Why don't you just help them clean?

As the child of a hoarder, I’ve been asked many versions of the same question by neighbors, relatives, and friends: How about you set aside some time and help your mom clean up?

I was asked this at age 7, age 12, age 18, age 33, and every age in between. I was asked by my friends’ parents, by my parents' friends, and by church members, some well-meaning and some exasperated and snarky. It always rankled because I tried so hard to be responsible for my mother’s mental illness, but when she doesn’t want help, what can a child do? When she only wants a certain kind of help and won’t cooperate with anything that challenges her mental illness, what can an adult child do? Am I obligated to sacrifice my mental health for someone who sacrificed my childhood safety and peace?

Hoarding is a complex mental disorder, not a lack of cleaning or organization skills. Even having a live-in, full-time housekeeper wouldn’t keep hoarding at bay. Hoarding is not ultimately solvable by anyone close to the hoarder, no matter how much they love them. The hoarder has to want to get treatment, as cliché as it sounds. 

What really needs to be done isn’t just cleaning; it's heavy lifting, hauling, throwing away, donating, and, once there’s actually enough room to store anything, organizing. What people often don’t understand about organization in a hoarded home is that it’s impossible to put things away “where they belong” because every single cupboard, surface, closet, and shelf is already stuffed full of clutter. You can’t organize chaos. You must first remove the source of the chaos. The source of the chaos in a hoarded home is mental illness.

As anyone with a hoarding parent can attest, “helping” the parent clean often leads to the parent melting down in anger and/or tears as their Stuff is moved or donated. (I capitalize Stuff because in my childhood home, the Stuff was just as much a member of our family life and dynamics as the human members of our family.) The Stuff always comes back, whether it’s from thrift stores or online shopping, estate sales or clothing boutiques, the piles and bags and boxes the child so carefully donated or sold or organized for their hoarding parent are always replaced. Sometimes they’re replaced the same day. I once cleaned for my mom while she went shopping. No matter how hard you fight, the Stuff creeps back even stronger than before, like the hoard has a mind and muscle of its own, a living Hydra determined to swallow the house whole. 

When my mom and stepdad moved out of my childhood home after I'd moved away for good, they needed multiple dumpsters just to clear out the actual trash and mold-damaged items. The stuff they wanted to keep required multiple truck-loads to take to their new home. That isn’t something a little cleaning can fix. (Unfortunately they’ve hoarded their new house too. That’s the nature of the disease.)

My mother was a stay-at-home mom to me (age 7), my little sister (age 2), and my little brother (newborn) when things really started to get ugly and bad in the house. We moved into a larger house shortly before my brother was born, and the house never really got unpacked or set up the right way. Combined with my mom’s postpartum depression, her hoarding became out of control and our lives were never the same. I was yelled at for throwing things away, even things that looked like obvious trash to me (old pamphlets and expired coupons). I was told not to move Mom’s Stuff. How can a child clean things she can’t move?

When I was around age 21, I visited their house and I was so disgusted by the filth in their fridge that I decided to clean it for them. I sat on a stool in front of the open fridge for nearly four hours, throwing out leftovers and expired products, scrubbing dried-on stains of various colors and sizes, and then, on my hands and knees, I scrubbed the bottom of the fridge where the worst debris and spills had collected. When I was finished it looked healthier, cleaner, more human, rather than feral. I asked them to please just wipe up spills inside the fridge as they happened instead of leaving them to dry.

A few weeks later I visited again and was horrified to see the fridge in a worse state than before: stuffed to bursting with containers and inedible food, spills, rotten milk, and zero of the organization I’d left them with. Stuff had won again.