Stuff That Scares Me
Jul. 3rd, 2008 10:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
exhilarationSo. I have an uncle who is a paranoid schizophrenic.
These days, especially here on the internet, severe psychological disorders seem to be the "cool thing" in certain circles. Which bugs me every kind of sideways, but I won't go into that. It's not "cool," though. It's very far from it.
My mother takes care of my uncle, so when my mother was in the hospital a few years ago, and then was home but did not have the energy to really leave the house, there was nobody to take care of him but me. I left the city I loved living in, and I left a very, very decent job (although, to be fair, I was also having a very difficult time finding a place to live...) to go back home and stay with my mom and take care of all her responsibilities. My dad was working in Canada at the time, and for him to come home, he would have had to break his contract (this is a very bad thing to do, and besides, he didn't want to.) My sister was in college, and for her to come home, she would have had to take a leave of absence for a semester. (This would have delayed her graduation for an entire year, and messed up her scholarship, and besides, she also didn't want to.) My mother's father is not living, and her mother also needs constant care, so... that left me.
When I was a kid I never really had a problem with my uncle. I thought he was "cool." He would always draw weird stuff with me, and he had a cat that he named "Jenny" after the black cat in these cat books I used to get from the library. My grandmother insisted on calling the cat "Blackie" because it was a black cat, but my uncle and I called the cat "Jenny." See, you can see shades of my mother in my grandmother, there, re-naming the cat like that, insisting that it would be called what SHE wanted to call it, even though it was not her cat. To think I ever wondered how my mother got the way she is.
I didn't see my uncle all that much, though, I just remember liking him in person but hearing all these scary stories about him, how he kicked in the basement door at my grandmother's house when he was angry, and my grandmother (of course) didn't get the door fixed for like, twenty years or something, or how he punched a glass shower door and messed up his hand but somehow not the door.
My uncle had recently moved nearby my mother, because my grandmother could no longer take care of herself and was in a nursing home, also near my mother. My mother found him an apartment in town and got everything taken care of with public assistance, and she would keep his social security money and dole it out to him every day, because if she gave it to him all at once, he would spend it all on beer and god knows what else, and not have any left for the rest of the month. She would also visit him every day, make him dinner, make him do his wash, etc.
The stuff she told me he would do got her so worked up because he just wouldn't do things her way and it was one of the most stressful situations I've ever been in in my entire life. I don't believe for one minute that my mother is mentally stable. She shows all the signs of being completely out-of-whack, and, I know, I'm one to talk, but really. Between her and him, sanity for me was pretty much... not an option.
So on one side, there was my mom just not letting anything drop and constantly hassling me, "did he wash the towels, he was to wash the towels, he keeps using the same towel, you need to take the dirty towel away and make him use a clean towel, did you see him wash them? Did you see him put them in the dryer? You have to see him do it, sometimes he says he washes them but then you have to smell all the towels to make sure he really does, you have to make him use fabric softener, he never uses fabric softener" and so on and so on, etc.
But on the other side - on the other side was the stuff he did, not washing the towels being pretty minor. One day my mom had it in her head that his kitchen floor had to be washed, and he wasn't going to wash it because he can't because he "has gout." Obviously she couldn't do it either. I think she once had one of her friends go to his apartment and wash is floor, but since I was around, oh, perfect, Lara, you're going to wash his floor!
That apartment just skeeved me out so bad, it was horrible. The floor was dirty, yeah it was, and no, I really didn't want to wash it, but it wasn't really that. It wasn't even me not wanting to wash the floor with my mom standing over me like that - my mom taught me to clean the house when I was nine years old, because she couldn't stand the fact that the house might be getting dirty while she wasn't well enough to take care of it. And even after I got hurt - I can still clean a house. It takes me longer, yeah, but it can still be done, I lived with room mates for years and certainly did my fair share of cleaning.
My mom is really obsessive about everything being clean. I'm not like that at all. Not one bit. We have never seen eye to eye on that. I have never understood the point of cleaning things that are already clean to prevent them from ever becoming dirty.
Dirty things don't bother me. There are dirty dishes in my kitchen right now and there is a towel on the floor in my bathroom. I don't care.
That apartment was so disgusting. The sink was brown with scum, the stove was crusted with god-knows-what, the floor was dirty, yes, but the table had a thick layer of dust over the newspapers that were piled all over it and there were like sardine cans all over the counter and the handle of the fridge - this was the last straw - was slimy. There were no paper towels. There was no cleaning spray. There were no towels. Everything was disgusting. The bedroom stank. And my uncle, I suddenly remembered my mom saying, wore the same clothes for four days straight on a regular basis, sleeping in them and not showering and everything.
By the time I had finished cleaning the floor I had the most intolerable sensation of bugs crawling all over me. I hate bugs. There were no actual bugs, I guess I was just so skeeved out by everything.
The part that scares me is that I do stuff just like that on a smaller level. And my uncle is in his fifties, I'm sure it took him a while to get as bad as he is.
I sit at my kitchen table that's piled with stuff, dirty plates, soda bottles, beer bottles and caps, bottle opener, newspapers, plastic bags, dish towels, dirty paper towels, everything, and I just push everything into a bigger heap to clear off a tiny place for my plate, and put my cup on the counter behind me cause there's not any room for it on the table anyway. I don't even wash my cup, I just leave it out and pour whatever into it, day after day after day, that's pretty gross, isn't it?
I keep my clothes all on a heap on my bed and just sift through them every morning when I'm getting ready. I don't sleep on the bed, I sleep on the futon in the other room, but I have started piling stuff there too, and I just sleep right there with it. I actually slept with a laundry basket on the end of the futon for two nights before I moved it, and by "moved" it I mean pushed it on the floor, and, guess what, it is still there, and the clothes are all on the floor too.
I decided I was going to spend today cleaning. I have been awake for three hours and have not cleaned anything.
Is this a sign, just like my mom always told me, that I'm sick in the head too? Is this what all paranoid schizophrenics do? Am I going to grow up to be the crazy, smelly, filthy old lady in the house of trash?
It freaks me out all of a sudden. I thought I was doing so well. I thought I had such a handle on everything, out here all by myself, doing my thing, you know, being independent and all that, and LOOK WHAT I DO!
*shudders*
The farther I am away from what I grew up with (years, not distance) the more I can tell how unhealthy everything was, and the less I blame myself for what happened to me. But this is the first time I've actually been aware of me spitting back out the things I swore I had to get away from.
Not so much that I've made such a mess. More that now I'm sitting here freaking out because omg this is all out of order! This is not clean. I am disgusting! Hey, I am still wearing what I wore yesterday too!
Since when do I freak out about things not being clean and organized? That is my mom's thing, not mine. I like a little mess. Not this big of a mess, but a little mess is good, it's healthy, it's nice, I like it.
It's like I'm stuck here in this absurd back and forth - if I clean everything up, suddenly I'm my mother. If I leave it like this, suddenly I'm my uncle. Can't I just be myself, without anyone else's faults encroaching on my actions? I let the house get messy. That's all. I'm a busy person, I work two jobs, and try to have a social life. The house got messy. This shouldn't be an indication of my mental state or of anything else other than the fact that I've over-scheduled myself, and THAT'S IT.
These days, especially here on the internet, severe psychological disorders seem to be the "cool thing" in certain circles. Which bugs me every kind of sideways, but I won't go into that. It's not "cool," though. It's very far from it.
My mother takes care of my uncle, so when my mother was in the hospital a few years ago, and then was home but did not have the energy to really leave the house, there was nobody to take care of him but me. I left the city I loved living in, and I left a very, very decent job (although, to be fair, I was also having a very difficult time finding a place to live...) to go back home and stay with my mom and take care of all her responsibilities. My dad was working in Canada at the time, and for him to come home, he would have had to break his contract (this is a very bad thing to do, and besides, he didn't want to.) My sister was in college, and for her to come home, she would have had to take a leave of absence for a semester. (This would have delayed her graduation for an entire year, and messed up her scholarship, and besides, she also didn't want to.) My mother's father is not living, and her mother also needs constant care, so... that left me.
When I was a kid I never really had a problem with my uncle. I thought he was "cool." He would always draw weird stuff with me, and he had a cat that he named "Jenny" after the black cat in these cat books I used to get from the library. My grandmother insisted on calling the cat "Blackie" because it was a black cat, but my uncle and I called the cat "Jenny." See, you can see shades of my mother in my grandmother, there, re-naming the cat like that, insisting that it would be called what SHE wanted to call it, even though it was not her cat. To think I ever wondered how my mother got the way she is.
I didn't see my uncle all that much, though, I just remember liking him in person but hearing all these scary stories about him, how he kicked in the basement door at my grandmother's house when he was angry, and my grandmother (of course) didn't get the door fixed for like, twenty years or something, or how he punched a glass shower door and messed up his hand but somehow not the door.
My uncle had recently moved nearby my mother, because my grandmother could no longer take care of herself and was in a nursing home, also near my mother. My mother found him an apartment in town and got everything taken care of with public assistance, and she would keep his social security money and dole it out to him every day, because if she gave it to him all at once, he would spend it all on beer and god knows what else, and not have any left for the rest of the month. She would also visit him every day, make him dinner, make him do his wash, etc.
The stuff she told me he would do got her so worked up because he just wouldn't do things her way and it was one of the most stressful situations I've ever been in in my entire life. I don't believe for one minute that my mother is mentally stable. She shows all the signs of being completely out-of-whack, and, I know, I'm one to talk, but really. Between her and him, sanity for me was pretty much... not an option.
So on one side, there was my mom just not letting anything drop and constantly hassling me, "did he wash the towels, he was to wash the towels, he keeps using the same towel, you need to take the dirty towel away and make him use a clean towel, did you see him wash them? Did you see him put them in the dryer? You have to see him do it, sometimes he says he washes them but then you have to smell all the towels to make sure he really does, you have to make him use fabric softener, he never uses fabric softener" and so on and so on, etc.
But on the other side - on the other side was the stuff he did, not washing the towels being pretty minor. One day my mom had it in her head that his kitchen floor had to be washed, and he wasn't going to wash it because he can't because he "has gout." Obviously she couldn't do it either. I think she once had one of her friends go to his apartment and wash is floor, but since I was around, oh, perfect, Lara, you're going to wash his floor!
That apartment just skeeved me out so bad, it was horrible. The floor was dirty, yeah it was, and no, I really didn't want to wash it, but it wasn't really that. It wasn't even me not wanting to wash the floor with my mom standing over me like that - my mom taught me to clean the house when I was nine years old, because she couldn't stand the fact that the house might be getting dirty while she wasn't well enough to take care of it. And even after I got hurt - I can still clean a house. It takes me longer, yeah, but it can still be done, I lived with room mates for years and certainly did my fair share of cleaning.
My mom is really obsessive about everything being clean. I'm not like that at all. Not one bit. We have never seen eye to eye on that. I have never understood the point of cleaning things that are already clean to prevent them from ever becoming dirty.
Dirty things don't bother me. There are dirty dishes in my kitchen right now and there is a towel on the floor in my bathroom. I don't care.
That apartment was so disgusting. The sink was brown with scum, the stove was crusted with god-knows-what, the floor was dirty, yes, but the table had a thick layer of dust over the newspapers that were piled all over it and there were like sardine cans all over the counter and the handle of the fridge - this was the last straw - was slimy. There were no paper towels. There was no cleaning spray. There were no towels. Everything was disgusting. The bedroom stank. And my uncle, I suddenly remembered my mom saying, wore the same clothes for four days straight on a regular basis, sleeping in them and not showering and everything.
By the time I had finished cleaning the floor I had the most intolerable sensation of bugs crawling all over me. I hate bugs. There were no actual bugs, I guess I was just so skeeved out by everything.
The part that scares me is that I do stuff just like that on a smaller level. And my uncle is in his fifties, I'm sure it took him a while to get as bad as he is.
I sit at my kitchen table that's piled with stuff, dirty plates, soda bottles, beer bottles and caps, bottle opener, newspapers, plastic bags, dish towels, dirty paper towels, everything, and I just push everything into a bigger heap to clear off a tiny place for my plate, and put my cup on the counter behind me cause there's not any room for it on the table anyway. I don't even wash my cup, I just leave it out and pour whatever into it, day after day after day, that's pretty gross, isn't it?
I keep my clothes all on a heap on my bed and just sift through them every morning when I'm getting ready. I don't sleep on the bed, I sleep on the futon in the other room, but I have started piling stuff there too, and I just sleep right there with it. I actually slept with a laundry basket on the end of the futon for two nights before I moved it, and by "moved" it I mean pushed it on the floor, and, guess what, it is still there, and the clothes are all on the floor too.
I decided I was going to spend today cleaning. I have been awake for three hours and have not cleaned anything.
Is this a sign, just like my mom always told me, that I'm sick in the head too? Is this what all paranoid schizophrenics do? Am I going to grow up to be the crazy, smelly, filthy old lady in the house of trash?
It freaks me out all of a sudden. I thought I was doing so well. I thought I had such a handle on everything, out here all by myself, doing my thing, you know, being independent and all that, and LOOK WHAT I DO!
*shudders*
The farther I am away from what I grew up with (years, not distance) the more I can tell how unhealthy everything was, and the less I blame myself for what happened to me. But this is the first time I've actually been aware of me spitting back out the things I swore I had to get away from.
Not so much that I've made such a mess. More that now I'm sitting here freaking out because omg this is all out of order! This is not clean. I am disgusting! Hey, I am still wearing what I wore yesterday too!
Since when do I freak out about things not being clean and organized? That is my mom's thing, not mine. I like a little mess. Not this big of a mess, but a little mess is good, it's healthy, it's nice, I like it.
It's like I'm stuck here in this absurd back and forth - if I clean everything up, suddenly I'm my mother. If I leave it like this, suddenly I'm my uncle. Can't I just be myself, without anyone else's faults encroaching on my actions? I let the house get messy. That's all. I'm a busy person, I work two jobs, and try to have a social life. The house got messy. This shouldn't be an indication of my mental state or of anything else other than the fact that I've over-scheduled myself, and THAT'S IT.
