A personal essay,
Drowning.
About the meaning of home.
Drowning.
Written in 2019, updated in 2023, & still a work in progress.
It was 7 A.M in Kansas City, an hour before my seventh grade English class. I awoke to my blaring alarm and the feeling of warmth on my face, struggling to open my eyes to the sharp morning light piercing through the cracks in my blinds. With a groan, I swung my legs over the side of the pink princess bunk bed I had slept in since preschool, preparing to walk across my newly “spotless” room. I had never been a morning person, but as my feet hit the stained surface of my green carpet for what might’ve been the first time, I smiled, admiring the progress that had been made over the past couple of months. Until my eyes drifted over the Winnie the Pooh wallpaper still donning my walls and the calamity of mismatched baby furniture pushed into every corner, and I felt an unavoidable sense of dread. It’s good enough, I told myself. It has to be good enough.
It wasn’t.
My mother is a hoarder. Raised in a house-turned-obstacle course, I navigated around the trash that defined me for sixteen years.
From the outside, I looked pretty normal. I was just like any other kid playing hide-and-go-seek on the playground in elementary school, or going to friends’ houses for sleepovers in middle school. You could always find me with a book, or walking the hallways with a smile that suggested I was happy to be at school, or just happy in general. I worked hard and got good grades. I wore nice clothes and grew up in a nice neighborhood. And my parents were still together, both working, and active in the community: my mom was a beloved teacher and tutor who was revered for being “motherly” and my dad was a lawyer who never stopped cracking jokes. If anything, I was lucky. My friends would talk about how much they loved my parents, and I would nod my head in agreement, commenting on how close we were. But one look at my beaten down home with a spider-web infested front porch and a patchy, unwatered lawn, and it was obvious something was amiss.
When I was little, around the age of four, the hoarding was bearable. We still had a ridiculous number of “things:” the hundreds of high heels that littered my mom’s closet were excused as a collection, the thousands of beanie babies “decorating” our home were promised to be valuable someday, and the millions of useless trinkets forming mountains on our book shelves were claimed to have a purpose but never did. It was by no means socially acceptable, but despite the clutter, we could still function like a relatively normal family, spending time together and watching movies in the living room or eating dinner at the dining room table. I was incredibly close with my three older brothers, bonded by our unusual living situation and their own personal responsibility to protect me, the “baby.” They watched over me constantly, ensuring I was never put in harm's way. They entertained me at every turn, distracting themselves from the mess that was our home in the process and peppering in an occasional “joke” about how we should "accidentally” burn it to the ground when no one was in it. It wasn’t ideal by any means, but we were happy, and that was all that really mattered. But with each passing year came a greater accumulation of stuff - and soon, we were drowning in it.
By the time I was seven, my mother’s hoarding problem was the neighborhood secret that everyone knew yet all pretended not to, and her embarrassment quickly became my own.
Pretty please, can I come inside? Why do I have to wait outside, please show me your room, my childhood best friend would beg, peering longingly at the darkened structure as I ran inside to get a jacket. I’m sorry, you just can’t, okay? I would say with immense shame, wishing more than anything in the world that she could.
My friend was so young, so she didn’t understand, at least not then. But her parents definitely did. My house stuck out like a sore thumb amidst the manicured green lawns and gardens on every corner. One look through the window and you would see our Christmas tree was still up in August. There was really no use in trying to hide it, at least not from the people in our neighborhood. But that didn’t stop my siblings and I from waiting panickedly at the door until our friends arrived to pick us up, ensuring they wouldn’t have an opportunity to reach the front porch and see what was hidden behind closed doors. That didn’t stop my siblings and I from peeking through the blinds of our bedroom windows every time the doorbell rang, our eyes scanning the driveway with paranoia, trying to determine whether or not it was okay to answer the door. That didn’t stop my siblings and I from carrying around the weight of this secret every single day like our lives depended on it - because in some ways it did.
You can’t tell anyone, okay? My oldest brother said anxiously. I could tell he wasn’t joking around anymore. The air had gotten thin and my body felt rigid.
You could get taken away. It isn’t safe for you to live here. Do you understand me? I need to know that you understand me. He was scaring me but I nodded my head, saying I understand with my eyes. He was crying, and gave me a hug. I’m so sorry, he said.
I whispered it’s okay as I looked down at my pink polka dot sneakers, but I knew that it wasn’t. I was eight then, and he was 19. It was the first time he had been back to the house since leaving for college. I knew it would be the last.
My mom is an incredibly high functioning woman, who always makes time for work, family, and her social life. She would drive me and my siblings to soccer practice and help out at my elementary school fundraiser in the few hours she had between work and attending “girl’s night out” with her friends. She would sing me a lullaby every night before bed when I was younger, never once missing a day. She always presented herself as the hardworking, happy mom who had everything together, because in so many ways, she did. So everyone ignored how growing up, her dad had remarried 4 different times, waiting long enough until she was attached to divorce and wed someone new. Everyone ignored how as a kid, her mom had thrown away her belongings if she left them out when she left for school, locking her in her room for hours at a time as her punishment. Everyone ignored how at age sixteen, she ran away from home to escape the coldness of her mother, while her dad moved on with his other family.
No one acknowledged how her tendency to hold onto things was actually emblematic of a much larger problem, one characterized by a severe case of “Hoarding Disorder,” a mental illness known for being misunderstood and incredibly difficult to overcome. They all turned a blind eye to the fact that she was actually a woman, who at home, was on the brink of a full blown hoarding epidemic racked by irrationality, misery, and a refusal to get help. Everyone somehow forgot that in reality, she was a woman barely able to stay afloat, trying to hold up the mountain of her belongings that had already started to tumble. And I was a little girl, wanting to tear them all down despite loving her mother so deeply.
By the time I was in middle school, the hoarding had extended from potentially valuable items to absolutely everything. The house was a prison, and anything that entered it would never be allowed back out. Everything in the house had value, and we couldn’t even take the trash out without my mom fearing something important had been thrown away. I need to go through that, she would say hastily, ripping the overflowing trash bag from my hands. I tried to argue with her at first, but she would just yell, overcome with fear, her own thoughts turning against her. I gave up on trying to reason with her, turning my life into a race to see how many items I could throwaway before she got home. But I could never have thrown away enough to make a difference, so eventually, I gave up on that too. Before long, the house wasn’t even a home, but a contained landfill. The hallway I had once taken to get to my bedroom was now an incredibly narrow pathway, mounds of deteriorating cardboard boxes, rotting trash bags, and books flanking either side all the way up to the ceiling. My green carpet was no longer visible - virtually any object from used soda cans to baby clothes that hadn’t fit me in 10 years coated the surface of my floor, and my ability to get to my bed was dependent on how well I could climb. Our front hall was littered with random dressers and tubs, stacked high with years old doodles, molding empty bottles of who knows what, and disgustingly dirty dishes on every unoccupied surface. Mail and pieces of trash covered the ground, so worn into the floor from being walked over, it could have been mistaken for the floor itself. By now, I had stopped wishing for a clean home when blowing out my birthday candles.
Every single time I entered my home, I felt alone. My oldest brother had just graduated from college, my middle brother had just entered college, and my youngest brother never left his room, only speaking to scream at my mom - he too, was about to leave for college. The distance between us was only growing. Our kitchen had become too hard to access, so we ate fast food in separate rooms for every meal, because there was also no longer a place for us all to sit together. My dad sat by listlessly, having given up on finding a solution years ago after hundreds of failed attempts. At some point along the way, he had stopped cracking jokes. Soon I never left my room either, a barrier of trash isolating me from my family and the rest of the world. I couldn’t have friends over, so my only company became the characters in my books: transporting myself from snowy Kansas plains to exotic 9 3⁄4 platforms in an effort to be anywhere else.
When the isolation became unbearable as I entered seventh grade, I made it my personal mission to clean my room. I succeeded, in theory. It could never actually be clean, with a cradle and a rocking chair from 12 years ago taking up a majority of the space. But at least you could see the green carpet. After months of abusive fights and threats from my mother, I had finally removed every single item that was not mine from that room - and completely destroyed my relationship with her so I could have just a fraction of a home. But as it turns out, a fraction wasn’t enough.
You should have divorced her! I shrieked at my dad through my sobs, shoving clothes into a bag with trembling hands. He didn’t say anything. He looked defeated.
I fucking hate living here!, I had yelled at my mom from my crumpled, crying form on the floor. I was screaming out for help but she couldn’t hear me. Her illness screamed louder.
Then don’t. She had said, with a gaze so cold it’s like she didn’t even know who I was. Ripping open my bedroom door to expose the horror that lived beyond, she had stormed out of the house. My small frame was struggling to stay upright as I gathered my things, and my dad had begged me to stay. But every single body cavity felt as though it was being flooded, flooded with resentment for a mother that I felt placed more value on objects than her family. So I left. Only for a few months at first. But eventually for good.
I still carry around immense guilt about the day I left and never looked back. I was sixteen the day that I officially walked away from my parents, leaving them in a place out of some dark, twisted nightmare. Trapped. I spent two years living with a friend, desperately trying to forget about them, and replace the home and parents that I felt had left me no other choice but to leave them behind. To abandon them in the way that I felt they had abandoned me. But no matter how much my friend’s family welcomed me with open arms, no matter how hard they tried to love and treat me like family, the void in my chest that my family had once filled remained empty. I felt alien in what was supposed to be “my home,” knowing that it too was only temporary. My friend tried to be my parents and my home all at once, but it was a role far too large for one sixteen year old girl to fill. So I left, yet again. This time on my own.
It took living by myself for me to understand that my mom was truly sick. That she had been abandoned too. It was in the process of getting rid of practically all of my personal belongings that I realized how the weight of all of my mother’s stuff was crushing her, flattening her to the ground like the trash ingrained into the floors of our home. And it was in the moment that I sat, staring out my apartment window with only a few dishes, my favorite books, and a few pairs of clothes sitting at my feet, that I knew what it felt like to be free.
I’m so sorry, Mary. I really do love you. I know you probably don’t believe me. But I do. She said tearfully over the phone. It was the first time I had answered in weeks.
I know, Mom. I had said. I knew she meant it.
I really am going to get help this time. I promise. She had said this before, and I had known she would say it again.
Okay, Mom. I said, hanging up the phone. But this time, for some reason, I believed her.
I sit here now, four years after I originally wrote this, in shock of how much has changed: My house, which had been at the center of so much suffering, now turned to rubble; My relationship with my parents, once falling apart, now rebuilt; And their marriage, formerly based on tearing each other down, returning to its foundation: friendship.
My parents had our house torn down in 2019, the same year I was asked to leave my friend’s house and was on a desperate search for a place I could call home. The same year I found such a place for the first time, in a small one bedroom apartment that was wholly mine - for the summer. The same year I went to college, and my mom developed a drinking problem severe enough to match the grief she felt after losing our house and everything that had been inside: finally suspended above her belongings, yet drowning in alcohol.
It was then that I finally understood what people meant when they said a house is not a home.
It was then that I realized that what I had always wanted was for my mom to be okay, to make it to her next birthday, to meet my future children.
It was then that I knew that my parents are my home, and I will do anything to keep it afloat.
Afterword
I read this essay back from a place of far greater forgiveness and compassion than when the majority of it was written in 2019, and even when it was updated in 2023. It is safe to say that my perspective has shifted with time, and that this story remains unfinished. I plan to continue writing and editing it until it feels true to who I am, and my relationship with my mom, today.