Um.
YAY!!! Tahssa wins!
Gold star, etc.
Thanks to everyone who has responded, especially those who can sympathize – and most especially those who just said “yuck.” That’s really all I was after, just some “ick factor” acknowledgment.
Lisacurl, you’re my new hero. 
That’s the only criteria I provided, isn’t it? I’m sorry that your Christmas involved more disgusting things than filth and roaches.
I filed my complaint for divorce on the Friday before I left for Christmas, and we went in and signed papers today.
I feel disgusted.
Because those that are judging don’t have a parent who lives in filth. I know what it’s like to clean the entire apartment AGAIN. After a certain number of years, I gave up. I realized that it truly is a part of her mental illness and she is not “just a pig”. She’s sick and no amount of my cleaning is going to change that.
So now she lives with the bugs, the mice and multiple cats. I visit for very limited amounts of time and shake my coat when I leave. :eek:
You’re not alone.
Yep. Years ago, I went to stay at my mom’s house while she was in the hospital. Itching to do something, anything for her (since I couldn’t speed her healing), I cleaned up her kitchen. My mom didn’t live in extreme squalor by any means, but she was a borderline hoarder. Every surface of her kitchen was covered in ketchup packets, coffee-stained napkins, and paper salt and pepper envelopes which she brought home from fast-food joints and saved up against imaginary poverty (she was a depression baby). By the looks of them, some were years old. I swept them all into the trash and scrubbed and polished the counters.
Boy, was she mad when she got home. Far from seeing it as helping her with housekeeping, she as good as accused me of stealing them from her. I learned my lesson.
If it’s any consolation, my furniture is spotted with bloody mucus and therefore I just had to have the cat’s infected anal glands expressed.
Children risen from filth, unite! 
One of my closest friends “came out” to me as a child of a squalor mom only after we’d been friends for years. We hugged like sisters and shared war stories.
Omigosh, teela brown! I did the same thing when my mom was sick with the flu about seven years ago. I started cleaning her kitchen, and I swear, she dragged herself out of her sickbed to scream at me for doing it.
“The SDMB: Where smart people come to judge others.”
I was very surprised to see one person get snooty towards the OP. That there were multiple posters who took that path, I can hardly believe.
Last Wednesday evening, my 10-week pregnant wife had a rush of blood that sent us in a panic to the emergency room. There, she had an ultrasound that told us that the baby had stopped developing at 6 weeks, and there was no heartbeat. Since then, we’ve been waiting for the miscarriage to begin. We were given some medication (which had to be inserted vaginally) to jumpstart the process, but she didn’t want to do that until after all the Christmas stuff was over with.
So Christmas night, I inserted those pills into her for her. The (very painful) cramps began quite soon, and at about 4 am, she passed the fetal tissue. I collected it for her and put it in a plastic bag in the freezer so we can bring it in with us at our appointment Friday morning.
Not an experience I want to repeat.
So very sorry, Smeghead.
I spent all of Christmas Day blowing my nose. I had a stack of used tissue next to my desk until two hours ago when I felt well enough to tidy a bit. I think Roaches are worse.
And now my Wife has the cold too, so I won’t be getting any “me” time for the next few days while I take care of her. Not to mention no Christmas sex
Condolences, Smeghead. That’s a brutal situation at any time, and even more so during the holidays.
Misnomer, is your mother a compulsive hoarder? Just wondering since I have a friend who is, and she can’t have anyone in her house unless she’s desperate for plumbing help or something. Nobody wants to go in there anyway.
To be clear: I am not judging your mother, nor pretending to know anything about her situation.
I am judging your determination that your violin’s tune be “Look how wretched my situation is. Could there be a worse one?”
Yes, there could be. And no, there is no excuse for not improving what you can and letting the rest go. I am sure you will find people to join your pity party, but I will not be one of them. If you want to make a positive difference in the world, describe your Mom’s situation, and what you did within your power to improve it.
If you just want to beat the bushes for fellow sufferers in a contest for who is the most miserable, have at it.
Smeghead, I’m so sorry.
Oh, man. Smeg, sorry to hear about your really lousy holidays.
Smeghead, your Christmas wasn’t more disgusting but was certainly more horrifying – indescribably so. I am deeply sorry for your loss.
Heh! One of the most frustrating parts is that when I was a kid, my father’s influence in the house kept things under control – and then my influence did (after they divorced). But once I moved out of her house it started going downhill, and it’s been a slow, steady slide for the past 13 years. It’s only been in recent years that I’ve realized this is how she has always been, it’s just that there used to be other people in the house to mitigate the effects.
Meh, even that is more than I planned to say on the subject, but whatever.
I often wonder that, myself, but really don’t know.
Well, gee, thanks for giving me permission to have this thread. You are now free to fuck off.
You post an extremely vague, one sentence OP in the Pit. Many people live in cluttered houses, and “filthy” could have a million different meanings. And in many parts of the country, roaches are impossible to get rid of, no matter how clean your house is.
Why exactly did you post this in the Pit? Sorry, but what kind of responses did you expect? That OP could well have been satirical bullshit. If there is some backstory here, be aware not all readers may know it.
I for one read it and thought “so what, I have no idea what this person is talking about.”
When “cluttered,” “filthy,” and “roaches” all appear in the same sentence, describing the same place, only the willfully obtuse would call that “vague.”
I posted this in the Pit because I had a crappy experience yesterday, and needed to vent. I expected responses from a) people who had a more disgusting Christmas than I did, whatever their definition of “disgusting” (like Diosa’s post); b) people who could relate, and/or c) people who would get that I was just looking for a sympathetic “yuck” or two.
Well, duh! If I wanted “all readers” to know the backstory, I would have posted it, wouldn’t I? I didn’t feel it to be necessary for a brief Pit thread, when the point was what I’d experienced, not the story around it.
So why didn’t you simply ignore the thread?
Thank your lucky stars you don’t. I understood it right off.