22-minute read time.
This weekend’s blog post is a lengthier interview that I did with my little brother, Matthew, a few weeks ago. Interviewing a family member who shared the same experiences I did, just with another set of eyes, was insightful. I highly recommend that my fellow children-of-hoarders sit down with their siblings (if they have them) and chat about their experiences. Feel free to use my interview questions, even.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
hoarding parent, social issues, financial struggles, artistic hoarding, gift giving, hobby items, emotional toll, coping strategies, professional counsel, materialism aversion, anxiety issues, future concerns, support structures, clean space, personal growth
SPEAKERS
Matthew, Lillian Peck
Lillian Peck 00:04
All right, so what is your name, your pronouns, where you’re from, and where you’re currently living?
Matthew 00:12
My name is Matthew Peck. My pronouns are mostly him/him. I’m originally from [REDACTED]. I lived in [REDACTED] for most of my life and am currently living in [REDACTED], where I’m going to college.
Lillian Peck 00:45
So, who is the hoarder parent that you’re talking about today?
Matthew 00:52
My mother.
Lillian Peck 01:07
How do you define hoarding?
Matthew 01:14
Hoarding is an impulsive materialistic desire to distract yourself from what you don’t have.
Lillian Peck 01:45
My questions are a little random because I wrote them down in a bad order. So, how was your social life as a child as a result of your mother’s hoarding?
Matthew 02:00
I had various personal issues, just on my own, which have led to certain quirks that I have. It was not helped along by the fact that the house being a mess meant I couldn’t invite people over. The main issue was that I felt I couldn’t go to meet people because I thought that I was just as messed up as my house was, that I would not be good enough for people because I might smell or look differently, especially because of our financial situation. I didn’t always have clean clothes that fit or clothes that weren’t ripped or stained. So, it made it more difficult, but I wouldn’t say that it was the main factor in my social issues.
Lillian Peck 03:22
How early do you remember noticing that your home was different from others?
Matthew 03:30
Well, originally, it was less of recognizing it as being different from others. But I can’t remember what age exactly. I remember my dad arguing with my mom about the dining room table that had a bunch of stuff on it. I was smaller at the time, so the mess that was there seemed less consequential. I could move around it. And also, before my parents were divorced, they had a clean house. It was not quite a hoarding house yet. It was more in control than after the divorce. But I noticed that when I would go to other people’s houses, there would be a clean dining room table. And I liked it. I liked to eat dinner at those tables with those people because it felt like I was part of a group that wasn’t separated by things.
Lillian Peck 05:06
What does your mother primarily hoard?
Matthew 05:09
She primarily hoards objects of artistic value and, I suppose, hobby value. She, like me, is very ADHD and will switch from one thing to the next to the next to the next. She often gets something as a gift and then overcompensates. For example, I used to do a lot of crochet, and she decided to buy me 20 rolls of yarn, essentially balls of yarn, and it was so much. And actually, that’s a really great example because this semester, it was impossible to bring it along with me. I just didn’t have room to carry it with me. If you don’t have room to carry something with you and don’t think that it’s valuable enough for you to bring it with you, then why do you have it?
Another example. She gave me a lot of knitting needles last year, which I gave to the Hooks and Needles knitting and crocheting club on my campus. She would buy a bunch of Wii games, buy or get them from Facebook marketplace for free. She would get a lot of Wii games, and with those came broken Wiis, so we had about five or six Wiis at one point. She would get a lot of movies and a lot of CDs. We would almost never play them. We would very rarely play the movies. And the video games on the Wii we would never play. We never had time to do that. She would mostly get hobby-based stuff. During the summer, she would get some sort of planting stuff, and she’d have way too many seeds to take care of, I think, about 20 tomato plants. Because she was so focused on these hobbies, it was her excuse not to get a job, which gave her more room to get more hobbies and stuff that she’d end up forgetting.
Lillian Peck 08:25
I also noticed that she likes to hoard things that she’ll give away as gifts. I think I’ll do a piece about it, “The Giver That Keeps on Giving,”and talk about how she needs to give away things, even if they’re inconsequential.
Matthew 08:48
I think I covered that a little bit with the yarn.
Lillian Peck 09:00
Yeah.
Matthew 09:03
A lot of the time, she would get stuff for her hobbies and our hobbies.
Lillian Peck 09:11
She gets things from Facebook marketplace, like diapers, to give away to people not involved in our family. The diapers stay in the house for months or years, and she either gives them away or says she’s going to sell them or some sort of thing.
Matthew 09:36
Yes, she was a middleman of a lot of things. She would see something of possible value, and then she would snatch it up and want to give it away. She’d see something of some sort of value and think that by having that, she then would have that value. I remember there was this one table we had in the car for months that she meant to give to her friend, Julie. She never did, and it just sat in the car. And obviously, it was a pretty big side table. It was pretty heavy, so it just never left the car. That was another thing, like the random furniture all over the house, which is not entirely a bad thing, but it didn’t follow any pattern. And there wasn’t room in the house for big things, so she would get lamps and such. The couch on Christmas would be filled with options and presents for us that we never touched. And often, even after Christmas, she would just say, “Oh, well, don’t open that. If you won’t use it, don’t open that.” So they would just sit there and do nothing but take up the couch. I specifically remember the yarn so much because the rolls would flow through the house and cover the floors and such. There were so many things that I didn’t even know the purpose of. I didn’t know what they were meant to do because they were broken-off pieces of things. She was a gift-giver both for herself and for others. She saw it as her job, that she had to be the person to do this, because otherwise it would be a waste.
Lillian Peck 12:18
Did you try to find information on hoarding or mental health as a child or teenager? And if you did, how did that search go for you?
Matthew 12:32
Not really. By the time I recognized what it was, I was in high school. I first started off, actually, with you helping out, cleaning up, and putting stuff in the basement, but that didn’t work. So, at some point, I just decided, “Oh, I’m gonna live with it.” And especially in high school, my big thing was: “I’m out of here in four years, three years, two years, one year. So this is not something that I can do.” We tried cleaning it up multiple times, and it would fail every single time. So, at some point, I decided, “Yeah, this is this is it. I will live like this until I get out of here, and then I don’t have to.”
Lillian Peck 13:36
What emotions or labels did you initially associate with your parents before understanding that hoarding is a mental health condition, and how has it changed? How have those emotions changed as you’ve been able to move out of the situation?
Matthew 14:01
I think the main one was, honestly, that I thought it was pathetic. I always knew that it was, maybe not necessarily a mental illness, but I knew that this was a quirk that she had due to something. There had to be some reason. I didn’t know exactly what it was, but I knew there was something. I kind of just felt like she was lost, and she was constantly spiraling. Those are the main three: pathetic, lost, and spiraling because she would ignore what had happened in the past to just move on without removing what had happened in the past from her life. I still believe that because she’s made some progress since moving in with her girlfriend, but I don’t think she’s ever really tried to deal with it. She thinks it’s an issue, but I don’t think she will ever make an effort to change. I guess another one would be stuck in her ways, stuck in the past.
Lillian Peck 15:44
Have you ever felt compelled to contact outside help, like Child Protective Services?
Matthew 15:49
Yeah. Well, actually, two times, I tried not to really truly run away, but kind of run away. You know, one night, run away. There were many times when I thought I could contact someone anonymously and get them over here to get me out of there. But I stopped because I didn’t want my mom to get in trouble, and I didn’t want us to be separated. The main thing was I was in the middle of my studies, and I had already put so much work into it that this would interrupt them for months or maybe years. And I had to come back to that, and this was too embarrassing for me to deal with. I was not in a good place, educationally, but I was in a good school, and I had good opportunities that I didn’t want to leave.
Lillian Peck 17:16
What strategies did you use to cope with living in a hoarded space?
Matthew 17:19
The main one is tunnel visioning. Just ignore everything and focus only on one thing. I noticed that I still do that nowadays. Whenever I’m really stressed, I just stop looking at the world around me, and I focus on one detail that I can control. When I slept in bed, half of my bed would be covered in stuff. That was partially my fault because that’s what hoarding does. It rubs off on me. But I would just ignore the stuff on my bed because I would be sleeping. I would close my eyes together, watch a video, or do homework.
Another thing would be a different type of avoidance. I had my first real relationship during COVID. I’d see them pretty much every week, and that one night that I would be there every week was incredibly refreshing because it felt like I was almost part of a real family, a stereotypically real family. She had an older brother, an older sister, and a younger sister. Both of her parents lived in the same house. It was a nice house. It was well decorated. They had food in their fridge that wasn’t rotting. That kind of amended an earlier question. That was another thing she hoarded. She would like to hoard food. Food that we would never use that would go bad. Even with that food, we would never have enough, as crazy as it is. But, yeah, the main coping mechanism is avoidance. It’s trying to keep away. I wasn’t actually very mad about the fact that she was always incredibly late to pick me up from things because my house wasn’t my safe space. It was not a home. My safe space was with Bella, my dog, and with my cats. I remember going to our grandparents’ houses and going to dinner with Dada, which was always nice. Going out to eat was always nice because I felt like I wasn’t trapped anymore.
Lillian Peck 20:25
So you didn’t consider your room a safe space?
Matthew 20:30
No, the thing that was safe was my bed. Even when it was fully clean, I still saw it as dirty. Remember when we tried to clean it out, and I saw it as like a hopeless endeavor? I knew what was going to happen. Even if I tried to clean the hoard in my space, it would happen again. Honestly, with the hoarding, I have not had the chance to develop healthy living principles. I have difficulties keeping my spaces clean with the amount of stress I’m under. Now that I’m getting close to the end of the semester, I can clean more, but things just kind of spiral very quickly, and I don’t have a whole lot of prominent mechanisms developed and muscle memories developed to stay clean and a routine that would help me stay focused more.
Lillian Peck 21:48
How did you balance trying to help or clean versus respecting your parents’ attachment to the clutter? I did this for the most part, but if you want to reflect on your experiences helping me clean up, you can.
Matthew 22:30
Multiple times, I would put things in my backpack to bring to school and get to throw them out, get rid of stuff a little bit at a time. Momma never noticed because there was too much stuff even to notice one thing going. It always felt wrong because that wasn’t going to stop the problem. It was like removing a fraction of a fraction. It was so little. What you can hold in a backpack is different from an entire household. So it was another coping mechanism trying to get rid of stuff. It felt good to get rid of something. At least I made a little bit of progress.
Lillian Peck 23:40
How did you feel when we managed to clean up the house in its entirety?
Matthew 23:50
I felt like it was hopeless.
Lillian Peck 23:55
Did you know what was coming in the future?
Matthew 23:58
It felt refreshing, but it was this calm before the storm, and I could feel a little itch to have everything back because I’ve also developed the same sort of issues. But also, that’s how I grew up, so of course, it would be like that. I have grown to expect that kind of. Hoarding is not a good thing to expect, but that was how I dealt with it. I knew that it was all going to come back. I was happy that it was gone, but I knew something was going to happen, and the first time I saw something on the stairs, I knew that was it. That’s all. That’s done. The house would never be fully clean. There was something dirty about the house in general. I think even if we cleaned up the entire thing before the fire, if we cleaned up the entire thing completely empty and did renovations where it was necessary, even if I came back there and someone else was living there, I would never be comfortable in that house. The memories were enough to destroy that building.
Lillian Peck 25:47
Do you think there’s ever a way that Mama can clean up fully, 100%?
Matthew 25:56
I’d like to hope that, but I don’t think she will. I don’t think it’s in her nature. I mean, she’s halfway through her life and has made very little progress, and she hasn’t made any real effort to deal with that trauma, to find the root of the problem and deal with that. Also, it’s so patterned in her that I don’t know if she can change. She’s also a terrible procrastinator. She has a similar avoidance thing to what I do. When I don’t like something, I avoid it. So when the house burnt down, she got two years to get it done, sell it or something, and get some money. I don’t know how much progress has been made since I talked to her about it, but I don’t think much has because otherwise, I would have heard, “Oh, that land had been sold, and so on and so forth.” So I think that money isn’t a motivator for her to get this done because she will lose over $400,000 worth of the house and land and everything inside it.
Lillian Peck 28:02
How would you describe your relationship with your mom?
Matthew 28:23
I haven’t had a conversation with her recently that hasn’t ended in an argument because it has become her life. She doesn’t have a job. She doesn’t have hobbies anymore. She doesn’t make an effort. She doesn’t even let me teach her my hobbies. She doesn’t make an effort to do anything in particular, whether it be about money issues, hoarding issues, or emotional issues. There’s never a point in time where we could discuss something properly, which defines our entire relationship.
Lillian Peck 29:47
Have you ever felt conflicting feelings towards your mom?
Matthew 29:52
Oh, yeah, that’s why I can’t completely cut things off with her. I want her to be better, but I don’t know how to help because I have tried to help so many times and in so many different ways. People need to want to change in order to change, and I don’t think she wants to change. But I know that if I were to push her harder, then I would lose her. I don’t want to do that either.
Lillian Peck 30:40
Were there any moments when you tried to discuss the issue with them directly, and how did she respond?
Matthew 30:48
Oh, plenty of times, both in terms of hoarding and money issues. Every time I have tried to talk to her, it ends in an argument, no matter how gentle I am with it or how I bring it up. I think that she makes it incredibly difficult to talk to her about it because everything is an attack.
Lillian Peck 31:30
What are the biggest misconceptions about hoarding, especially from outsiders?
Matthew 31:41
That it’s just being messy, it’s not just being messy. It’s also not collecting. Collectors are not hoarders. I have friends who collect. They’re actually incredibly organized about it. I commend them on how well they do it. The other thing is that many people believe that anyone could be a hoarder. I don’t think anyone could be a hoarder. I think it requires time and certain triggers. I also think a lot of people don’t notice that hoarding becomes your life very quickly, because when you are surrounded by things, it makes it very difficult to get a job and have a life, because you’re so focused on those things and getting more things and getting rid of things. So I think a lot of people don’t realize that it’s not just like, “Oh, I have a lot of stuff.” For me, I don’t get stuff because I want stuff. I hate having stuff. But sometimes, I’ll let it pile up because I don’t have time to clean. It’s more than just letting things pile up a lot of the time. It’s a compulsive need. It’s not being messy because I’m messy, but I’m not a hoarder. I’m always looking to get rid of stuff, and life is what gives me more.
Lillian Peck 33:48
What do you wish more people understood about the emotional and mental toll of hoarding?
Matthew 33:56
How much it affects every other part of your life: a healthy space, a healthy mind. Having a clean space to live in, a welcoming space, makes you feel safe. Hoarding makes it so that you don’t have a home. No matter where you’re living, you don’t have a home. If you’re living with someone else and stuff is clean, then you’re living with someone else. And if you’re living with a hoarder, then it’s not a house anymore. It’s a storage container.
Lillian Peck 34:49
Are you excited to eventually have your own home?
Matthew 34:56
Yeah. I am excited but also apprehensive. I am afraid that I will be like our mother, that I will have too much stuff to avoid all the things that I have. I think something that helps me is living with someone who values cleanliness. Last semester, my roommate was a lot cleaner. My desk was dirty, but that was it. Because I’ve been so busy this semester and because my roommate doesn’t care as much, it’s a lot more difficult for me to keep a clean space. So I don’t know if living on my own is going to be difficult. I think that I kind of need a structure to develop more of those skills. I have only lived on my own for a very small amount of time, so I haven’t really developed as many of those techniques and scheduling things. I don’t have a specified cleaning day, because I just don’t have enough time for that. I have over a 52-hour work week, which thankfully now has gone down. So I want to focus more on getting cleaning done and having a healthy environment to live in.
Lillian Peck 37:58
What advice would you give to others experiencing similar challenges with the hoarding parent?
Matthew 38:15
If you have professional counseling, tell them about it. It may seem scary, but just explaining how your life is will help you deal with it so much more in your own head. Realize that a lot of it’s temporary and that you don’t have control now, but you will have control later, and that they are their own person, that you aren’t them, and that you can grow from their mistakes, but if they can’t find something wrong to fix, there’s only so much you can do.
Lillian Peck 39:13
How has growing up in a hoarder environment shaped your identity or values?
Matthew 39:21
Well, I hate materialism. I hate stuff. I don’t even like money. I like to work, I like to eat, but I never looked at my bank account, if possible. I avoided it at all costs. It just feels like it is another thing to deal with. I think it also has affected how I interact with people. I was very closeted, not in the sense of sexuality. I was very open about that, but very closeted socially for 18 years of my life. So, getting out of my shell has been a difficult process. I think it also has given me a lot of anxiety, a lot of issues with anxiety, hopelessness. It’s fueled many of the things I have naturally developed over time. I don’t know if it caused any one of them in particular, but it definitely made a lot of them worse.
Lillian Peck 41:05
Are you scared for the future?
Matthew 41:19
When my grandfather eventually passes away, or when she eventually retires, or when our dad stops giving her child support, or when the house is officially no longer available to be getting insurance from, I don’t know what’s going to happen to her. I have to assume that I am going to be the only one to build up my wealth. I’m going to have some money from my grandfather, but that’s a very small amount to start off with, so I’m going to have to build myself up, which is scary. I have to assume that I will be broke for years, so I have to get everything I can out of college. I’m definitely scared for the future because I don’t know what’s going to happen to her or to me, and the support structures that I currently have in my life are not very secure, like incredibly supportive and incredibly wonderful. Still, they’re also not doing that well off financially. Our grandparents are doing well, but I don’t know how much longer they’re going to be around. And our dad is doing well, but I don’t know how much support he will be because, notoriously, in the past, he has not been financially supportive.
