I'll Take "A Side of Frozen Claustrophobia in Limbo Land" for the win, Alex.

Christmas came late this year for us. Or really early. I guess it depends on how you look at it. We were all finally feeling well enough to celebrate Christmas in mid-February. We still have our tree up, because we have to get a couple of pictures of Baby Bug with some cute little paintings we made for her parents with her hand and footprints. It will be good to get the tree down soon. I'm starting to feel claustrophobic. We will have Baby Bug over tomorrow, so we will get it down this weekend.

The bad thing is that I've been feeling a bit more claustrophobic in the house lately. 

The good thing is that I've been feeling a bit more claustrophobic in the house lately.

As much as I hate the discomfort of the feeling, it always leads to a surge of dehoarding, and I'm really beyond wanting to get it done! However, I'm far enough behind again that I'm feeling frozen. I just need to get moving. Once I do, I'll thaw out a bit and will start accomplishing things again. So tonight, I will make a master list of things that need to be done in the near future and another list for the not-so-distant future. Lists always make me feel better, because I feel like I know where to start. It gives me a visual of what I've accomplished when I mark something off the list. And yes. I've been known to add something I've accomplished to the list after I've done it. It's still a record, and it helps.

Hubster's Parkinson's has left him exhausted all the time. It doesn't help that we have been sick more often than not since October and had to cancel Christmas week after week after week. But now that we're all feeling better, I need to kick it into gear. It's so easy to let his exhaustion be contagious, but I can't afford to do that. 

I need to propel myself out of the Land of Limbo. 

It's all in the genes?

I know it's been said there might be a genetic component to hoarding. That at the very least, it does appear to run in some families. Whether it be a learned behavior, it's in the DNA, or it's a combination of the two, there is definitely hoarding in my family. But just because a person has a predisposition to alcoholism, drug addiction, hoarding or the like, it doesn't mean a person should just surrender and say, "There's nothing I can do about it, so I'm not going to fight the urge, and I'm just going to allow it to control me and use it as an excuse for everything that's wrong in my life." So I will continue to fight with every breath that is within me to get through this dehoarding process. I don't want to leave a mess for my husband and children to have to deal with and fight their way through when I am someday gone.

My grandmother was a hoarder. She was an antique dealer, and she owned gorgeous pieces over the years. But she also had a difficult time getting rid of useless things and often lumped some of her best pieces in boxes that also contained clothes, both dirty and clean, dirty dishes, newspapers, brand new towels, mail, jewelry and curlers as well as the occasional dried out piece of dog poop. Each box seemed more horrifying than the next, and we would literally just shake our heads in disbelief, as we'd try to make sense of her thought process as we filled trash bags and sorted through boxes of stuff.

Several of us, usually aunts, cousins, my mom and I would get together and go as fast as we could to clean as thoroughly as we could, so she could have people over for the holidays. We would spend several days cleaning, sorting, and purging as much as we could get through before her out of town company would show up for the holidays. We would do what we could to make her guests feel comfortable, but we were in it alone. She would sit in her chair with a cup of coffee often looking off into space, sometimes engaging some of us in conversation or answering the occasional question.

She would have bags upon bags of unopened things that she'd gotten for gifts for her kids, grandchildren or great grandchildren that sat waiting to be wrapped and sent off to her loved ones. There were scores of items she'd picked up at garage sales or thrift stores and lots of gift wrap that never seemed to be put away. There was just tons of stuff everywhere.

I wasn't there for any of the last holiday scrambles where we'd gather to clean, as we lived several states away, but I'll never forget what it was like. It was hard to catch your breath, because the air was always thick with the smell of rotting food, dog poop and urine, since the dogs had free reign of the house and frequently used the floor as their personal restroom. We'd occasionally find maggots and mold in the rotting food in the kitchen, and there were always moths of some sort in the canisters of flour or in the tins of cookies.

Needless to say, we didn't eat anything at her house unless we brought it or prepared it from fresh food we opened ourselves. We went through the cupboards each and every time and emptied out all the old food and the bulging cans. And we thoroughly washed and dried every canister in the house before replacing the flour, sugar and other baking goods. We cleaned out the refrigerator and freezer, bleached all of it out, so it was nice and clean, and then went shopping to get fresh groceries, so she'd have something to eat.

Once all the major cleaning was done, and we'd vacuumed as well as possible, we'd shampoo the carpet. At some point, someone talked her into getting a carpet cleaner. We'd scrub the carpet until the water came out as clear as possible. We'd use a commercial carpet shampoo like are used in restaurants to get some really heavy duty stains out, and it helped tremendously. I don't think we ever cleaned the carpet with fewer than 5 passes per section, and even though we would try to get to the point that the water that we were extracting from the carpet came out clear, a dull gray was as close as we ever got.

I know that toward the end, many of her issues stemmed from her age. She was over 100 years old when she died, and she lived alone well into her 90s. She'd had several mini strokes over the years, so it was harder for her to keep things up, and she probably should have been in a home years before she was. But the hoarding started decades before the incidents which I write about happened. Horrific and indescribably atrocious things happened to her when she was a little girl, and I'm sure much of her mental illnesses stemmed from those things. I don't feel at liberty to discuss them here, but I honestly don't know how anyone could be 'normal' after going through what she endured.

I have no doubt that my grandmother's house would look like those on the hoarding shows, if we didn't intervene on occasion. It still took no time at all for things to pile back up and for the carpet to need to be scrubbed again. I'm in no way condoning the way she kept house, but knowing some of the things that happened to her as a child I can understand where the mental illness began and that this was her way of somehow trying to maintain control over her life. It was a coping mechanism that failed her.

I'm hoping that by recognizing the tendencies I have to hoard, like my grandmother did, and consciously choosing to address those tendencies on a daily basis, that I'll never fall into the trap that so tightly ensnared my grandmother.

The spririt's willing, but the flesh is weak.

Yesterday, after I scrubbed the shower out and washed the shower liner, I hung the clean liner up with a shower curtain we've had for years. I was hoping that by having a shower curtain on the outside of the shower, that the liner would stay inside the 4" shower pan. In theory, I think it would work, but we've had this !00% cotton shower curtain for so long, that it's shrunk probably at least 7". It came nowhere close to the length of the liner, so we'll have to pick up something for that bathroom.

Unfortunately, between hanging the shower liner and curtain up again and doing several loads of laundry, I can hardly move today. My neck and shoulders are screaming. I had to take a muscle relaxant earlier to try to get them to calm down. I'll be taking another one soon, since the ibuprofen did nothing to dull the throbbing. I'm hoping that I'll be in tip top shape tomorrow or at least well enough I can do something.

I try hard not to complain about being in constant pain, but sometimes I find it very difficult. I work through it most days, but when it's like today, I simply can't. It can be quite frustrating. Especially because I really want to make progress with the dehoarding more quickly than I am currently. Also, I know that complaining just sounds like I'm making excuses for not getting things done. I am trying really hard not to use it as an excuse but rather as an explanation.

Besides. I really, really, really want to get the house totally dehoarded, so we can get some sort of a hot tub or an infrared sauna. Something to help relax these silly muscles!

In your mind, is there a difference between an explanation and an excuse in a situation like this? If so, what do you see as the difference?

What did I come in here for?

Today, I've been organizing. I need a permanent place for a few things that I use that don't really have a permanent home - things that come in a variety of sizes but can all be stored together - like labels/stickers and envelopes. So I was in the process of repurposing some cute little boxes that have been used for various things over the years. I got them labeled and filled, and was pleased with the result, except for black marker on the top of the one box.

I have a tendency to use things more readily, if they look nice, so I wanted to rid the box of the marks. I tried rubbing alcohol, and while it lightened the scribbles, it didn't remove them completely. I remembered that I had a sample of one of those little Magic Erasers which work wonders on things great and small and started to walk into the other room to get it.

I'm not sure, if it's the ADHD or if it's the curse of the 'middle age', but I took three steps and forgot what I was going in the other room to get! I had to retrace my thoughts. I didn't have to retrace my steps, since I'd taken so few, but gad that irritates me! I remembered right away what I was looking for, but it's such a pain to be so forgetful sometimes!

I refuse to make excuses for my house getting to its current state. Granted, a lot of it is situational, I'm sure. But I am afraid if I go down the road of saying that this contributed and that contributed to the mess that I'll fall into the trap of blaming everything else instead of my poor choices. So as much as I'd like to say, "I can't remember squat! No wonder my house looks like it does!!" I'm not going to. My house looks like it does, because I struggle with making decisions and letting things go. I have to take personal responsibility. I am responsible.

Things may slow me down, like the kids being ill, or my own illnesses or back injury, but I will not be permanently derailed. I will get this done. I owe it to my family. I owe it to myself.

On that note, I did get several boxes sorted last night. I'm working on more tonight. I'll be sorting more tomorrow when I get back from the doctor's with our youngest. She's been sick and/or feverish more often than not since she got the Swine Flu the first part of October. I'm looking forward to getting answers! I'm also looking forward to making some more progress.

All in due time.

Now. What did I come in here for?