It's All in the Family

A couple of days ago I started this blog –and a discussion about living with bi-polar. Just in case any of you thought, for a second, that I was blaming myself for being such a crazy woman –banish that thought immediately. This is ALL about Mommy and Daddy and their screwed up DNA. Of course, when my son accuses me of passing on that same DNA with an alcoholism chaser –I tell him he has choices, that suffering is a choice, that he is responsible for his own decisions, yadda, yadda, yadda. Nobody likes to be the bearer of the blame.

So maybe “blame” isn’t the right word to use. After all, my parents didn’t pick their zygotes either, they didn’t pick their crazy parents any more than I did. Unless you’re Buddhist or something and then you might think we Did pick this scrambled-egg brain to learn something about life. If so –this is what I’ve learned – being bi-polar SUCKS! End of lesson.

Now I feel the need to justify the title of this blog –I’m not as Crazy as I Could Be –about telling you about a peaceful, semi-moist day eight years ago when the Monterey County Police and the Monterey SPCA descended on my parents multi-million dollar property in Pacific Grove to cart out 137 cats. 137. It took then five hours. They said it was a record. Aren’t we proud.

Hoarding is one of my mother’s coping mechanisms. Or it’s another disease all on its own. Either way we should have seen it coming. My mother was a retail manager’s wet dream. She would go to K-Mart to get some toothpaste but always, always grab a cart “just in case”. “Just in case” turned into a full to the brim shopping cart of useless shit. Stuffed animals, (for her), cases of whatever the blue light special was, candy, magazines, clothing –what else do they sell there? If they sold it –she bought it.

If my father noticed he never said anything to us kids. I don’t know where all the stuff went but eventually he gave up trying to control her and built a new house. This house had his-and-her wings. Each wing had 2 bedrooms and a bath with a common living room. On my Dad’s side we visited one extreme on the continuum of OCD –a Spartan, barely furnished bedroom and an office with pens and pencils standing at attention. To say my Dad was a neat-nick is not true –he was a perfectionist, and those people are truly crazy. I don’t think that he could stand to venture into the other wing. I almost never went in there when I visited, though my sister seemed right at home.

When my father died he left all his money to my mother. His last act of revenge on my sister and I for the sin of existence. I can think of no other reason he would leave millions to this woman. He had to have known, right?

Seven years and a million dollars later the authorities stepped in and my sister and I were left with a God-awful mess. Once the cats were gone, we went into a house we had been forbidden to enter for two years (we complained about the smell once too often). My mother had a roommate who fled to Nevada to avoid charges of elder abuse but frankly the thing that abused my Mother was her own brain. And perhaps the stubbornness of the “greatest generation” who could never admit there was a problem.

The house was filled with my Mother’s “investments” –hundreds of collector teddy bears with their own furniture! Thousands of Beanie Babies in clear plastic boxes, their tags covered with tag-keepers! Worth thousands! Except that they were covered in cat urine.

Behind the million dollar home on three lots in exclusive Monterey County was enough trash, filth and stench to make a hillbilly blush.

In the end we had to rip out all the floors, bathrooms, kitchen and half the walls so the hazmat team could come in and try to get rid of the smell. They barely succeeded. My Mother avoided jail because she was conveniently senile, according to the court. Today she doesn’t remember a thing, she says. But because she would not get help for her mental illness, because my father put his head in the sand and because my sister and I had no power over her –she destroyed everything my father had worked for and killed a few beautiful animals in the process.

I woke up. Although never a hoarder of stuff –I hoarded other things – like negative emotions, bitter stories and gay husbands (more on that later.) My life was its own horror story and at 52 I was done with it. I had one last choice –die or change. I chose to change. I figured I could die later if that proved necessary.

So here I am, eight years later, still alive, vertical and relatively clean and not as crazy as I could be.