Validate Me! (How My Mom's Hoarding Kind of Messed Me Up.)

By Melissa Patton

Compulsive hoarding damages house structures, threatens safety and health, drains bank accounts, and estranges a hoarder from the rest of society. It goes way beyond just saving stuff. It goes deeper than just being a pack-rat. It is a very real disorder, and it affects more than the hoarder. In this brief memoir, Melissa shares her struggles growing up as the daughter of a hoarder, her reality TV experience and the events that followed, and her journey through the therapy she did not realize she needed. "Validate Me! (How my mom's hoarding kind of messed me up.)" opens your eyes to the most important “things” that get destroyed under the piles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781329425040

Melissa Patton

Brenda Scott-Coleman is a retired international trade specialist and a designer of CHANGE-A-LETS, a unique earring for ladies who cannot wear traditional earrings. She is also the author of BREN-DEE: A Child Who Survived on Bookmarks, a story about the challenges she faced as a child with facial differences and how she fought that adversity. Her latest book, The Girl with Many Faces, is written for children who have difficulty making friends. Her most important goal in life now is to reach out to children with differences, praying that her stories will be an inspiration to them. She also hopes that her stories will teach children that we are all different in our own special way.

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Validate Me! (How My Mom's Hoarding Kind of Messed Me Up.)

Validate Me!

(How My Mom’s Hoarding

Kind of Messed Me Up.)

Melissa K.M. Patton

Copyright

Copyright © 2014 by Melissa K.M. Patton

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

Originally published in the United States by Melissa K.M. Patton in 2014.

ISBN 978-1-304-95774-0

eBook ISBN 978-1-329-42504-0

Screaming Flea Productions, A&E, and Hoarders are trademarked names and have been mentioned with express written permission from the producers and the network.

Dedication

For my daughters,

with love.

And for fellow

daughters and sons of hoarders,

with hope.

Introduction

Do I have to respond to every little thing you say?  Sometimes I don’t have a response, but I heard what you said!

The curt words from my high school best friend stung and embarrassed me.  I had been talking about something inconsequential – don’t even remember the context now – and she said nothing in response.  So I asked her if she was mad at me or something.  Given the exasperated tone of her response (that I still remember like it happened yesterday), my tone was likely just as unpleasant.

In high school, I was constantly worried that people were mad at me.  Friends.  Classmates.  Teachers.  Strangers.  Everyone.  I went around claiming I didn’t care what people thought of me, but that could not have been further from the truth.  I did not realize it back then, but time and experience have made it evident to me that everything I did was in pursuit of acceptance and approval.

To everyone I have ever known, I’m sorry.

Chapter 1: Memories

When I was born, the library/office in my parents’ house was converted into my nursery.  By converted, I mean my mom and dad put a crib, dresser, and rocking chair into the room, but never got rid of the large metal desk or tall metal bookcases that lined the walls.  But it was sufficient for a baby, and at least I had Care Bear curtains.

As a small child, when I was at home I played in a small space on the living room floor.  It was cramped, but I just figured I had a lot of toys.  My dad would sit in his straw rocking chair and watch TV.  I don’t remember if we ever had a couch (an old picture of me as a toddler suggests that we did), but I do remember being able to comfortably watch TV in the living room together as a family.  We ate some meals together in the eat-in kitchen – me in my high chair, and my parents at the little green-top table.  My mom was a phenomenal cook and baked the most amazing banana muffins.  She made Mickey Mouse banana pancakes for me on weekends and carved out a happy face in every new tub of margarine.  Sometimes she picked fresh, ripe papayas from our tree, and served them, too.

We had two Siamese cats; one was friendly, one was not.  Mom liked to sew and often made us matching dresses.  Each Christmas, we would get a real Christmas tree.  Mom would decorate it, and there would be presents under it on Christmas morning.

As I got older, Mom started working late a lot, and I was getting more involved in Girl Scouts and gymnastics.  On my free nights you could find me outside riding my bike or rollerblading with the neighborhood kids.  Dad and I started bonding over regular trips to the library, park, golf, the Sanrio section of what used to be Holiday Mart, and fast food.  Around this time we started eating out more, or my dad and I would eat frozen meals on my parents’ bed, where we started watching most of our TV.  The living room and kitchen were gradually becoming increasingly cluttered by empty boxes, plastic and Styrofoam cups, containers, jars, and egg cartons that my mom was hanging on to for proofs of purchase and various future projects.  We spent less and less time in those common areas until eventually we had no choice but to avoid them all together.  The living room TV was the one with cable, though, so when I wanted to watch movies or music videos, I would have to clear the space in front of the TV and find a place to sit.  I think at one point there was a stool…or I would just sit on a sturdy box.

Tangent:  Speaking of memories with my dad, I wrote the following blog post in honor of my dad for Father’s Day 2012.

Spotlight on… Dad (June 2012)

In honor of Father’s Day coming up on June 17th, I wanted to share some fond memories I have had with my dad over the years.  My parents are still together, but my mom worked a lot when I was growing up, so most of my childhood was spent with my dad.  I have always been, and always will be, a daddy’s girl.

These are somewhat in chronological order.

Teaching me how to ride a bicycle

Singing Peter, Paul, & Mary in the car together on many drives to elementary school

Daddy-Daughter camping when I was a Brownie Girl Scout

Taking me to the park to push me on the swing, fly a kite, play basketball

Setting out my bath towel and toothbrush for me every night

Accompanying me as I walked around my entire town selling Girl Scout cookies

Hanging out at his office, visiting the warehouse guys

Dog sitting at his sister’s house after school…with junk food and TV

Pizza Hut and Taco Bell after school

Dave’s Ice Cream after gymnastics

Teaching me how to play chess

Teaching me how to play golf, and taking me to the driving range

Teaching me to drive and then taking me to get my driver’s license

Watching my high school basketball games

Hearing that he started going to church

Walking me down the aisle when I got married

Holding his first grandchild

I have countless other memories with him that may not be as fond, but still conjure deep appreciation, nonetheless:  spending hours at the library with me, helping me write my first research papers in elementary school; four years of gymnastics practice and meets; weekly trips to the Orthodontist; installing my ceiling fan; chauffeuring me all over the island until I could drive (mall, friends’ houses, State Fair, movies, birthday parties, etc.); getting lost on Maui…

I firmly believe that you cannot FULLY comprehend the sacrificial love of a (good) parent until you walk in their shoes.  Sure, as you get older – and especially as you become responsible for your own finances – you realize more and more how much they’ve done for you; but to see how much they gave up for you, so you could have a decent childhood and allow you to do all the things YOU wanted to do…I think that’s hard to truly know until you’ve started making those sacrifices for your own child(ren).  I am starting to understand this more each day.  When I review just this short list, it is very clear to me that he limited his free time to allow me to pursue my own interests and make sure I wasn’t constantly with a babysitter.  He could have easily said, Screw this, your mom’s not here to take care of you, why should the burden fall on me? but he never did.  Not once.  He was (is!) a good father.  He still had his interests, but he found a way to balance it with taking care of me – and I know I was a handful at times!

To my dad... Thank you!

I just wanted to include that as a demonstration of how most of my good memories happened outside of our home.  Keep reading and you will understand why.

By the time I was about thirteen years old, the sewing room, which had always been full of stuff, became impenetrably blocked off by boxes of who-knows-what, and little paths throughout the rest of the house were formed where there was once floor.  Mom stopped cooking.  Getting a Christmas tree became a battle that involved weeks of moving the clutter around so we would have just enough space for it atop the card table that sat amongst a pile of stuff in the middle of the living room.  (Most of that stuff ended up in bags and boxes in the carport, which ultimately stopped housing the car.)  The tree would go on the table, and Mom would decorate it with an eclectic variety of ornaments that followed no theme but had significant sentimental value, such as ones I had made in school.  We were lucky if we got our tree set up a full week before Christmas.  Eventually even that became impossible.  One Christmas, we threw the presents in the car and drove to my dad’s office, where I sat on the floor near a fake tree and we opened our gifts there.

Living room to kitchen

No one ever came to our house to visit or stay over.  Anyone who did happen to catch a glimpse of the inside of our house always seemed shocked at how messy it was or how much stuff we had. 

Living room2

I desperately loved going to my friends’ houses.  Even if their houses were no bigger than mine, it always felt like a mansion to me because they had so much space.  With wide eyes, I would always say, Wow, you have such a nice house.  They had walls.  And carpet.  Their clothes were in their closets.  Their doors closed.  Ours couldn’t close because they were jammed open with boxes or things hanging from them and in the doorway.  I had a screen door on my bedroom that my parents had no way of replacing with a normal door even if they wanted to.  (I wanted to.  Imagine the awkwardness of my teen years.)  Besides, I had a nice breeze that my parents did not want to cut off.

My sense of reality was warped.  I did not understand it, I just knew my house was messy.  I hated my house.

By the time I was in high school, you could barely walk through the living room and kitchen without knocking down some precariously-balanced tower of boxes.  The stove and microwave were no longer accessible and the refrigerator had stopped working.  The freezer no longer kept things frozen, but kept things cold enough to act as a fridge as long as there was ice in there.  So, rather than clearing the space to get the old fridge out and replace it, my parents instead started buying one to two bags of ice per day to keep things cold.  At one point, they secured the cash to buy a new fridge, and had even purchased it, but they were unable to get it in the house.  The store kept calling, trying to have it delivered.  I have no idea how long they held it, but I know they eventually gave up.  I hope my parents got their money back.  A spare microwave was hooked up in the living room, in the midst of the ever-growing pile.

Kitchen (sink)

Food was stored in plastic containers and recycled tubs and jars, to protect it from