My parents are fucked up. Our house is so full of stuff that you can barely pull out any of the dining room chairs to take a seat before it bumps into a piece of furniture. We have a huge filing cabinet and tool chest/organizer taking up like a third of the space in the dining room. A filing cabinet they haven’t opened in probably fifteen years. Nearly every horizontal surface in the house is covered with unsorted papers of some kind.
My dad has ADHD and the house is full of half-finished projects and renovations. At work, his office desk is covered in a mountain of papers and books. It takes him forever to find anything. He agrees that the house needs to change, but he expends absolutely no effort to make it so. He leaves everything in the hands of my mom, as he did with our parenting.
I think my mom might be a hoarder. She recently added shelves in the hallway such that only one person can walk through it at a time, and still have to twist their shoulders to squeeze through. She has eleven pairs of flip flops and slippers that are too worn out for her to wear, but won’t throw away because someone, somewhere could use them.
She’s always taking stuff out of the trash can that we had throw away, like my sister’s hair ties. She destroys them now before discarding. For a month I used a leg brace (~$30 from Amazon) for a broken ankle. When I had healed, it was falling to pieces and soaked with half-dried sweat. I threw it directly into the bin outside. My mom took it out, because “someone could use it somewhere”.
My parents are paying a total of probably $400/mo on at least three storage units filled with junk they never use.
My father had a huge metal shed built on the lot of property he has in the rural outskirts of town. It is filled to the brim with his father’s junk, including a band saw from 1924 and a rusting mixing bowl from a WWII-era battleship kitchen that’s five feet in diameter. His father has been dead for 24 years. My dad told me he has nightmares about his father asking “where is my stuff?” He obviously needs therapy, but considers it a waste of money and hates rich doctors. My mom agrees that he needs emotional help, but has never talked to him about it.
I told my mom that the single thing that she could do to help my depression would be to discard as many things as she could bare to. I tried to introduce her to Marie Kondo’s method, but she reacts with heartbreak whenever I criticize her style of house organization. She retorts with “our house is just too small for the five of us (mostly true); I’m doing the best I can.”
I want to have a family meeting so I play this video, and communicate my feelings.
Edit1:
A silver lining is that the house isn’t “gross” dirty. There’s no more than a normal amount of filth and dust, and the dishes and carpets are cleaned regularly. And there isn’t much stuff on the little open floor space that we do have; all the junk is piled onto desks or tables. We have way too many end tables.
Edit2:
This may be a tangent, but whenever I try to express my feelings, my mom interjects to minimize it (I think that’s the right term).
Example: When I moved back in with my parents after financial ruin two years ago (six months later my brother would do the same), I threw all my belongings in a hurry into dozens of plastic totes. No organization; it was just to make it through the move. Once home, we packed most of my totes into a storage unit (I’m part of the problem, but at least I know it). There is a lot of stuff in there that I need periodically, but which would be too much trouble to fish out.
I told my mom that my mom that I wanted to sort through all of it, because having my belongings packed away that way gave me anxiety. The only response she could give was “it’s not that disordered! The stacks of totes are very orderly.”
I never get validation. It’s always “oh sweety, there’s no need to feel that way!”
My parents aren’t as bad as yours but my Mom will basically never do any cleaning. My Dad will tidy after himself in day-to-day stuff but anything like papers, etc. he refuses to organize so he has car repair/part receipts all over the place and he refuses to organize and then they have a loop where they leave shit for years until me or someone else cleans it and then because of that WE are on the hook to remember where everything is and get it for him. They’re like baby-hoarders although they’d probably be full-blown if they didn’t have 4 children periodically cleaning the house out over the years. My mom’s weak-willed and won’t clean even if she wants to but my Dad refuses to get rid of stuff usually. I don’t know if there’s any solution other than having numerous people on your side to either clean it yourself or tell them to fuck off when they melt down over getting rid of the 2nd coffee maker they haven’t used in 7 years.
Don’t do this.
I dunno how to do it in a good way, but I know that the last thing people in a tight spot want is to be ganged up on and having their shit ripped away from them be it drugs, a gaming console, food, what have you. It is a recipe for disaster. At best you get angry people, distrust and distress. Shit sucks but this isn’t the way to do it.