Back me up on being the mean, mean mommy

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I was a sentimental keep everything kid. For various reasons my things were vary important to me. My mom used to go through my things and throw them out and it caused a serious rift in our relationship. It showed me...

....that she didn't care about what was important to me
....that she didn't know me very well to think that it would be okay to throw my stuff out (just because she wouldn't care about those things, then she assumed I wouldn't care about them either).
...that nothing of mine was really mine - that she felt she could do with it as she wanted
...that she had no respect for me (finding things you care about in the trash and knowing they were taken from your space and put there intentionally feels disrespectful).

In the end all her actions did was make me feel even more like keeping stuff, I just got better at hiding it in places she couldn't find. She still found things and threw them out assuming they were of no value since she didn't value them. It was the main reason I really stopped trusting her and no longer confided anything in her as I got into my teen years. I still went on to be a controlled hoarder, and still am, and her throwing out my stuff made it worse.

She gets mad because every time she comes to my house I tell her that she is not to throw a single thing out without my permission. This is no longer her space to do as she pleases and I will not let her continue to disrespect me that way now that I can have a voice. I don't allow her in the bedrooms or anywhere I have my 'stuff'. I don't trust her judgment of what has value to me.

I hope you got help at some point.

Your mother was going about handling it wrong, but it sounds like you might well have a problem. I hope you have found a safe therapeutic place to deal with it, especially if you have kids.

No, I haven't ever done therapy because it doesn't really interfere with my life. I just have too much stuff. My house is sanitary and most of my 'stuff' is in bins. There isn't rotting food, or dead animals or paths through piles. It is also contained to two rooms, neither of which are communal family spaces. I have a storage locker too so extra bins go there. I don't pick up trash and keep it and I throw out actual trash at home - the kids don't even really know I have too much stuff. I don't keep 'everything' - just far more than I need to.

Are you still bringing in more than you take out? If so, with that much of your home filled already, and a storage unit, you are on the road to much worse. I have seen it in a beloved family member and a friend's mother. It may not seem "bad" now, but it is, and if you don't get help now, it will only get harder to get help and harder to handle.

I know I am just an internet stranger, but I have fresh experience with the havoc this wreaks on families. Hoarding has already damaged your relationship with your mom. It has probably gotten to your marriage already, and it will get to your kids. If you don't get help, you make it far more likely for your kids to experience depression and anxiety and have a difficult, distant relationship with you in the long term.

It does seem to affect your life. It is a problem now. And you can get help.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Mom doesn't make kid tidy room regularly. Offers little to no direction on how room is to be kept.

Imposes out-of-character deadline.

Does not supervise for an hour.

And we're blaming the *kid* for being a "hoarder"?

This forum...

Your concerns would be valid if the child was 5. The child was 11. Mom's expectations were age appropriate.

I haven't supervised my girls cleaning their rooms since they were probably around 6 years old. Can an 11 year old in your world really not handle an hour of "unsupervised" time productively when given a specific task? That seems like really low expectations and a lack of responsibility to me.

My 6 year old can clean her room from hurricane status to near spotless in about 30 minutes, because the room is laid out well, everything has a home, and she's been taught since around 2 that putting her stuff away is her job. So yes, "clean your own room" is certainly age-appropriate.

That said, the reason my kid can do this at 6 is she's been asked, consistently, to do this, taught how, etc. It's not a foreign task to her. It's an everyday thing. You want to watch tv/play iPad/have treats/go to the ball? Clean your room first.

Not the case in OP's story. Also? "Here, I'll help you. Oh, you're not doing it right, well cancel all the things, then. I'm out." is a pretty ridiculous, overdramatic, entirely ineffective parenting strategy.

But the kid is the problem. Clearly. And we're asked to back up the OP's crap parenting.

I am the poster you responded to (my post is in bold) and I see where you're coming from with OP possibly expecting too much with too little support if cleaning the room wasn't already an expectation. I posted 17:50 laying out what I would do from here to address this issue if I were OP. My post that you responded to was more of a response to the idea that it is somehow bad to give a child an hour to try to work something out on their own if they haven't explicitly been taught. I don't necessarily think that's the case.

I don't think OP handled the situation perfectly, and I would handle it differently in the future if I were in her shoes, but I also don't think she was completely out of line or that the child was an innocent victim of horrible parenting. I think OP's DD made poor choices and received some possibly disproportionate but not truly harmful consequences.

[Anonymous]

If your daughter is clinging to trash, she may have a hoarding disorder. It is regarded as a form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, so you may wish to think about whether your daughter exhibits other symptoms of that disorder.

[Anonymous]

Op here. Just to be clear, I offered to help her clean from 10-1 knowing that three hours is our limit for this task. My daughter was the one who said no and emphatically begged to clean on her own from 10-11 before I came in. I agreed and reminded her of "how" to clean. Grab all the books and get them in the bookcase. Straighten up all the comics. Put all the uno cards in a neat pile. All dirty clothes in one spot. And I always, always tell her to start with grabbing a bag and throwing all the garbage in there. When I walked in at 11 she had done literally nothing at all. Not one thing. That is why I cancelled the activity. I did not expect the room to be anywhere close to spotless.

[Anonymous]

Although now I'm veering off topic, sort of, I want to address this issue of keeping and not wanting to throw things away.

I have a daughter age 6 who has these inclinations, too. It must be common.

I told her straight out that in life we cannot keep everything, because we would wind up with too much. Once our things start to spill on the floor and look very untidy, we know we have too much. That's when we have to make decisions. People who can't or won't decide and who can't or won't donate or throw away things they don't use can wind up living a stressful and dirty life. That is why my job as a mommy is to help my daughter figure out what she has space to keep and what she needs to give away or throw out.

We do talk about this quite a bit. "Let's go through our things." "Mommy is going to sort through the garage." "Christmas is coming, and we should make room for new things, and give away what we don't use anymore." "You want that toy, but do you have space for it? What will you clear out to make room?" And I do this: if my daughter doesn't clean up, I take a big bag and zoom through whatever's still on the floor, throw it in the bag, and put the contents on vacation. My dad did this, too--and I understood what it meant. Once after many, many warnings, he followed through with his ultimate threat: to donate the contents of the bag since it hadn't been sorted through. Two things I learned from that: (1) he meant what he said, and gave me lots of chances and (2) it didn't feel as bad as I thought it would to toss that bag into the donation pile.

For our kids, we have a place for special sentimental things, too: "time capsule boxes" where she can place anything that won't rot and that feels special. I pull the time capsules down now and then so that we can look at them. Homework and old tests that she is proud of get archived in a special three-ring binder.