Hi everyone, I’m new here. I’m needing help/advice on my mom, or maybe just to vent? The backstory: I’m an only child to a mom with borderline personality disorder. My dad died when I was 13 and my stepdad over ten years ago now. I left home when I went to college and never moved back because my mom affected my mental health so severely. I didn’t cut ties completely, but set boundaries for my self and my family. I’ve been married for 21 years and have two thriving, busy teenage sons. My mom has been very independent until the last few years. 2 years ago her companion went into a NH with end stage Parkinson’s. Since then, the hoarding has exploded. She moved the contents of his 3 bedroom house into her tiny 900 square feet house. This past year she’s been in and out of the hospital and is struggling to take care of herself. She also refuses to leave her hoard. She’s got massive financial issues (the borderline manifests in extreme overspending and always has). She won’t follow medical advice (or pretends like she doesn’t understand it). I’m at my wits end with her. Her house is far too much for me to handle, and being drawn back into her drama is making me depressed all over again. I have to stay well for my sons and my job, but I can’t abandon her completely either. She literally has no one else. I don’t even know what resources to look for to deal with the hoarding, or how to care for her in an environment that traumatizes me like it does. I feel like a horrible person for resenting her but also like this is one more drama that I have to be her adult for. Help?
For your survival you need to step back and detach. Set boundaries. You don't like the way she is living, but you have no control over that.
Eventually something will happen to her so that things will need to change. Meanwhile look after yourself and your family. You could look around and see what resources there are for when that time comes, but until it does, she will live the way she wants to. You fretting about it is not helping her and it is hurting you. Take care.
I am the only offspring of a mother with Borderline so I’m assuming you were also raised to believe you were responsible for all her needs. And now that she’s old and has driven everyone else away with her BPD you have to fix her because you’re all she has left. Sigh. I know how hard it is to fight against your childhood programming.
Here’s the thing: even if she was the perfect parent and you had nothing but independent wealth and endless free time you STILL can’t make another adult do what you want. This is why independent women can’t be involuntarily committed to insane asylums by their unsatisfied husbands any more so thank God for that. And it means you are free, if you choose to be.
You can do what any concerned person can do. Alert adult protective services about a vulnerable old person. That’s it. That’s all you can do. You can’t fix her. Stick around here and read all the posts and you’ll get a firm idea of how few “rights” adult kids have to force their parents to do anything. Much less somehow rectify multiple mental illnesses.
The one thing you don’t do is start martyring yourself. Don’t fund her. Don’t go to her house and try to clean the hoard. Your kids deserve better. You deserve better.
I have a book for you to read :Never Simple by Liz Scheier.
Liz's mom was Borderline, stubborn, charming and had severe lung issues.
Despite all of her valiant efforts, neither she nor all the Social Services of NYC and New York State were able keep her adequately houses and safe.
You simply can't help folks with mental illness. This is not your fault, not your responsibility to solve.
I'm sorry for this distressing situation. Your best strategy is to stay out of trying to manage her life, especially if you're not her PoA or legal guardian -- in which case you really have no power to make her do anything.
Just concentrate on your own family, which is the priority. Your Mom has the right to rot, and you trying to make her do things she doesn't want for herself will just exhaust you.
May you gain peace in your heart .
you can do one of two things: wait for the call that she’s in the hospital again. Inform the hospital social worker that she lives alone and is unable to properly care for herself and is an unsafe discharge. Explain that she is a hoarder and you believe she needs to be in LTC. She probably has dementia.
Then get the ball rolling on applying for Medicaid.
The second possibility is to report this to Adult protective services and explain that she can no longer take care of herself and lives in unsafe conditions. Let them make an assessment. And go from there.
I would try one of those options.
Or you can just leave her be to live life as she has chosen. Hard to stand by and watch.
Do you have power of attorney? If you don’t you should. If you are going to stick around to oversee all this you will need it.
The anger and resentment is normal, especially so when you didn’t have a good relationship with her.
A cognitively normal caring individual that gets sucked into trying to solve a hoarder's hoard is a constant maelstrom of stress and worry that leads to more stress and worry. On the other hand, the hoard is their safe place and no matter how bad it gets, taking away their safety blanket makes the rebound much worse.
It's taken over 50 years for me to learn how to deal with the hoarders in my family. Recently, we burned one house to the ground after death and the other we gave away to be professionally demolished.
Protect yourself and your immediate family by leaving her to her lifestyle until she's gone. Only then can you deal with the hoard.
[hugs] from one hoard survivor to another.
Do not quit your job. Your life is with your family.
She still yelled. Even though half of the clutter was just paper, I (with the emphasis on "I") felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I urge you to devote a few hours a week to start. You will gain momentum once you start to see some light. Take the breaks you need to maintain your sanity. You won't want to do this when you are grieving. Give yourself the foot up that YOU need now.
We, along with our other 2 siblings, cleared out a lot of the junk this past year while helping him move into 2 different sheltered housing flats. It's now at a more manageable level, but his hoarding hadn't yet got too extreme before we intervened.
However, even with 4 of us pitching in, we found this extremely wearing. It's both emotionally and physically tiring, and made worse by the hoarder's reaction.
We were there at his request to help him move, so we were able to throw a lot away that we wouldn't have otherwise been able to. If you're doing this for someone who doesn't want you moving and sorting (and eventually discarding) their junk, you'll encounter even more resistance.
I don't think it's always wise to take this on, especially when the hoarder is likely to just revert to their old ways once you've gone. Also, touching the stuff of an extreme hoarder can have a detrimental effect on their mental health. It's a complex problem.