The Shape of Things

A couple people recently recommended I watch the A&E show Hoarders because of my passion for de-cluttering, organizing and generally throwing shit in the trash. After watching two episodes online, I wish I could inject the show intravenously or at least huff it.

Despite my own aversion to accumulation, I come from a family that includes hoarders. My paternal grandmother (may she rest in peace) hoarded. She lived in a shack, and I remember it being full of junk. According to my mother, it was also vermin-infested, which is horrifying. My paternal grandmother died when I was eleven, and family lore has it that it required three visits from the sanitation department to haul away all the trash my dad and his siblings removed from her shanty. She kept things like empty compacts. (Heartbreakingly, she also recorded every cent she ever spent in notebooks, which, while not a sign of hoarding, makes me want to cry my eyes out. She had nothing, but she died with something like $30,000 in cash in a battered suitcase.)

My father also hoards. The man lives in a spacious home with a two-and-a-half car garage that has never had a car parked in it. The cars, which cost actual money, stay parked outside where they are exposed to the elements. The garage is reserved for coffee cans full of screws, nuts, washers and other assorted hardware items and bric-a-brac my father has liberated from other people's dumpsters and trash heaps. He has several boxes of stuff in the attic from my great-grandmother's house, and I guarantee you that while she may have been a lovely lady (I never met her), she was way too broke a hillbilly to own anything worth saving.

Watching Hoarders, I saw the most bizarre relationships play out among family members. In one episode, a woman's children had been removed from her home by Child Protective Services because of the vile condition of her home. She professed to wanting to get them back, but she was unable to throw away even a plastic cup that she probably got with a Big Gulp. I wanted to reach through the TV screen and strangle her for choosing a piece of cheap plastic over her two children. In another episode, a man's female life partner tripped over one of the numerous stacks of magazines piled on the stairs and broke her arm. This did not motivate him to purge his collection (or even move the piles), so his wounded mate told him that if he did not stop hoarding, she was throwing his ass out of the house. His daughter glared at him throughout his segments with ill-disguised loathing. This gentleman could not complete the purging process and was unable to make progress. His partner foolishly did not follow through on her ultimatum to kick him out and suffered a heart attack within six months of filming the show.

In essence, the hoarders chose things over people. Cheap, shitty things, no less. It's not like they were choosing a pile of diamonds over their children. It angered me to watch, but I also realized that the people on the show were sincere about their love for their families. The problem was that their mental illness prevented them from making the kinds of rational choices most people think are obvious, such as choosing people over things. There is not a single thing in my house I would not throw away without a second thought if someone told me I had to do it to continue having a loved one in my life, but I am not mentally ill (with this particular disorder).

Watching the show and realizing this about the participants gave me some insight into and perspective on my dad. I have always felt like he prioritized stuff and money over me, and I still think that's the case. However, I also believed that this ordering of his priorities meant that he didn't love me or didn't love me enough, and I now think that isn't true. My dad does love me, but he is also profoundly mentally ill and damaged, and he does not seek any help or treatment for it. He grew up stunningly poor in a home with an alcoholic father and a hoarder mother (there seems to be some link between alcoholism and hoarding, based on my informal and scant observations). His adult life has been all about establishing the control that was wholly absent from his youth and making himself feel secure. He defends vigorously against any threats to his illusion of control and security, even when those threats come from his own offspring.

For the first time in a long time -- maybe the first time ever -- I feel forgiveness toward my father. I wish he had recognized his problems and sought help, but I can now appreciate that he did the best he could considering he was parenting with a significant mental illness. (My mom always explained my father's shitty parenting by saying that he had no role model. I think this is poo-poo. Plenty of people can figure out how to be halfway decent parents without having had a decent same-sex parent themselves.) It would be like hating my father because he was schizophrenic to continue to hold a grudge against him.

At this point, I'm not ready to re-establish a relationship with my father. I'm not sure I ever will be. I'm also not sure I can empathize with his situation, but I can at least sympathize a little bit with it. At any rate, it's progress to go from thinking of my father as an unfeeling monster to recognizing that he does love me but has suffered from mental illness that made him unable to prioritize the way I think he should have.