Thank you @NatureLover 🙏💖
I am feeling a little quiet today, but was around a lot yesterday. Seems that so many members were struggling badly yesterday and I seemed to go from thread to thread offering comfort and support as much as I could. But not very successfully I suspect. Felt pretty useless and ineffective with it all.
I promised to get back to this thread to talk about hoarding. So I will do so now, but no need to respond ... I can see you are busily doing your morning rounds at present.
I mentioned that both my Mum and my Dad are hoarders in the extreme. As you know, my Mum died just over 12 months ago. Dad remains at home with a lot of help from agedcare. But even with as much assistance as he is getting from Aged care and family members, he is finding living at home to be more and more difficult. He is very challenged physically and mobility wise, has had numerous falls a major stroke and a couple of mini strokes recently. So the time is approaching where he will need to sell his home in order to pay his way into an aged care facility. My brother wants him to move in with him, but he lives on a farm 45mins from nearest facilities, and thats not ideal when Dad has the medical conditions that he does. Just not practical.
So a couple of weeks ago, after Dad had another mini stroke, I went down and visited him for a week. My aim was to start going through some of the accumulated clutter and hoarded 'this that and the other'. Dear me ... what a nightmare! The home is a small 2-bedroom fibro, with limited storage. But its a large town block and so there is a huge 6-bay shed up the back yard. Really hard to know where to start, because everywhere I looked there was 'stuff'. And absolutely no order to anything. Me with my OCD, has to have order to things, at the very least.
I started in the kitchen. Very top shelf ... rows upon rows of assorted teapots, some good others crap. Above the gas stove cooktop was numerous containers. Containing anything from food, to rubber bands, to thumb tacks, to used matches. I found 12 boxes of unopened thumbtacks! In excess of 30 or so, boxes of used matches. Several unused ones. I found rubber bands poked in here there and everywhere, mostly no longer elasticated. I found assorted long dead mice and birds on top shelf above microwave. Nearly made me sick thinking about how that would have been at the time.
Decided to move to the writing desk and stationary bits and pieces. Adding the recently discovered rubber bands and thumb tacks to the collection. 100's of pens, pencils and textas. Many no longer working. About 20 rulers! 100's of unused envelopes and stamps. Assorted writing pads, note books, journals and loose paper .... my goodness ... it was just endless. I filled 3 bins in the week I was there .. and that was conservative.
The same applied with the bathroom cupboards, the bedrooms, the book shelves and the laundry. The loungeroom was just as bad. Every single trinket of any type was poked into the tiniest of spaces. Many previously broken, but lovingly repaired as best Mum could. 34 CareFlight bears hung all around the lounge walls collecting dust, soot and smoke from the loungeroom fire. Magazines of all types kept for the past 50 years, all strewn around the house and many more in boxes stored in the shed out back. Most of those were done last year.
As you may imagine, with my OCD, I was completely horrified. And all this is after a major culling operation last year soon after Mum passed away. I left after my week there, satisfied with what I had managed to achieve, but with the realisation that I could do that half a dozen more times, and still not be done. And yet, if Dad decides to sell his house, it definitely needs to be done. It was an exhausting week.
One good thing though ... Mum also hoarded toilet paper. I think she used to buy it whenever it was on special. Either that, or she forgot she already had plenty. She would have had about a 100 rolls stored in various nooks and crannies within the house and outside laundry. So there was no toilet paper shortage for Dad during the panic buying days of the Corona Virus. 😊
Thank you for listening. Although I have to say, I only told you some of it ... there was much that I would not be able to say here, nor would want to. I know you have the unusual and somewhat conflicting twin disorders of hoarding and germophobia. My Mum definitely did not have the germophobia that you do! Unfortunately. But the hoarding ... most definitely.
Emelia 🌸
