Authorette

For twenty-three years I was married to a compulsive hoarder. For anyone who doesn’t know what that is, I will define it for you.

Compulsive hoarding is thought by many to be a subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). People are thought to have a compulsive hoarding problem when they meet all three of these criteria:

• They regularly keep a large number of possessions that most people would not consider to be very useful or valuable.
• Their home, or parts of their home, are so cluttered that they can no longer use those parts of their home for their intended purpose.
• The clutter is so bad that it causes significant distress or impairment.

My ex-husband, * Norman, met all three.

It started when our garage became a virtual dumping ground of belongings that included, but was not limited to: bird cages, art supplies, tax records, Christmas ornaments, China, crystal glasses, desks, old pickle and jelly jars, building supplies, aquarium components, a boat anchor, foam rubber, hundreds and hundreds of books (that no one ever read), a zillion tape cassettes, old furniture, a large meat hook, televisions, computer monitors, a pair of elk antlers, old clothing, sixteen-thousand little plastic rings from used up rolls of Scotch Tape, a broken pool table, pictures, a wheelchair, office supplies, one thousand feet of rubber tubing, old VCR’s, a backyard hammock, and old children’s toys – all to the tenth power. Heirlooms and other possessions of value were broken and crushed under the weight of piles and piles of useless junk.

But at least the debris was limited to the garage.

When we moved into a house with a backyard, my ex began filling the yard with – you guessed it – more stuff! He would go dumpster-diving at the local nursery and come home with truckloads of discarded plants. In one day he brought home 65 near-dead rose bushes. In some parts of the yard Norman’s added vegetation was so dense that you almost needed a machete to hack your way through it. Neighbors described our backyard as “scary.”

Then came the bathtubs. Norman decided that he wanted to raise pond plants. Sounds innocuous, doesn’t it? Well, it wasn’t. Within a relatively short time, there were ten ponds in our backyard. There was one pond made with a plastic liner that was laid in a large hole that had been dug in the ground. Along with the liner pond, there was one bona fide backyard pond made from hard acrylic, and the rest were old bathtubs that Norman had recycled. To the ponds Norman added thirteen turtles and hundreds of fish.

One day the pond made from the plastic liner sprung a leak and flooded the yard of our next door neighbor. Needless to say, the neighbor was not pleased.

Then Norman confiscated our children’s three-foot-deep 10’ x 10’ above-ground, Doughboy swimming pool and transformed that into a pond also. One day I looked out the window and saw two ducklings paddling around in the doughboy pond. The baby ducks grew into adult ducks who took perverse enjoyment in terrorizing our dogs.

The piece de resistance of this pond mania was the waterfall that Norman made by running our children’s “Slip-N-Slide” down our backyard hill. Water would run down the bright blue plastic of the Slip-N-Slide, spill over a ledge and splash down into one of Norman’s bathtubs. Classy.

Norman also hoarded pigeons. One day as we were exiting Food-4-Less Market, a pigeon ran into the glass picture window and lay stunned on the ground. Norman picked up the bird and brought him home. Before you could say, par-a-keet, Norman had erected a giant pigeon coop in our already over-crowded backyard. The coop became over-run with pigeons. There were also quail and doves and a rooster who cockadoodle-doo’d at 3:30 every morning. (We gave the rooster to a farm.) Norman went on to build another aviary that housed dozens of finches and cockatiels, and a third one for “Pete” and “Re-peat,” Norman’s love birds.

Finally I put my foot down and said, “No more birds!” but our flying friends continued to procreate. Norman gave away some of the pigeons, but there was one pigeon who – no matter how many times we gave him away – escaped his new home and flew back to our pigeon coop. He was a homing pigeon. Norman named him “Boomerang.”

Then came the animals. Soon our suburban backyard became home to guinea pigs, snakes, and rabbits, and everybody knows what rabbits do!

Whenever it rained, Norman would relocate the outside caged animals (and their cages) to our living room. One rainy Saturday, while Norman was at work, his parents “dropped by,” and they did not appreciate the ‘Noah’s-Ark-esque’ of our parlor. Norman’s mother, clutching the front of her raincoat, looked as though she was about to have a heart attack.

Finally we moved into a larger house that had the biggest lot size in our subdivision, and Norman promised to change his ways and stop hoarding plants, animals, and useless junk. Of course that didn’t happen. So I began giving things away.

Earlier, I had tried cleaning out the garage, but Norman would confiscate 75% of the stuff I had thrown away and put it back inside. It was a constant tug-of-war. But then I came up with a better way of thinning down Norman’s junk – I got rid of it while he was sleeping.

Our daughter and Chad, her husband, were living with us. Chad was six feet, five inches tall, and weighed in at 250 pounds. We would wait until Norman was in bed for the night. (Norman took sleeping pills, and, therefore, could sleep through a train wreck.) Then Chad and I would load up the car with junk from the garage and deposit it in the industrial-sized trash cans behind our local food stores. Chad did all of the heavy lifting. When the dumpsters were too full, we would drive deep into one of the orchards near our home. I’d stop the car and say, “Let it rip!” Chad, who was in the back seat, would open the car door and heave out the trash. And then we would make our escape. Now, because of my husband’s hoarding, I had resorted to being deceitful and breaking the law.






I did not divorce Norman solely for his hoarding. But his collecting and hoarding problem certainly did exacerbate the bad! My former marriage, though, is not the theme of this essay. Hoarding is.

I let Norman have everything in the house, which – in retrospect – was the biggest form of revenge I could have exacted. This meant that when the house sold, Norman would either have to get rid of his junk or be the one to move it. Of course, Norman chose the latter.

Until a year ago, whenever I would talk about Norman’s hoarding, I’d get so upset that I would lose my voice. All the years of acclimating to and working around Norman’s junk had taken its toll. I used to think over and over again: This is not normal! This is not normal!! I would tell my husband that just because something was still in a “state of matter” did not mean that we had to keep it! All I ever wanted was a normal house, a regular back yard with maybe a tree or two, and a garage where I could do our laundry and park our cars.

Thankfully, for me, the hoarding years are over.

Someday, though, if I happen to drive by Norman’s house, I expect to see it caved in upon itself -- with only the chimney standing -- from the weight of Norman’s junk!

Hopefully, Norman will not be buried in the rubble.







As an aside:

This was the first time that I have been able to finish a piece of writing about Norman’s infamous hoarding. Before, I would have to stop mid way through because I would find myself getting too angry. However this time, it was definitely cathartic.

Thank you for the therapy. Feel free to send me your bill, and I will put it on a maxed-out charge card – post haste – because I am…










* Name changed to protect the guilty.

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"A woman is like a tea bag. You don't know how strong she is untill she gets into hot water."

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mammamaia

i'm glad to know the catharsis was helpful... as a piece of marketable writing, i would strongly suggest you not start it out with a blah statement and a boring definition...

you need to hook the readers, not give them reasons to stop reading, so i'd open with some really outrageous example of what you had to put up with and save the DSM-IV definition for later... and if you really think you need to include it, put it into a more digestible form, instead of lifting it verbatim from a textbook... give it a comic twist, to make it go down more easily...

skipping to the end, your closing shot makes no sense... how could a house crammed full of stuff 'cave in on itself' ?... all that stuff would keep it from doing so, wouldn't it?... perfect earthquake protection, i'd think...

you've plenty to laugh about now, since you've rid your life of that idiot and all his stuff, so see if you can get more of the ridiculous in there and less of the anger... it could be a good piece for a women's magazine, with some work...

you'll probably find this bit of mine uncomfortably familiar... it's titled, 'taking inventory' and i hope it makes you laugh away your unhappy past:

http://saysmom.com/maia/content.asp?Writing=270


love and hugs, maia

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