and

KEEP YOUR FUCKING YUGIOH SHIT

[loquaciousquark]

I’m not very good at keeping up with life updates. I don’t know why! I never have been!

Carol moved out August 9th, about a week extra over the original two months we’d agreed on. She got an apartment about five minutes away, which is about 40 minutes from her job. I recommended getting an apartment closer to her job to ease the commute, but she said she strongly preferred being near to her friends and the city center. (She also had the option of a $650/mo lease for a year or $1100/mo for a six month lease at this complex, and opted for the shorter lease even though she couldn’t afford the $1100. She also insisted on a two bed 1.5 bath apartment instead of a much cheaper one bed one bath, and I don’t know why. Her financial choices continue to bewilder me.)

I helped her move, because she has a number of physical disabilities and a fairly total inability to accurately predict the scope of a job like this. She insisted to me multiple times that all she was picking up from her estranged mother’s home was a few books, a desk, a chair, and a small round end table. She came back with a fifteen foot Uhaul packed top to bottom with dozens of pieces of (often very heavy) furniture, tubs upon tubs upon tubs of books (not small boxes, like 40 gallon tubs immobile with books) and a lot of...I don’t know how to describe it.

Honestly, it reminded me of a hoarder’s home from those TLC shows. She had so much stuff, and almost all of it was...garbage. Like, stained, discolored, moldy, dirty, dusty furniture and blankets and clothes that were covered in mouse droppings and bird crap. An ancient armchair that she called “antique” but was made of very cheap very damaged veneered pressed wood and whose upholstery was of an indeterminate color because of how stained it was. A “display piece” of an old suitcase she picked up in some thrift store that was locked shut with what felt like twenty pounds of bricks inside, but the outside wasn’t even attractive - just an ugly brown box with no care or craftwork that was scratched and torn and stained with mouse poop. It honestly made me uneasy to touch it, and she was putting it in her apartment to use.

I don’t know how she thought she was going to be able to get all of this stuff down the half-flight of stairs to her apartment by herself. I helped her unload for four hours before I had another obligation, then came back after that finished for another hour or two of unloading to get it in her apartment securely. It was...very tiring, but also very exhilarating to be physically closing that chapter as well as mentally. I don’t intend to do it again.

--

My job (professor) started back in person on a regular basis the following week in August. We’ve now been in class for almost two months and no students that I directly interact with (my 46ish 2nd year students) have had any exposures or at risk scenarios. A small handful of 3rd and 4th years have had exposures, and I think one student actually tested positive, but none of the exposures or positive results were from our clinic or labs; they were all from community transmission (wife/husband/child/roommate caught it from somewhere else, student had to quarantine).

I have been almost draconian with my 2nd years about the thin line we’re walking in being allowed to have even our minimal, limited in-person labs, and have warned them that if we have an exposure breach in our clinic, there is zero chance they graduate on time in a few years. They seem to be taking it extremely seriously, which I like a lot. All students, staff, and faculty are given new surgical masks daily, and everyone who interacts with patients gets a new n95 mask every 10 days. We have decontamination stations throughout the building, temperature guns, digital “passports” that they have to update daily to be allowed on campus, and plenty of spray bottles with high level disinfectant for surfaces and hands. It’s honestly as safe as we can make it, and I feel we’ve hit a good balance between staying safe and getting them actually trained on real human beings.

That said, we are having more students than I’ve ever had fail exams and practicals across the board, and I honestly think it’s an artifact of the remote lectures (all lectures are remote unless specified for particular reasons, and then they only take place in distanceable classrooms, which are at max like 70% of the class). God knows I wouldn’t have learned as well at home - I’d have been on my phone or playing games and kind of half listening in the background, and if nothing else this has made me more of a proponent of mandatory attendance once it’s safe again to do so, because the drop I’m seeing is almost precipitous. Either this class is unusually full of students incapable of completing the program, or COVID’s striking again. I’m pretty sure it’s the latter.

On the other hand, we’re FINALLY making up the Injections course material that got stopped dead in spring, and the first run of it went very well last Saturday. I unequivocally resent that I have to give up an entire Saturday to do so (and will have to do so thrice more to get all the students done this semester), but it’s at least one chunk of incompletes that are now passes (and in fact, mostly As).

We just got the notification that hybrid courses will continue through spring. It’s so exhausting. We can do it safely, and we are, but it’s so hard.

--

Went to get a drink last night before bed and noticed the tea was a little warm. Went to grab some ice cubes from the freezer and discovered the ice cube tray was full of water, and the chocolate ice cream in the door had melted and spread across the entire unit.

Managed to get a repair guy out this afternoon, who charged $228 to replace the ...relay overload array capacitor, or something. He showed me what it was--a little black and white box that he said was bottom of the barrel cheap from China, which I fully believe, and installed a new one then and there while I had a remote test review with a student over Zoom. I put on headphones for her privacy, but she cried several times. It’s usually a pretty rough awakening when students who never had to study in college realize how difficult this program is and the study time required to pass, let alone succeed.

Anyway, the freezer’s chucking out cold air like it was made for it, and the fridge seems to be slowly working its way back down. Had to throw out everything from the freezer (chicken, steak, ground beef, bacon, veggies, frozen meals--and some pizza rolls) and I’m not looking forward to the grocery bill it’ll take to restock the fridge either, but at least it seems to be functioning again.

I just checked; the freezer’s made six ice cubes in the last three hours. I’ve put them all in my tea to celebrate.

--

Edit: just checked again and the fridge is slowly cooling off, thank goodness! Of course, I somehow managed to fall down the four stairs of the hall between here and there and bruise the royal bejeezus out of both hips and somehow the inside of my left foot, so I’m ordering in for dinner, because nuts to that.

[nebris]

How Cleaning Out My Hoarder Mother-in-Law’s Junk Caused My Own Marriage to Crumble

As we plowed through decades of her extreme clutter, I began to notice similar tendencies in my husband. And once I saw the hoarder in him, there was no turning back.

There’s a snapshot Aiden took of me a few days after our wedding on Christmas Eve, 2009. I’m standing outside his mother’s house wearing disposable coveralls, gloves, and a particulate mask. In the background is a dumpster. The ground is thick with dead, brown palm fronds. I am beaming at the camera.    

           I wished so much that I could have met Ruth, my mother in law. I knew she was a bright, adventurous woman who never found work to suit her lively intelligence. She was a 1960’s housewife fascinated by history and art and ideas. She loved dogs. She suffered from untreated depression and agoraphobia.    

           The day Ruth died, her family just locked up the house and walked away. Now, five years later, it’s still standing empty. Aiden worries about it. I worry about him. No one, I think, should have to clear out a parent’s house alone. His brothers are no help at all.    

           “You and I can do it together,” I say. “It’ll be our honeymoon. We’ll take a month and just get it done.”    

           And now we’re here.    

           The front door opens into the living room — an ironic name for such an uninhabitable place. I’ve never seen anything like this. There are LPs, stained mattresses, mountains of canned food, ripped cushions, dog crates, and hundreds upon hundreds of boxes. All fading back into the darkness. The smell is beyond staleness or rot. It’s the stench of sickness, of time lost.    

           I’d fantasized about meeting my mother in law. Now I’m getting my wish, but in the most macabre way. As I dig through her belongings, I feel I’m excavating Ruth herself. Every room in that house — every pile of garbage, every broken sofa, every packed closet — seems saturated with her spirit. Each stratum we uncover reveals more of the woman who raised my husband — a woman whom I will otherwise never know.    

           I haven’t yet heard of obsessive-compulsive hoarding. I have no idea that there’s a clinical name for what I’m looking at. I only know that Ruth’s house feels like a map of a disturbed mind.    

           Why, I wonder, is the floor of the den covered in newspapers three feet deep?    

           “That’s for the dogs,” Aiden explains, as if it makes perfect sense. We start hacking the newspaper out, a job that requires pickaxes and shovels. Clouds of powdered filth fill the air. The whole thing is a petrified matt of paper, urine and excrement. Decades ago, Ruth crammed her ever-growing collection of dogs — eighteen? twenty? — into this single modest-sized room and left them to do their thing. When the floor got bad, she simply added another layer of paper.    

           In another room, I find notebooks. Boxes of them, all densely crammed with faint, microscopic handwriting. They’re lists of words.    

           “Oh, Mom was always learning languages,” Aiden tells me. Some of the word-lists are in English. Others are in Spanish, German, Polish, Norwegian. Clearly the work of an intelligent and gifted person. The thing is, I can’t see anyone actually using them for anything. They’re barely legible. It’s as if Ruth was collecting words just for the sake of having them.    

           Further in, there’s a stack of maybe thirty cardboard boxes, wrapped in paper and swathed in packing tape. What was Ruth storing with such special care? Even with my mat knife, it takes a long time to get the first one open. I tear off the paper. Underneath there’s more tape. Then tissue paper. Gently, I turn back the layers.    

           Palm fronds. The box is full of dead palm fronds from the yard outside, carefully folded and packed.    

           I spend the next hour cutting open more boxes. They all contain more of the same. As I work, I keep twisting to glance behind me.    

           Back in the den I find Aiden crouched down, frowning at the heaps of crud that we’ve hacked out of the floor.    

           “We need to go through all this by hand,” he says earnestly.    

           I stare. “You mean the whole room? All of it?”    

           “There could be something important buried here,” he says. “Get a bag.”    

           I get a bag. As I start sifting, I try to think of something to say. We can’t do this. We’ll never get through it all. This is crazy.

           I pry up a wad of rat-chewed newsprint. Underneath, gazing up at me, are Aiden’s eyes.    

           It’s a photograph, half buried in the muck. It can’t be Aiden, though.    

           The picture is old, taken maybe around 1920. But the resemblance is eerie. Same curly brown hair, same beautiful eyes. The guy is obviously a relative. Aiden has no idea who he is.    

           Later on, we show the picture to Aiden’s dad. “That’s your Great Uncle Norman,” he says. “He had some problems.” Problems? Apparently, Ruth’s uncle committed suicide sometime before the Second World War.    

           I’m sorry to hear it. But what really disturbs me is the vision of my sweetie buried under a pile of garbage in that house. Those eyes, hidden down there for decades. Sad eyes. A genetic heritage.    

           At the end of January, after about a month of excavation, we run out of time. The whole process has been traumatic for Aiden, and to what end? We’ve filled one corner of the dumpster, which means we’ve thrown away the equivalent of about one closet’s worth of stuff. The rest of the house we leave as it was, relocking the door behind us. I feel defeated. Aiden is silent.    

           Back in London, our cluttered apartment is starting to worry me.    

           “I’m remodeling, so everything’s kind of up in the air,” Aiden had told me months before, the first time I saw where he lived: before it became where we lived. I’d been impressed to learn that he was doing all the work himself. Naturally the place was messy now, I thought. I could see it was going to be beautiful when it was done.    

           But time passed, and the remodel began to seem like the labor of Sisyphus: a project that could absorb any amount of time and work without ever reaching completion.    

           Now we’ve returned from California and moved into a construction site. It’s uncomfortable. There’s no room for my stuff. Aiden urges patience as he keeps accumulating tools and crates and building materials salvaged from neighborhood trash cans. One night, I come home and am bewildered to see what looks like a pile of car parts in the living room.    

           I’m starting to understand that, for my husband, the chaos of the remodel is not a temporary stage on the way to a cozy shared living space. It’s the way he lives.    

           When I shake out a blanket, clouds of dust and mold fly up. We have fleabites. Without consulting me, Aiden adopts two dogs, which are never housebroken. Now I have to wear clogs all day, stepping over puddles on my way to the kitchen.    

           I offer to do all the cleaning myself. “This is not your project,” Aiden responds. I try to negotiate for one clutter-free room. For the first time, I see my husband truly furious. Once, I rearrange a couple of pictures on the wall. After that, Aiden doesn’t speak to me for a week. He feels that I’m a feckless control freak. I feel unwelcome and unvalued. Much as I love him, I’m sliding into chronic depression. Angry depression.    

           Through it all I can’t get Ruth, or her house, out of my mind.    

           Finally, two years later, our marriage ends. I’ve been fighting hard to clear away the obstacles — physical and emotional — that stand between us. To Aiden, I’ve realized at last, my efforts feel like an attack on the core of his being.    

           The hoarder crowds his life with rubbish in an effort to keep other things out of his life. Things like spontaneity, and the spiritual intimacy reflected in a shared living space. Love and friendship don’t stand a chance. The need to barricade oneself — literally and psychologically — overrides everything else.    

           I grieved our loss for a long time. But today I’m sitting in a tranquil room full of clean surfaces. There’s open space. There’s sunlight. I luxuriate in having exactly what I need and no more — my books, my teakwood desk, my glass pen jar. Best of all, my thoughts have room to spread and blossom.    

Freya Shipley is a writer, editor, and speech coach in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she works with a wide range of freelance clients in all three fields. Freya loves helping individuals and organizations develop communication skills that do justice to their ideas.

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