And do they need to figure out what is the truth behind what they are being told? i ask because my niece, my sister’s daughter, has decided to talk to a therapist about her issues, and she has told my sister what she said to the therapist, and they are heavily…shall we say shaded? statements. My sister is upset by this and wants to be able to set the record straight. She doesn’t feel her daughter will be adequately helped if they therapist takes these statements at face value.
Here are the facts: Their house is messy. My sister is a huge procrastinator on things, and we were brought up to not throw away anything that could be useful (Depression-era mom who grew up poor). So there is a lot of clutter. And my sister had a lot of hobbies and interests that related to her teaching job, so there are materials for school as well. So the dining room table, the last time I was there, is stacked with mail and magazines and cookbooks and fabric and bills and owner’s manuals and newspapers and everything. When there is a desperate need to straighten up, they have a tendency to shove it all into a box and shove it in the spare bedroom.
My niece is a photographer. Her dad, when he was living there, had all sorts of tools and computers stuff and DVDs, and he took very little with him when he moved in with his boyfriend. My nephew took very little of his stuff when he went into the miltary, so there are games and toys and books and clothing still in his room. My niece builds props for her photography jobs, and leaves the residue all over the house…one day it is cut-up pieces of cardboard, the next day you’ll come home to glitter and paint everywhere. Clothing strewn about. The bathroom is a clutterfest of makeup and hairtools and wet towels…and all this from a girl who rarely bathes and infrequently brushes her teeth.
No one helps clean up, and my sister is overwhelmed. Over the past few years, she has dealt with her husband sort-of coming out as gay, leaving the home, and moving across town, though he stops by every day to pick up the lunch she makes him. Then she got diagnosed with breast cancer, and had to go through the surgery and chemo with very little assistance from husband and kids. Oh, the daughter would make a big show of helping in front of her friends and on Facebook, but when push came to shove…not so much. My sister’s health then took a hit from some bursitis and arthritis issues that were exacerbated by the chemo, and she now can barely walk and uses a scooter to get around while she teaches at a very stressfilled high-school. She’s hoping for a total knee replacement this summer if she can lose some weight. Their finances are rocky, what with two households being supported, and their house is older and things keep needing repairs. In the last two weeks they have had to replace a toilet and the subflooring in one bathroom AND buy a new refrigerator.
So. Lots of background to let you visualize the situation. Untidy, cluttered, aging house, little help from her daughter, criticism from the husband, ill-health…but my sister is not a hoarder. She is more than willing to sort through boxes of stuff, send things off to Goodwill, have garage sales, throw trash away…she just is exhausted and physically limited. She rented a storage space to meet her husband’s ultimatums about clearing through stuff, but she can’t physically carry heavy boxes down the steps to the car and into the storage locker, and the son and daughter will rarely take a load over for her…in fact, her daughter has taken almost all the storage boxes she bought and used them for her photography studio.
What my sister will not do, and I support her in this, is just load up boxes and take them to the dump without going through them. That is her family’s “solution” to the problem…just throw all your stuff away, Mom, because nothing of yours matters to us. But in those boxes are tax papers, family photos, savings bonds, recipes, bills, financial records, the paperwork for the house and the cars and medical records she needs for making her insurance claims…it’s not trash. She steadfastly refuses to let them just “hire a dumpster and clean everything out”. She leaves for work at 6am everyday, teaches a full day, and then usually has either doctor’s appointments or grading and classroom prep to do for the next day, and her daughter demands that she run errands for her. She falls asleep the minute she sits down at night most nights. And some nights she has to deal with her daughter flying into rages and having emotional meltdowns…hence the therapist.
Which brings us full circle to the daughter telling the therapist that my sister has OCD and refuses to throw away a single piece of paper. Gee, darling niece, what is in the bags of trash my sister painfully drags to the curb each week? She told the therapist my sister is a hoarder…this from a girl who had a month’s worth of half-filled drink cups in her room and has a fit if my sister tries to go in her room to clean them out before bugs get in them. My sister is just so worried that the therapist is going to believe these heavily edited statements and not get the real situation. My sister readily admits that her house is not in a fit state, and that she procrastinates, and that she is way behind on cleaning through and organizing. But she also deals with coming downstairs at 5 am and finding a sink full of dishes and food that her daughter has created during the night and left behind, after my sister has stayed up late to clean the kitchen.
My sister has set up an appointment to see, at long last, her own therapist. I’ve been urging her to do this for years, ever since her husband started sort-of coming out. Instead, she has called me nearly every single morning and most nights to cry on my shoulder and vent. Between her family issues and the horrible high-schoolers she has to deal with, I start my mornings with doom and gloom that I can’t fix. i told her if she is concerned about what her daughter is telling the therapist, maybe she should ask for joint sessions.
So what does a therapist do? Will they accept my niece’s statements about my sister’s “problems” at face value and base their diagnosis of the source of my niece’s issues on something that is just not true? My daughter had friends who had mothers who DID have true OCD, and dealing with that can mess a girl up. But that is NOT what my niece has had to deal with at home. Clutter, yes. Hoarding and OCD? No. A mother who has been too lenient about requiring her child clean up after herself? Yes. A family in financial and emotional stress? Yes.
Sorry this is so long. I guess I needed to vent, too!