Coming Clean: A Memoir (21 page)

“I’m going to tell her you said that…”

“Oh no!” He laughed again, more heartily. “I’ll be there bright and early Saturday.”

After she went home, I spent most of my downtime out on Long Island with them, helping around the house, going to doctors’ appointments with her, and attempting to keep my father from bringing new garbage into the house.

Three months later, in late January, my mom was stable enough to go into corrective surgery. She had been stable enough in December, but she didn’t want to ruin our holidays if something went wrong again.

We were barely inside the triage room before we were greeted by a very excited med student.

“It’s great to meet you, Mrs. Miller,” he said as he shook my mother’s hand. “This is a big case.” He went on to babble excitedly about how he got to the hospital early so he would be first in line to scrub in.

“I’m sure Dr. Philipps has taught you well, and I’m glad to be in such competent hands,” my mother says. “I look forward to thanking you in person after the surgery.”

After he left, she turned to me. “I’d rather he liked me before he starts tinkering around inside me with a scalpel.”

A parade of doctors and nurses came in to introduce themselves and test my mother’s vital signs, and the reality that we were doing this again sank in. It was starting to seem like the only way I knew my mother was either going into surgery or recovering from it. Meanwhile, my father was sleeping on a round rolling chair—no small task, given its propensity to roll off and wake him up. Each time he was jarred into semiconsciousness, I shot him a dirty look. My mother could die, and he would have spent his last few moments with her snoring on a stool.

“Let him sleep,” my mom said.

“I can’t believe him.”

“This is how he copes with stress, he checks out.”

“When did you become the patient one in the family?”

“I’d rather have him sleeping here than roaming the halls of the hospital stealing brochures about diabetes and prenatal care.”

We kissed my mother good-bye and set off to take our rightful places in a corner alcove of the surgical waiting room. We
had spent so much time in this hospital over the preceding few months that it had started to feel like a second home.

My father could pass hours upon hours of waiting immersed in books about finances and magazines about computer software. I couldn’t. Allowing anything but my mother to take up space in my mind felt like a betrayal.

“Remember when Mom made you wear a suit to my fifth grade field trip to Philadelphia?” It had been almost 100 degrees that day, but she hadn’t wanted me to be embarrassed by my father’s usual uniform of too-loose jeans and faded T-shirts with chest pockets bursting with business cards and scrap paper.

My father laughed as if he were remembering the best day of his life. “Yeah, your mom’s a pisser. Next time I’ll know better.”

“And the time you had pneumonia?” My mother woke up in the middle of the night to check his fever and had found him burning up. She ran to the bed with ice packs to place all over him to bring the fever down—but she forgot to wake him up first. His screams woke the next-door neighbors up.

My father laughed so hard that the people around us, other people waiting to know the fate of loved ones in surgery, sent glares our way.

“Daddy, what if she dies?”

My father stopped laughing and put his hand on my knee. “I don’t know if this makes any sense to you, but I’ve asked the universe to watch out for Mom, and I think it’s going to be okay.”

My father prayed. He never stopped surprising me.

T
HIRTEEN HOURS OF SURGERY
and another month of hospital living later, we were finally free to resume some semblance of our normal lives again. My mother had her own battles to fight: frailness far beyond her years and a body made patchwork by surgical scars, in addition to her ever more faltering eyesight. I wanted to go home and be with her again, to pull her out of a depression I knew was imminent, but I couldn’t. I could hardly look at her or my father.

After the mass cleanout of their apartment, I had been plagued by nightmares. Nightmares about my old house: images of sludge-filled puddles in the kitchen, fly droppings that covered every window, and maggots in our food. I dreamed about sucking my stomach in so that I could squeeze through the front door despite the trash pushing it closed, the sounds that emanated from the attic, and the stranger who lived alongside of us.

I dreamed about the decision I had made to use a broken toilet, knowing full well that my feces would live in it indefinitely, rather than soil myself, because I didn’t know the next time I would have a proper shower.

I dreamed about fleas. It had been almost ten years since I’d
seen a flea or even thought about their existence, but I woke up sweating and scratching the little red bumps that took over my body while I slept.

These were all parts of my life that I had put away.

For months I woke up between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m., sweat-drenched and scratching. The nightmares had expanded from fleas, and I started remembering floors covered in animal feces, ceilings crumbling as they rotted, and our swimming pool—the pool we used one summer but then never closed and allowed to become a brown pond filled with waste. We went out of town one weekend only to find that a neighbor climbed over our fence and threw our dog in the pool. He had been swimming in the brown water for hours, we think, when my father jumped in to get him. When my father came out he was covered in a thick greenish brown sludge.

When I woke up, I cleaned. Every night I wiped down my floors with bleach and sprayed bug spray on my bed. It smelled noxious, yet comforting.

Every subway car in New York City was plastered with ads for bedbug remedies: mattress covers that claimed to contain bugs and dogs that could sniff out insects that humans couldn’t find. I convinced myself that those tiny bloodsucking miscreants were the reason for my incessant itching.

By April I was so sleep-deprived and so convinced that it was bugs causing my nightmares that I woke up my landlord in the middle of the night, banging on his door and telling him that he needed to hire an exterminator immediately.

“Okay, Kimberly,” my landlord, John, said. “I’ll call an exterminator. Can it wait until morning?”

When I returned to my apartment, I threw out my blankets, pillows, and sheets—anything I thought bugs could hide in. I threw out boxes of mementos, the bag that held my once-beloved dance shoes and leotards, picture frames and books, my alarm clock and my nightstands—and then I dismembered my bed.

I grabbed a 10-inch chef’s knife from my kitchen and used it to slice open the box spring, then climbed inside, flashlight blazing, to inspect each crevice of the thin, paperlike material on the bottom and the wood frame for signs of a bug infestation.

I didn’t see any, but based on my nightly Internet bedbug research, I knew that didn’t mean anything. Just because you couldn’t see them didn’t mean they weren’t there.

I mopped with bleach again and sprayed another layer of bug spray on my stripped bed, then blew up my air mattress to sleep on.

The next morning, I called to see if my doctor could fit me in.

“Those aren’t bedbug bites; those are hives,” he said, inspecting the bumps on my arms, legs, stomach, and back.

“Are you sure? I wake up scratching in the middle of the night every night.” I neglected to tell him about the nightmares, about my old house and the fleas.

“Yes, I’ve seen a lot of bedbug bites in the last few years. Hives can be caused from an allergy or from stress. Have you changed detergents or been particularly stressed lately?”

I told him about my mother, but that she was doing better.

“I shouldn’t be stressed anymore.”

He wrote me a prescription for antihistamines that would both stop my itching and put me to sleep.

I was furious—I couldn’t believe my doctor had been so incompetent—and
raced home to meet the exterminator. I presented him with evidence of my infestation: particles of dust (or dead bug bodies) that I had found in my home and carefully preserved in Ziploc bags for safekeeping. He assured me that I didn’t have bedbugs.

“Listen, I could charge you a lot of money to fumigate this place, but you don’t have bedbugs,” he reported to me in a thick Brooklyn accent.

“Thank you,” I said.

When he left my apartment, I called Rachel.

“What happened? Is your mom okay?” she asked as she answered the phone. I told her about the nightmares and the bedbugs.

“Kim, I’m worried about you,” she said. “This is what you do whenever you’re upset—you throw out your stuff. But since you don’t have much stuff to throw out, you’ve created some sort of physical manifestation for your PTSD.”

“I don’t have PTSD, I’m just really itchy.”

That night I woke up at 3 a.m., sweating and itchy despite my antihistamine, and resigned myself to the fact that I didn’t have bedbugs. I just hadn’t dealt with my childhood.

A
S I RELAYED THE STORIES
—CPS scares, the house burning down, my grandmother kicking us out, the new house, my father’s brain injury and his time in the mental hospital, my suicide attempt, and my mother’s inability to have a surgery that didn’t almost kill her—I imagined the therapist sitting across from me was writing
PATHOLOGICAL LIAR
in big bold letters in her notepad, then circling it over and over and over again. The abbreviated version of my life didn’t sound real, even to me.

“Honestly, I don’t think you’re depressed, at least not chemically,” she said as I rummaged through my purse to find money to pay her. “I don’t think you need medication. I think you’ve gone through a lot, and you need to find peace with it.”

I didn’t know what “finding peace” meant. Forgive my parents? No need, there was nothing to forgive; they’d done the best they could. Their best was slightly less best than some other people’s, but not as bad as child molesters or belt-yielding abusers. They were unfathomably messy, not evil. I still loved my parents, probably more obsessively than anyone else I knew loved theirs, so I didn’t really see how this therapy thing was going to
help me. I just wanted a pill that would make my nightmares go away.

I didn’t tell the therapist all this, though. When she asked if I’d like to see her again, I agreed to her suggestion of once a week.

Hoarders
was on TV for two years before I could bring myself to watch it, but in the months following my first therapy session I made learning everything I could about hoarding a pet project—one that would hopefully help me “find peace.” Whatever that meant. On a rainy Saturday, with nothing better to do, I sat down for a Netflix-fueled
Hoarders
binge. I wanted to see what the world saw when they were exposed to hoarding.

The houses with children were the ones that broke me down. I remembered what it felt like to look at a parent who loves you and to be ashamed of them, and be ashamed that you are ashamed. When a house on the show was “clean”—when people collected things in themes and could still see their floors and their food wasn’t rotten and their toilets still worked and they could shower at home—I had a sort of indignant pride.
That’s nothing compared to how I grew up!

Episode after episode, I cried—not because of what was on TV, but because I knew that there were people, millions of people, who watched shows like this for fun. People who laughed and feigned gagging, people who would never really understand what it felt like to live like that.

A twenty-one-year-old man, a hoarder living with an alcoholic father, made my stomach turn inside out.
How often does this happen?
I thought, then pressed pause.

I immediately started searching for a tie between alcoholic parents and hoarding children and stumbled upon the website for the National Association for the Children of Alcoholics. On a page titled “Effects of Alcoholism on the Entire Family,” it stated that children of alcoholics are four times more likely than the general population to become hoarders.

I called my parents.

My mom answered. “Hi, honey, we’re watching
The Tourist
.”

“I can call back later.”

“No, that’s okay, we paused it. What’s up?”

“I was just doing some research and I stumbled upon a site that said that children of alcoholics have a higher incidence of hoarding than those born to nondrinking parents.”

“That sounds about right,” she said. My mother had always told me that she thought my father behaved like a “dry drunk,” interacting with the world as if an addict, not because he was one, but because he had been raised by them.

“I just wanted to call and…”

“… give Dad an excuse.”

“I guess so.”

“Okay, here, talk to your dad.”

“Hey hey, K-Rae!” I heard my father’s voice beam out, and I realized that my parents were having a nice day and I was calling to ruin it.

“Hey, Daddy, I just wanted to call and report my latest find.”

When I started doing research into hoarding after my first therapy session, I decided that I would share what I found with my dad. I wanted to understand, and I wanted him to understand why he was the way he was. And there was no one I knew
who appreciated knowledge—any form of information, really—as much as he did.

Over the years I had learned not to give my parents things as gifts, but I broke my own rule and bought my father a copy of
Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things,
a book that featured profiles of various types of hoarders.

He found the book fascinating, even flattering at points, when the book’s authors, professors Randy Frost and Gail Steketee, theorized that hoarders may actually be smarter than the rest of us, able to see connections in things that others can’t.

But most important, the research opened up an avenue of discussion for us.

“Okay,” he said. “How am I crazy today?”

I relayed the new finding about alcoholic parents. He said, “Does that make me
eight
times as likely because both of my parents were drunks?”