I live in a Pig Palace

I don't remember how young I was.  Much too young, I'm sure.  I was probably caught between the trap of being a preschooler, an only child, having a "pack rat" father and a tidy mother, and never having been taught how to declutter and purge.

Inevitably I got to an age, probably 5 or 6 at most, where I was expected to have developed cleaning habits and skills in the face of a daunting amount of STUFF in a room much too large for someone my age to be fully in charge of.

I was commanded to clean my room and left to carry out my marching orders, and being a typical young child, I had no way of determining exactly what that meant.  Being born of a pack-rat I'd come across favorite treasures or long-lost companion objects or books and get distracted from the task-at-hand.  Eventually a parent would come to check on my stalled progress and instead of redirection and coaching or instruction, I felt like I was getting blamed for having missed something important even though the instructions were never specific.

Deciding that the expectation was unreasonable and unattainable, cleaning became a game of shoving as much STUFF under whatever objects I could get away with.  Beneath the bed behind the dust ruffle, in the back of the closet, in drawers, under or behind furniture.  Much of the time these ploys didn't work.

Never did anyone sit with me and help me make decisions about my items.  No one asked where an item belonged.  No one helped me determine whether an item was still useful.  I was still playing with my preschooler circus train set with my barbie dolls when I was 9 or 10 years old.  It's a testimony to my imagination, and that I wasn't too spoiled (never had the Barbie car or the Barbie house, so I made do with what I had).

I'm not sure exactly when the name-calling began.  I know I was very young.  Keep in mind that the younger a child is the more impressionable they are, and the stronger the commandments of the parents.  "Your room is a mess" is a holy decree when you're young enough.  It's a statement of fact.  It's indisputable.  It's reality as proclaimed by someone who is omniscient.  And this statement gives no hope or promise of the possibility of change.

Name-calling is even worse.  "Your room is a pig sty."  Whether they say it directly or not, if I live in that room I must be a pig.  "You're a slob."  As sure as you are male or female, you are also a slob.  It's just something you are.  It's neither something you have control over nor anything you can aspire to change.

I've tried all my life to do better in keeping my environs clean, but deep down inside I have what I'd call a "High Mess Tolerance."  Once I reached puberty, occasionally my mother's side of my gene pool reared it's head and I'd get into a compulsive cleaning kick.  I'd stay up until all hours and rearrange my room and do something miraculous.  But this work is so exhausting that it doesn't last and is far from a habit of being tidy.  The rare appearances of my tidy binges can't combat the pack rat mentality.

And I realized why the pack rat wins over the neat-nick.  Because I've invested myself in living up to my parents' expectations.  You simply can't fight your parents when you're very young.  I had no idea they were wrong for saying those things, and no way to fight back, so I did the only thing I could do to maintain my grip on sanity: I gave in.  I believed it.  And over 30 years later, I realize that I still believed it.  No matter how often I tell myself that I can clean now, that I can take care of the mess and keep it at bay -- I prove myself wrong by burning out.

But they talked about the mess, me being a slob, and disgusting.  And I watched enough Odd Couple to know what they meant, and they even compared me to Oscar Madison.  So when left to my own devices, I would turn into Oscar.  With one exception.

They never ragged on my organizational skills.  It's ok to have order in your sloppy chaos of a house.  It's ok to know where everything is within the "Your room looks like it was hit by a tornado!"  So I have made an art of staying very organized inside my mess, to the point of organizing information in binders, having and using a file cabinet, etc.  It's amazing, despite being proclaimed a doomed pig, I can still see some of that Felix Unger, some OCD in my pack rat mentality, in my inability to purge and let go.  If I marry the pack rat and the tidy neat-nick, I'd possibly be functional.

Even when I really tried to clean, I was never complimented for the things I had accomplished, never given kudos for the effort or for maintaining my focus in cleaning.  My teenage 3am cleaning binges got jaw-dropping astonishment in the morning, but no real pat on the back or celebration or acknowledgement of the inner neat-nick who was dying for a breath of air.

So now I'm entering a new phase of awareness with myself, tackling something that never was in my waking brain before, and digging deep at the roots.  I'm doing so right now with the help of http://flylady.net - a website for people immersed in CHAOS (Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome).  I'll be working on purging the triggers and self-image issues using EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), too.  Soon I will be living in a Pig Palace instead of a pig sty, after all there was never really anything wrong with the pig; it was just the pig's choice of accommodations.

Update 2022

After all this time we figured out on top of all of this that the egg donor was also a hoarder. But at a stage of hoarding where all the hoarded stuff could be kept behind closed doors. When there was more stuff, she would acquire another piece of antique furniture to fill up, or stuff it into a closet, or into a cabinet. So what was "tidy" was also something of a lie. She was no different than me shoving things under the bed, into drawers, into the closet. That was how to clean. That's what I was taught and shown.

This makes the expectations even more hypocritical. No wonder we didn't know how to clear or purge, because neither of our parents were doing so. They both had "places" for their things, and could put things "away" but threw out very little. They'd fix it, reclaim it, save it, even sometimes use it. But they wouldn't release it.

That hidden organizational skill — that came from their role modeling as well. The sperm donor collected coins, stamps, etc. but kept things in binders. His hoarded things were organized into categories, and stashed away together. Similar for the egg donor's craft projects. All the yarn in this antique cabinet, for example. So the fact that we can organize within our chaos also comes from them.

In 2018 we discovered Lissie in our system and she is better at cleaning than the other Crisses, which is very helpful. We can let things go, but also still hoard things. We look at our apartment and there's so much STUFF. Also, we don't shame ourselves about it because along with the STUFF, there's also the fact that we have 20+ people who front and this isn't very much stuff for so many people with all their interests and crafting etc. We learn how to limit things so we set aside a bin for rescuing some things from recycling for reuse or craft projects for example. But need to limit it to that bin. If it's more than the bin holds, it has to go. We have some old banners from business stuff, and we plan to repurpose them into things we might have otherwise purchased, otherwise they go as well. And so on. And if things aren't used within a certain amount of time, we have Lissie to hold us accountable for it.

It's a project, but we've put the shame where it belongs, and that's the important thing. We can reclaim our security from under their shame and proudly say yeah our parental units dropped the ball on this, and it's up to us to learn and change and start to move stuff out of our space because they're not going to fix this.  Heck, even if we tried to talk to them about it (we're not communicating with either of them any more) they'd be in denial about it, so it's pointless to expect any answers from them.

So, as an example — we were using a cardboard box as a shelf divider. We fixed that with a more permanent solution, then we had this box. And it was an Imperfect Foods box: strong, clean, etc. We were reluctant to recycle it if we could use it for something else.  We had a puzzle we had glued but didn't sit well on a wall — it bent in the heat and buckled etc.  So yesterday we repurposed the box as a backing for the puzzle, used hot glue to mount the puzzle on the cardboard, added craft sticks on the back to keep the cardboard folds from bending, and re-mounted the puzzle on the wall.  That's several items we had floating around now taken care of, and a wall that had nothing on it is now decorated so we can enjoy the pretty puzzle. There's still some scraps of cardboard left for us to mount other artwork and hang it, then we'll throw the scraps into the recycling. The box won't be hanging out for months or years, the artwork will be deployed properly, and we'll enjoy our space more.