When I lost the farm and moved back in with my mother I was rushed, emotional, and physically spent. I ended up shoving all my belongings in boxes without looking at them and dragging them here by myself in one of many three hour car trips (1.5 hours each way.) And to make matters worse my mother is a hoarder… although a few years previous I had helped build out the basement to be livable, by now it was hoarded to the hilt. All my stuff remained in boxes and were shoved in random corners, sometimes piled to the ceiling, because the entire basement was already that full with her stuff. She did not believe I’d ever be moving back home, why would she? I had finally made it out of there! I found my old bedroom, which was huge, was now filled with the cage animals my mother still has after almost twenty years (those little mother fuckers just won’t die) and the “living room” was a storage closet piled to the ceiling with Tupperware tubs full of crafting supplies and random shit. She had turned the kitchen into her soap making shop and every cabinet was full with soap making supplies (and she was having a blast making soap!) The laundry room, as expected, was a giant laundry pile on the floor reaching up to my knees, the bathroom remained unfinished, and all this left me with no place for myself or my stuff…
The first week I was home I slept on the couch upstairs, in her space, surrounded by her damn yappy dogs. From there I moved to a couch downstairs, a really bad pull out one, and lived with springs up my ass for the next two months. I put my TV atop a pile of junk near the ceiling. It’d be the only sign of normalcy for a long long time. I know there are readers out there who know exactly what I am talking about. Hoarding is a relationship killer and a massive stress on families. I was already depressed at the fact I was now in my thirties and moving back in with my mom, because I had no other options financially, did she also have to be a hoarder?! And hoarders deny being hoarders EVERY TIME you bring it up just because they saw some worse hoarders on the TV that had four dead cats smushed under boxes in their living room. See? She doesn’t have any dead cats under boxes, she must be just fine. It’s enough to drive anyone homicidal.
I spent the remainder of spring and summer running. I took every chance I could just to leave the fucking house and get away from it all. I would stay out all day, blog my intrepid travels, and come home exhausted where I’d collapse in a coma for three or so days and do it again. Any second I was stuck home and alert I worked on my crowdsourcing campaign to get the fuck out of here – but after it failed miserably I had to make due with my shitty lot in life. This was made so much worse by the cold weather which ticked off my body and threw me into stronger and stronger relapses, much worse than I experienced on the farm, but this isn’t surprising considering it was this house that made me sick in the first place from a source I still haven’t found.
Currently I sleep the night, get up, stay up 2-4 hours, get too exhausted to move, go back for a two hour nap, and repeat for as many times as it takes to be night again. It’s a dysfunctional schedule that’s already hard to work around but when I found myself with no working space, no cooking space, and still sleeping on the fucking floor, well I finally snapped. I had to face reality – there was no benevolent internet spirit who was going to whisk me out of this shithole, I just had to make due. So that’s what I did. Instead of focusing on how unhappy I was with the situation I gritted my teeth and started to change it – with labor pains that I am sure will last many months!
I woke up and looked around and started to deconstruct everything in my head. What needed to be done to clean this place up and make it functional? I devised an attack plan. First I would haul out the laundry room, get rid of all the shit in there, including the furniture. I would build a fold-up table hanging from the wall to use as a folding table, a small shelf for detergents, and three hampers, one for each resident of the house. I would kill anyone who left anything on the floor or on top of the washer.
Then I hauled out the hallway to the laundry room and built a large shelving unit. This took me roughly $100, two days labor, and a week and a half relapse where I was pretty much in a coma and not functioning twenty hours of the day. WORTH IT. Sanity started to settle.
These past couple days I hauled out my sewing machine nook. Both machines have been uncovered and are accessible and I have brought my three surviving angora rabbits inside for the winter and put them in a pen in this cleaned out space. This is so I can keep up on their grooming needs this winter while also cutting out my need to snow blow anything other than the driveway and a path to the front door.
I will be moving on and reclaiming the kitchen next. I will go through the cupboards and cabinets, making everything efficient, functional, and only kitchen related. And when this is done I will start to work on the two bedrooms. I will be hauling out the larger one, with her pets in it, and taking it over, letting them have the smaller room as there’s only a few cages of them left anyway. I can leave all the shit that’s already in the small room that’s not mine and take my bed, my TV, my computer, and my two fold-up plastic tables (one’s a computer desk and one’s a crafting desk) and bring them to the larger room. After that my own living space will be FUNCTIONAL. It won’t be pretty or personal but I will be able to work on my crafts, my writing, or I can invite someone over and not die of embarrassment or refuse to let them inside the house! This is the only way I can move forward in any sense… I need to be able to have a work space, quiet, a place of my own, utilities I can actually reach, in order to work on my writing, my art, my health, my social life. Nothing will be possible without this. Should I need more shelving or furniture (as I have no closets) then I am happy to build more.
Here’s the good news – I am halfway there. Yes, it’s taken everything I have physically, mentally, and emotionally, but I am making progress!! I even got my mother to OK throwing out two pieces of useless furniture which is huuuuuuuge. I should get a fucking medal for that. This woman never throws anything out, especially useless furniture which fills three sheds in the back yard! Since I have started to do all this she’s seeing it is possible to change, to do what needs to be done, to get the house and her life better. It’s leading by example and she’s filling up the dumpster on her own!! I am SO PROUD of her because I know how hard this is for her but I have promised once I finish the basement I will go upstairs and help her out in the rest of the house. I WILL REGAIN SANITY. Just fucking watch me! And after sanity who knows what I will regain!
At the end of all this I will know I can achieve anything given enough time and determination. That’s why I have not given up on the goal of building my own shipping container home on a large acreage where I will run a proper homestead and farm by myself this time. That’s what I was made for, it’s what I am good at, and it’s what gives my mind and body absolute peace. I am happy to share that joy with anyone who wants to follow my journey back into sanity, good health, and community.