Now that I’m working from home I have more time to spend improving my children’s lives (!) and the intervention, it seems, comes non-to-soon as my six year old has turned into a hoarder.
Have you seen those people on tv? Matt Lauer was talking to one a while ago on the Today show, and I watched in disgust with my own (at the time) secret hoarder as she ate breakfast before heading to the bus – never guessing she was actually looking for tips!My mother and I went to her bedroom to help her “organize” – it was a disaster area. She likes to play games that include making little tableaus of dolls with blankets, etc all over her room so there is no floor space available; she likes all her books to be laid out in various piles all over her bed; on and on. So we tried to buy her some shelves and boxes (in fact, she got these from her grandma as a birthday gift and pointed out “This is NOT what people usually get as a gift”.)
We started going through her boxes and found the following (only the weirdest are listed):
1. A candy bar wrapper that she had saved for its glow-in-the-dark properties
2. A spice bottle filled with water
3. The end of a loaf of french bread (disgusting) that we threw away, in the sink, and which she then saw had sort of reconstituted with the addition of water and which she then WANTED BACK
4. Three random plastic toys that belonged to a set she might someday get, she thought (she won’t)
5. Two popped balloons
6. Ripped wrapping paper from a birthday gift that she was going to re-use
7. A bunch of old newspapers – it turns out that these were comics given to her by Daddy when she was in the hospital over the summer, so she wanted to save them.The last bit of reasoning is sort of cute and in fact, she had REASONS for everything she saved. But put together as a collection filling her room (and arguably attracting rodents) the whole mess was gross and a bit scary.
She wants to hold on to things that are important or have some meaning to her, but it’s everything. I know that sometimes I am the same way – saving each picture every kid draws, every single school assignment – but it so quickly becomes overwhelming that now I am rash, and throw things away the second they come through the door. In fact I got a special trash can behind my “main” kitchen trash can – it’s a two-can set in a pull-out drawer, and I think some people use the second for recycling but mine is kid stuff I throw away that I don’t want the Hoarder to pull back out of the trash. For the most part she forgets what I throw out – though she did pitch a fit when she went back to find the previously mentioned ripped wrapping paper.
I think she wants to hold on to her childhood, all of it, and in many ways so do I. But not in the form of a moldy piece of old bread.