Happiness takes planning.

[gottawonder]

Lately, my sister Trainwreck has taken to calling me several times a week, apparently just to absolutely dump on me. I don't know how this helps her, but it sure sucks for me.

When her partner was still alive a few years ago (two? Three?) I didn't hear from her that much, though to be sure her life still sucked. She was just busier with fighting with her partner.

NOW I get to hear from her all the time...because she cares about my life? Likely not.

Anyone reading this likely knows the story. She's very broke, sick mainly because of her smoking and alcoholism, and a hoarder. Yup. Her life sucks.

She's also only around people who more or less can't run away from her anymore. Like my Mom, who is in the care home, and Sister N who is in pretty rough shape. She really only sees people who are in the last stage of life, and that IS DEPRESSING.

Yet, any kind of deeper thoughts about her life, and you can see how it is her choice to be where she is.

I TOTALLY UNDERSTAND how kicking addictions is really hard. REALLY HARD. Yet that might be the first thing she could choose to do that would improve her life in many ways. She could attend AA, but will not. She might start to see how she needs to be accountable to herself for her actions and choices. Maybe she would start to be aware of how startling her appearance is to people, and why many people might distance themselves from her.

Getting help for her hoarding is a monumental thing, and it is not as easy as "just get rid of it" or "stop bringing things into the house". No, it is not that simple. I do not minimize the enormity of that situation.

Yet, she has not always lived in isolated places. She has lived in larger centers at different stages in her life where maybe she could have gotten counselling for her issues. Maybe she still could.

She has nothing left in her life that brings her engagement or happiness.

You know what? I've struggled with being lonely A LOT in my life. I don't have anyone in my life that is a close enough friend that we hang out together. I have had to fight to find something to give me some kind of foothold that ties me to the rest of the world.

I know that she wouldn't have the money to do things like pottery or riding lessons, but there are book clubs, things at the drop in center, things she could volunteer at, she could find something.

She could also move to be closer to her adult kids.

She could learn how to use a computer so that she could be on Facebook more, and keep in touch with her family or at least have access to some services (like maybe use Zoom for online therapy?) or even just entertainment like most people.

When I do try to talk to her about positive things, like how well our adult nephew is doing (he is learning how to be in the broadcast arts, like filming hockey highlights and interviews for local television, doing ads etc.) and she brushes it off "I don't even talk to him anymore". Well, maybe because you don't care about how well he is doing?

She really doesn't want to hear about my average days either. Many times, my days are just nice, normal days where I get up, take care of the animals, do some laundry, talk to my husband, go to the barn or get groceries, come home, watch a show. That's how most people live, and maybe it seems a little boring, but can't we talk about normalcy?

Why is it only okay to talk about misery, and impending doom?

Yep. We're all going to die. Nothing we can do about it.

What we do have some control over (somewhat) is whether or not we try to be okay. Do we make the decisions that will lead us to being a little bit cleaner today, like have a shower and take out some garbage? Do we only talk to people who will confirm our belief that the world is horrible, or balance that out by talking to people who are working on a fun project or building a skill, or going to a museum or on a trip?

Do we try to eat to care for our bodies, get a good night's sleep, and exercise a bit, or do we tank up on toxins, never sleep because of said toxins, and either never exercise or try to do a heavy day of work but nothing in between so that the one day we decide to be a warrior we ruin our back and have to lie in bed with painkillers for a week, then decide to stay in bed for a month out of depression?

Her current set of living conditions and circumstances mean that NO ONE wants to be around her, never mind a sane person who might want to date her, or a sane friend who might be pleasant to be around. Nope. No one healthy will want to spend any time with this person.

Even her kids are probably not that excited to be around her. I know their spouses don't want her around. I think that's fair.

Making good choices isn't REALLY that hard. It does seem to require something that she doesn't have.

Comments

[ratunderpaper]

What do you suppose might happen if you told TW that you'd like to hear more of her thoughts, but while you do, you'll be helping her clean some of her massive hoarder's den?

[gottawonder]

She lives about a fifteen hour drive from us, and I see her once or twice a year in person.

I am sorry if these posts end up giving you the same feelings that it gives me to know her. The idea that she can be helped or fixed. I really just need to stop caring about her. I should probably just stop talking to her, but she isn't a horrible person, just very damaged. So, I need to get to a point where she stops ruining my life with her own pain.
It's been harder for me in the last few years, because she has almost no one else who will talk to her any more, and some family will talk to her, but not about her issues. Lord, how I would love to know how they manage to limit her that way. I let her talk openly because on some level, I hope that she finally hears herself, but in doing so it leaves me feeling compassion for her that she no longer deserves.

You can't really do much cleaning for her. This is not a tired old lady who just can't manage her depression enough to clean, this is a person who will defend every scrap of paper like a dragon.

You could maybe throw out absolute trash, but you'd be surprised. She wouldn't let you throw out egg cartons, because someone else can use them. Not old magazines either, even if they have mouse droppings on them. She'll say they can be recycled, but they will somehow just be set aside, never to actually leave the property. Maybe cans, unless she has a plan to use them to raise tomatoes in them later.

It is entirely possible that she would let you throw away a bucket of used toilet paper. That, maybe.

Old, rotten shoes? Not unless she didn't have a plan to go through them and save the laces and take apart the leather ones for a craft project.

A bag of yucky, moldy, old stuffed animals? They could be washed, or taken apart to be used as patterns, or just impossible to throw away because they are like living things because they have eyes.

She will SAY she needs to throw things out, but you could stand there with her, and all she would get you to do is to help her go through it, and put all of it over in another pile. She would put almost nothing on the truck.

About every ten years or so (when she was younger it was every two or three years, because she was renting, and that's how long it would take for her to get evicted. The longer periods are because she and her partner rented an isolated farm house that no one cared about, and then bought this isolated trailer), she gets to a point where she is absolutely drowning, and is being evicted, or the house is collapsing, or...the house is collapsing or she is being forcibly evicted by town authorities...or the house is collapsing. Then, we go in there with the bonfires and the trucks, but even then, she tries to keep it all and just move it to the next place.

Our family has gone to great lengths to help her over the years. We have helped her move again, and again, and again. We've burned mountains of stuff when her life demanded that she be forcibly moved. I have personally gone and scraped layers of rotten eggs filled with maggots off of her kitchen floor (she was trying to make money selling eggs, but most of them ended up rotting in pails all over the house and on the floor). I did that because her partner, who is now dead, moved out of the home and would not come back until at least the kitchen and the bathroom were clean enough to use. It took another sister and myself about two days and a giant grain truck to clear to the floor, and that did not address things like the refrigerator or all of the cupboards full of expired food.

We have gone into mold filled basements to drag bags of sodden shit outside to be thrown away.

Then, within a few years, she is right back where she started. At times she has hoarded animals, and ending up with litters of puppies that she won't get rid of, that end up chained all over her yard as adult dogs.

Now, no one in the family wants to help her anymore. Most of them are too old, or we just recognize the futility of helping her.

Sure, we could all go help her clean up a bit, but it never fixes the underlying issues.

It's a bit like "you could go over to an alcoholic's house and make them a cup of coffee". That does not address the alcoholism. Which she also has.

Unless SHE starts getting counseling, starts going to AA, throws it all out herself, it won't matter what you do to help her.

This is why I believe people when they say that you just can't help some people who are heroin addicts living on the streets, or people who are so mentally ill that they would rather die than get help. My sister is pretty much a lost cause.

[sherlockishere]

It's so frustrating to have someone like this in your life. And the maddening thing is that you're right: This is not something you can fix, not at all. You've described the classic pattern here: Trying to get the person to make some kind of healthy change, only to have them carry on the same process of self-destruction. It makes me hurt for you and every other person who is going through this.

One of the harms, I think, comes from living in contact with people like this. After growing up in my family, I used to think (when I was younger) that at any moment I could screw up somehow and have my life fall apart. Because when it's a parent or anyone you look up to who lives this way, and they never take responsibility for their destruction, you believe that their life just randomly fell apart (like they say it has). So I believed my own life could end up this way.

It's a little odd to find myself at age 66 now, intact, without having any catastrophic event happening to destroy my life. Things are ok. I didn't just randomly fall into alcoholism or drug abuse. It still surprises me a little, because I believed them when they said it wasn't their fault. It's that myth that the mess around them just randomly happened to them.

Bah. I know how terribly difficult this is, to be caught between caring about someone but utterly unable to help them. Take good care of yourself, my friend!

[gottawonder]

Yes. When I was younger, I didn't have any money, but I worked hard to make good decisions as best I could.

I stayed away from ALL drugs and alcohol, and was super careful about pregnancy (to the point where I never, ever wanted kids, ever).

As you say, three of my sisters had kids by random people, and pretty much all of them were "total accidents". Serious. One sister had four kids with different men, Trainwreck had three with all different dads (and she says she didn't even want kids), and the third sister was in an abusive relationship and wanted to leave, but kept "getting pregnant" like she didn't know how it worked.

On top of that, none of my family sat me down and talked about sex or how birth control worked, or offered to help me sort things out by going to a clinic with me or talked about condoms. I had a rough time the first time I was in a sexual relationship (and it totally could have gotten me pregnant) because of my shame over having sex in the first place, and my total immaturity and ignorance about how to go about getting help.

I did go to a clinic and get on the pill, and I was damn lucky. After that, I felt more assured of protecting myself.

Who knows. If not for my insane family, maybe I wouldn't have been so careful.

Now, the HEALTHY way to also have approached this, is just to have a loving, supportive family who was really good about talking to me about things, made sure I understood how pregnancy worked, kept checking in with me and offered to go with me to a clinic when I was ready to be sexually active, fostered a good sense of self-worth and set reasonable boundaries for me until I could make good decisions on my own.

There are less traumatic ways to learn how to make good choices than how I got to grow up.

You are correct, it is traumatizing to have family like this (she's not the only one that gave me PTSD). You can't help them, and as a kid, you can't really set boundaries around how they interact with you. You absorb their attitudes, normalize their behavior, and you don't always get to see how the rest of the world views them until you're older. You don't feel safe around them, but your Mom leaves you in their care or sends you to their house to babysit for them. You are TOLD that they are safe (they're not).

Note: because of our big family size, many of my siblings are much older than I am, so I was a baby and a child while they were already adults having children. I often was either cared for by them, or when I got to be a teen and they were still having kids I looked after them at their homes.

Now that I am older and in a reasonable place in life, Trainwreck has started to see me differently. I am not really a "little sister" to her, I am an adult who could help her. This is new for me, and it hurts, because I could give her money, but I would have to KEEP GIVING HER MONEY. It wouldn't fix her at all. She's pretty sure money is mostly what she needs.

Part of me wants nothing to do with her at all, but the guilt makes me think I have to do something.

[sherlockishere]

Yes, yes, all of this! Do you ever wonder how you could grow up in this family and learn to be EXTRA careful to prevent an unwanted pregnancy, but yet your sisters couldn't? I wonder a lot about that.

I honestly don't know how it happens that some of us escape it. When I think about my own childhood, I know that even at 9 or 10 years old, I clearly saw that pushing our parents for something-- permission to do something, or a gift-- just made things worse in the end. But my brothers couldn't see that at all, so they were constantly pushing the limits, just aggravating the alcoholism and drug abuse that already existed in our parents. And then my brothers' selfishness and self-indulgence turned into their own drug abuse when they grew up.

I guess with alcohol and drugs, some could say it's genetics, though I really can't believe that's all of it. At some point, I dabbled enough in early college that I was in danger. But then I recognized it and completely stopped.

Sigh. Maybe I won't ever understand this thing-- how some of us have the insight to see the pattern early in life and then work hard to avoid disaster, whereas others don't. But I'm grateful to you every time you write about this pattern in your family. It normalizes my own struggle with this and makes me feel less alone with it.

[gottawonder]

I feel like I was a very...aware... child.

When I was very young, maybe five, I used to get angry at my sisters for smoking, for drinking coffee all the time, and somehow I was able to get the impression that they were sorry for this..kind of promiscuous, but that the real issue was that this behavior was about lack of self worth. I don't know that I could have explained it that way, but I know that I thought their relationships were not good for them.

I can look back, and I KNOW I was passing judgement on many aspects of their lives. Their relationships, the way they handled money, whether or not they could regulate their emotions, when they were being manipulative, when they weren't taking responsibility for their lives.

How would a kid see things like that and maybe not really be able to articulate it, but recognize it?

I think a lot of it was just SEEING it, and recognizing it as something you could choose not to do. I think my sisters fell into this way of thinking that either it wasn't happening, or they "couldn't help it". A lot of things "just happened" to them.

Some of it is having enough self-worth to say no to things that aren't positive, even if it means being liked less. Some people care more about being liked than they do about being safe or about accomplishing their goals.

I am glad that you share your own experiences too. I don't talk about my family much outside of with my husband or other family, because frankly, it's a lot.

I mean, it gets a little awkward to talk about my sister who poops in a coffee can because her septic system is frozen up.

As you say, there are times when I am not even sure how much of my life is really MY LIFE, because so much of it has been just a desire to be "not like my family". I've spent much of my adult life trying to make sense of my child hood, and to try to deal with the trauma, and the oddness of it.

I've gone over it a lot, to try to even figure out how much of it was "okay" and how much of it was not.

It's made me doubt myself a lot too, because how do I know I'm making good choices, other than it's different from what my family would have done?

It was really hard for me to marry my husband, and to believe it could be a good thing. You just feel like you're waiting for the other shoe to drop.

[ratunderpaper]

I can see why it would be difficult to be near someone as focused on despair and on despairing conditions.

[gottawonder]

Yes, not all of our conversations are bad, and even in the ones that drift off into despair didn't always start that way, and they don't always end that way.

Since things have gotten so dire for her in the last year or so, the conversations have gotten much worse.

As I've said, when her partner was alive a few years ago, her situation was different, I didn't hear from her as much, and even though she was the same person with lots of problems, she had at least SOMETHING in her life that was sometimes positive, or at least distracting.

I feel like this upcoming summer is going to be pivotal for her. I feel like her trailer will literally become unlivable this year, and she will be forced to leave by dire circumstances and her kids will probably have to get involved, or she will be forced to walk away from it and move to the local senior's lodge, or something very similar.

If she stays there another winter, I shudder to think.

[ratunderpaper]

Hopefully, her kids and closer relatives will get her to a safer place before next winter.

[gottawonder]

Yes.

I am trying to understand that I can't control her actions, and that it is not my sole responsibility to help her when it's gone too far.

If she can't clear it out herself, and won't accept the help offered by her kids when they offer to get her out, then there isn't much I can do for her. Her magical thinking of "I WANT to clear it all out myself and sell it so I can buy another little house" requires HER to act, not me.

[ratunderpaper]

Alas, hoarders have one main goal, and that is to get other people off their backs. They may not like some of their self-made circumstances, but they will resist any change that is foisted on them.

[gottawonder]

I will agree that to some degree, hoarding is about control. Not necessarily trying to control other people in their lives (but maybe?), but trying to have things that will fill all of their needs.

That's how I feel. If I like something, and it meant something to me, I keep it. Sometimes because it USED to be used a lot, and now I have memories that are sparked every time I see it, sometimes I keep things out of guilt because they cost money.

Some things I hate to toss because...well...they aren't exactly garbage or unusable, but no one else would likely use them, and it COULD be used again maybe..

I can get rid of books that weren't that good. I can get rid of movies that I won't likely watch again. I can get rid of clothes that others would use if they really don't fit me anymore if someone else could use them.

I get stuck on gray area things, like old sheets that still work and aren't torn, but dingy. They are not lovely, I could use nicer ones, but until these are RUINED I won't get rid of them, because they are too dingy for the thrift store.

Often I end up buying new sheets, but not getting rid of the old ones. Sigh. Same with bath mats.

I'll be honest, I REALLY wouldn't want my husband to start being critical of my clutter. Again, it would be fine if he got after me for things like having a horse blanket in the house, but if he just started to get after me for having too many clothes or too much stuff on top of my dresser, it would be hard on me.

Now, all of that said, if I had twenty garbage bags of kid's clothes, I could donate them in a heart beat because I DON'T HAVE KIDS. If I had bags and bags of ruined clothes full of mouse droppings and I never wore any of them and never planned on wearing them, they would be GONE. Sixteen boxes of wet magazines? GONE. Three old sofas? GONE. A mountain of those cheap plant pots that come from a green house? GONE!

Boxes and boxes of costume jewelry that I will never wear? Donated.

Over the years I HAVE gotten rid of things I cared about. A lot of knick knacks, I've given away tons of the pottery I've made, things I had as a kid. I sold a bunch of extra horse equipment a few years ago. It just isn't easy.

[ratunderpaper]

I don't really have mess or clutter to criticise; my hooey is all in the process of going from too many big boxes to small boxes or OUT. Old clothes are hard to part with, because they cost a lot and have been kept in good shape. I tend to wear t-shirts until they're nasty with holes. Towels are kept until threadbare.

I bought a big set of Brian Gluckstein fitted/flat sheets and pillow cases, virtually new, from a church sale last fall. They are the colour of dark chocolate cake and I hope they last a long time without looking dingy.

[gottawonder]

I agree that it's hard to part with nicer clothes that cost more. I will often hang onto them until it is quite clear that I will never wear them again.

I like the dark chocolate sheets. They make sense. Snow white sheets are lovely, but hard to keep looking nice.

[ratunderpaper]

I'm trying to limit the colours in the sulking room so that it is a calm haven. It's not easy when you're not an interior designer!
Dark chocolate brown is such a nice colour to climb into at the end of a long day. The walls are Fawn, and I haven't decided what to do about the trim or ceiling yet.
Curtains are pale fawn and deep grey velvet. Blinds are fawn There's bright artwork on the walls, and a gallery wall full of small pieces and photos. I've never felt comfortable in completely white rooms, unless in artfully-lit photographs.

I have a couple of sweaters that are a quarter-century old, and the quality is so good, they barely show any wear at all. But I don't dare roll around on the floor with the dog while wearing them.

[gottawonder]

Yes, my "nice" clothes get put on in anticipation of leaving the house to go to town or a social event. They don't get worn at home to get covered in hay or cat hair.

Shades of fawn and brown can be peaceful colors for bedtime.

[ratunderpaper]

The fawn has a light green cast to it.

Almost everything in the room is soft grey, charcoal, oak, and that greenish fawn. I have contrasting trim in white, but that's going to disappear soon. I tried stripping and sanding the door and mouldings, but they look unfinished as opposed to authentic.