When is enough, simply enough?

The title is a rhetorical question... on two levels.  I will start with the larger question.

In the past few days, an 11 year old boy was found by a deputy in North Carolina.  He was handcuffed to the porch, and had a dead chicken around his neck.  The video on the story can be viewed here.  You might be saying... "How terrible... Lisabeth... how does this relate?" Bear with me a minute.  If you have the iPad or iPhone app, look at it on CNN/US.  Also, in an AP link that for some reason is eluding me... the information contained in the initial CNN mobile site story is there.  So, between the 3 stories referenced here, and the countless others I have seen over the past little bit, the "Cliff's Notes' are as follows:

• The perpetrators are both 57 years old.
• They have 4 adopted children, and one foster child.
• The foster child was the one who was handcuffed to the porch with the dead chicken around his neck.
• The woman in the case is a SUPERVISOR at the area DSS.  She is a Department of Social Services SUPERVISOR... Let that sink in for a minute, eh?
• The police officer that made this discovery was actually enroute to another house when he spotted this.  This was a discovery of misadventure.
• The man was not cooperative upon being contacted, and one of the kids opened the door and released a dog that chased the officer to his car.
• When the officer returned, the child was in the house, the chicken was on the porch...
• In the CNN mobile app this morning (11/17/2013) both a law enforcement official and a member of the press stated that the situation was one of utter misery and squalor.  They remarked on the animals running in and out, and the farm animals roaming on the property.  The entire place stunk of feces and urine, and there was lots of junk...

So- in a word... HOARDERS.  And no one said the word.  And the woman?  In the management chain of DSS.  Wonder how many other children she damned to a life in the shadow of the hoard?  Besides the 5 that are now in CPS custody out of state.  

The upshot is, until all of us as community members make our elected officials, our members of law enforcement, our first responders, et al aware that we consider this to be a form of child maltreatment, and we continue to advocate for the children, there is little hope of a child escaping the hoard without significant trauma, and some do not escape at all.

What can we do?  Advocate.  Loudly.  Many of us, vociferously.  We can contact our housing multidisciplinary teams.  We can contact the Area Offices on Aging, find Hoarding Task Forces, or demand they be assembled, and demand that the focus not be solely on the hoarding person, but on on those in the home as well.

So... switching gears slightly.  I know I have been rather 'on' or 'off' since my surgery in August.  I am still healing, and long story short, things have continued to not be what I would call 'linear'.  

Some of the challenges I have been dealing with include:

• Continuing to lose muscle mass and drop in weight.  I went down to under 112lbs without trying to.
• Attempting to catch up and dig out at work, and it has been hellishly busy, and I am still buried from 2 months off.
• I had an allergic reaction because I am an idiot, (I ate turkey pepperoni despite a text warning me as I was flying low from NY to my best friend's home for his daughter's 3rd birthday party.  I saw the gist of it, but did not connect the dots.  Luckily, I caught it within 3 minutes, purged the 2 slices, and got liquid Benadryl caps that I opened and swallowed immediately.  No epi pen needed... this time.  Now however, I am hoarse, (had NO VOICE for 3 days) and appear to be dead with a cold, although it is not.
• Went to my specialist who was not aware of the events since June and July.  She FREAKED on me, screaming at me that I was underweight (duh) and needed to gain 12 pounds NOW.  (Double duh).  She disagreed with some of the surgeons decisions, and set me up for nasty and unpleasant tests.  On the positive side, she took me off 2 meds, decreased one in half, and said I should start gaining weight.  I have!  I am staying between 115 and 117 for right now, and I am actually hungry.  And eating!  And now I actually have some energy, and my sleep/wake schedule is resuming somewhat a normal rhythm.  I am losing my 'bracket face' and have resumed the gym, today I did three miles on the stepper.  Not much, but a start.
• My nerve damage issues have continued to be on or off.  Travel, eating, illness, med changes... it has been UGLY.
• I had a thyroid/parathyroid tumor scare.  It is not totally resolved, but it is not the frightening issue presented to me last week.
• Once I am back to near 100%, I will be scheduled for another bone scan, and hopefully, a genetic test to look for BRCA 1, BRCA 2, and other cancer indicators.

Again, I do not need a 'wahbulance' but life has not been all rainbows and puppy dogs for Lisabeth, and I did not expect it to be that way.  I am grateful to be here, to be back at work, to be cancer free.

So... where the piss off at my hoarding mother dearest occurs... 

Last night I attended the wedding of friends.  It was beautiful, and fun.  The reception ended 6 hours later, and since it was relatively early, and I had not talked to her in a few days, I called.  

The call consisted mainly of:

• Her commenting on how hoarse I sound, and using that as a springboard to talk about her many maladies and to ask bizarre questions.  I will spare you the questions, but they are of the type that comes from someone with nothing else to do but look at every bump, lump, and excretion of her body, and pathologize it.
• She commented on the 'actress' (GAH!) that had her 'stuff' removed due to her mother dying of 'that'.  She meant Angelina Jolie, the actor and human rights activist, and her mother's death from Ovarian cancer... and her being tested for the breast cancer gene, and getting a prophylactic bilateral mastectomy, hysterectomy and her ovaries, etc. removed.  I made the DIRE MISTAKE of commenting that I would be doing the testing soon and might have similar decisions to make (not commenting that she could have done this under her insurance at no cost and refused a few years ago).  She was appalled, and started her BS about breast implants, cancer, and etc.  I cut the discussion off brutally.
• She said she had something to tell me that was not pleasant, was disgusting, and I knew she was going to turn to discussing her poo.  Again, I will save you the unsavory particulars... but she asked if I was still having 'trouble' (referring to my partially paralyzed colon).  I very quickly and acidly told her I. DID. NOT. WANT. TO. TALK. ABOUT. IT.  She responded with a rebuke that she is just trying to be helpful, and plowed on with her 'discussion' that I would clog my toliet up like she did today, and then attempted to go into the details of the 'event' and its particulars that caused it, her phone calls to plumbers, the recommendation to buy an acid product (that we have at my shelter BTW) and how she used vinegar to unstop it.  I hung up on her.  

Not that this is to the level of anything near the hoarders who severely abused that child.  But- one thing is similar, and it is this amazing sense of entitlement that they do not have to follow anyone's set of boundaries.  They are above or beyond the law, society's conventions, and the boundaries of appropriateness.  It is always about them, what they want, what they experience, their priorities, and their screwed up narcissistic perceptions.  

What was a lovely evening filled with love, fun, food, music and laughter was eroded somewhat in just a few minutes on the phone.  I should have known better.  When will I learn?  And when is enough, enough?  

Dysfunction flourishes in silence.  Abuse grows in secret.  Keeping the secret... protecting the hoard.  After over 44 years, I am done being silent and keeping the status quo.  

Thanks for reading.

What is in a name- especially my name? The second generation replacement child...

Last week I had the pleasure of spending time with some of my friends who are Children of Hoarders.  While we are together, we laugh, we play, we come together like family.  We also share experiences from time to time.

We were at a wonderful barbecue place in NOLA, and there were 7 or 8 of us sharing dinners, appetizers, drinks, laughing and telling stories.  I mentioned something and did not think all that much about it...

I was speaking to my respect for my mother.  I know from the past 60-something posts here it would seem that I have little to none for her.  That is not entirely true.  My mother survived a horrendous childhood of incest, domestic violence, and running away to have her baby in an unwed mother's home in the early 1950's.  She was not going to give her pedophile father another child to abuse.  

I get chills when I think of her hiding her pregnancy, planning her escape, and after the birth of her child, giving that baby to the nuns, and being summarily returned to her parents where her hell on earth escalated until she turned 21 and escaped.  

I did not know that I had a 1/2 sibling until I was in my late 20's, in the mid-1990's.  And, in a story for another time, the news was delivered in the most convoluted, screwed up, controlled way ever.  But my mother asserted that my dead father knew, and was okay with everything.  I doubted it at that time, because my dad had made some comments about pregnancy that would be insensitive at best, cruel at worst, if that were the situation.  Dad may have shared my sick and dark sense of humor, but intentionally cruel he was not.  

About 10 years ago, my 1/2 sister shared a secret with me, a secret that she and my aunt had been hinting at that they would tell me 'after my mother was gone.'  I finally got tired of the dramatic foreshadowing and stated that they either needed to tell me or to keep it to themselves, because I was done with the bullsh*t.  

So my sister told me.  Apparently my name is recycled.  I am also a replacement child.  She secured her original birth certificate, and the name given to her by my mother was my first and middle name.  I guess when the hoarders are in the narcissism of hoarding, others do not exist except as a support to the person who hoards.

I flashed to a conversation with my father at one of our family graveyards in a rural town about 2 hours east of my hometown.  I might have been 9 or 10 at the oldest.  We were visiting his father's grave with his mother, and I spotted a small stone that stood to the side, and it simply was inscribed 'Infant Grey'.  I asked my father about it...

Dad- who is that?

"It is my older brother.  He died during birth, many years before I was born."

Why did he not have a name?

"He would have, Lisabeth.  [Looking away and speaking in a strained voice]... He would have had my name."

He would have been _____?

"Yes.  The first born males in our family alternate the two family names.  My father was named ______ _____ and my brother would have been named my name.  I was not born until many, many years later"

If he would have lived, what would your name have been?

"...I ... do not know Lisabeth.  Here comes Mom, please let's not discuss this in front of her.  She still gets very upset about it."

Okay.  Promise.

I was a bit too young to understand entirely, but I understood a sad and profound moment had passed between my father and I.  In later years, he made small references to that, and shared more about his parents.  Apparently my grandmother had quickened early in the marriage, but the birth was difficult and the baby died within minutes of delivery.  She was devastated, and struggled with the grief.  She did not conceive again for many years, and when she did, Dad was the focus of her life.  But, he always felt the shadow of his infant yet deceased brother.

I knew at the moment my sister shared that information that he DID NOT KNOW.  Another piece of my mother's revisionist history.  A couple of days later, the copy of the original birth certificate arrived. It was true.  I was a replacement child.  My years of feeling I was being compared to someone that I could not see or ever measure up to made sense.  I was very upset in the beginning.  As the years passed, the pain has turned into something a bit darker, a bit harder, and masquerades as humor.

I made a sarcastic and self-depricating comment to finish up the story, and looked up from my entree that I was busily picking around on, and every pair of eyes was looking at me, shocked.  All joking and side conversations had stopped.  Faces were a bit pale and eyes were wide, some mouths were open.  For a heartbeat I cringed internally, cursing myself for sharing something so personal, that made me look like the self centered ass my mother has always proclaimed me to be, and something so petty compared to the issues these folks have survived.  What the hell was I thinking?

The a cacophony of responses erupted.  Shock, dismay, regret and multiple expressions of how incredibly SCREWED UP that was (in very blunt vernacular), and I had every right to be disappointed.  Questions about whether I had considered changing my name, questions about how I felt about it now, questions about how on earth I even spoke to her.

I again had a small epiphany of how much I negate and minimize my own experiences, and that I had a right to be angry about this, regardless of the tragic circumstances of my mother giving up this child.  I was not born until nearly twenty years later, when the  high school senior that she was when my sister was born was in her mid/later thirties when I was born.  

There is much more to this story, but the hour grows late.  It simply is, and I move on with my life.  But, I keep being reminded that although I have faced a bit of adversity in my life... I have come out the other side for the most part.  The thing I must learn is to seek support, to allow assistance, and to allow myself to feel without 'gaslighting' or invalidating my own experiences.

Hopefully some day soon... I will succeed.  Thank you for reading!  I will have more 'from the mouth of a hoarder' very soon.

-Lisabeth