237: What if your mom hoarded 90 cats?
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Episode 237. What if your mom hoarded 90 cats?

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My mom was born in 1943. She was an only child. She was raised by her parents in a farmhouse in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. When my mom was five, her parents had gone together on a business trip. They were on their way in the car and apparently there was a logging truck behind them that lost its brakes on a hill going downhill and it flattened their car and they both died immediately.

My mom was five at the time. Apparently there was a trust fund associated with my mom's family. And so the two sides of the family fought over her to see who would get custody of her for the next two years. So she went to an orphanage from the age of five until she was seven. And then the people who won that fight were my grandmother's sister. She was an alcoholic and so was her husband that she had at the time.

Her husband was not a very nice person, according to my mother, and was not affectionate and didn't want to have anything to do with her. Now they already had a son, which my mom calls her brother, which is actually her cousin. I think my mom felt like an intruder in the family and never felt like she belonged with them. And shortly after she arrived in their home, the husband took off, left, just abandoned the family. And so she thought she caused that as well.

So she grew up in a family where I don't think she felt like she belonged and she missed her parents and therapy wasn't a thing because it was the forties. But because she had a trust fund, my mom went to private boarding girls, boarding schools, and she was a pianist. And I guess it was at the point where she had to decide whether to go to college or to become a concert pianist. And she chose college. But I do also think that

She became whoever she needed to be in whatever situation she was in. So then she met my father and they had an engagement party. And my grandfather, my dad's dad, owned a bar. So he was familiar with alcohol and what alcohol did to people. And he pulled my father aside at one point and said, I think that your fiance has a problem with alcohol.

And of course this made my dad mad and that's the woman I'm going to marry. You can't talk about her that way. And my dad says it took about 10 years to realize that my grandfather was right. I think my mother had a very long, slow decline and it was all related to alcohol. And I also think that growing up the way she did, she didn't have a really good sense of who she was.

abandonment issues and grief issues and alcohol was a way for her to cope, I think, because it made her feel like the person she really wanted to be. As a kid, we were oblivious to my mom's drinking, I think. At the time, I thought everything was normal and my mom was, you know, loving. I don't think I knew really that she had a problem with alcohol until I was 13 years old.

She annoyed me. She was embarrassing. I was embarrassed by her behavior. We were on a field trip at a hospital. She was a chaperone on the trip and we happened to be walking down the hall. And I was turned around talking to someone and she was behind me. And I didn't realize that the hallway narrowed and I ran into the wall and there were all these kids and parents and my mom and everything. I had hit my face on the wall. Like it hurt.

And my mom literally busted out laughing. But I started to cry because I was so angry with her for making fun of me. I felt like she was making fun of me. There were little things like that where she didn't listen to me as a kid saying, I don't like that. It was more about her than it was about me. But that's so subtle. You don't realize when you're a child that that's hurtful.

You can't really explain it or rationalize it or understand it for what it is. My dad always used to tell me that I was born with an overactive embarrassment gene, but I think it was shame. I think shame was a big, big thing in my life. And I think you learn that as a child of an alcoholic, you learn what that is. But then as I started to get older, I think my mother started to drink more.

Things just sort of started falling apart, but I didn't even know that it was happening, really. I just knew things were not right. And I used to hear them arguing, which was sort of new. I hadn't heard that at all. And I think that was the point at which I started to take care of my mother. Not that it was ever my responsibility, but I thought if I could help her, my dad wouldn't be angry with her.

And one of the things my mother was never good at was keeping the house clean. The house just sort of started to become more and more chaotic, messy. There was just stuff everywhere, like newspapers and our toys and clothes. And the kitchen was a mess and you couldn't see the countertops. And my brothers and I all felt like, God, this is our fault. Like we were making this, this place is a mess.

And all during this time, I remember thinking as a kid, I'm going to clean the house for my mom. So maybe my parents will get along better.

I remember just becoming so incredibly anxious when my own room was messy. And I would spend hours in there organizing and rearranging and cleaning and vacuuming and making the bed. And then I would sit in my clean room and I just remember that was like the place I could go to relax because that was what I had control over. I had control over the things in my room. But everywhere else in the house was just sort of a disaster.

I remember my dad telling me this story once about how he, to make a point, he cleaned just his side of the room and then put a piece of tape all the way down the center of the room across the floor and over the furniture and everything. And he said his side of the room was pristine. His side of the bed was made and her side looked like a cyclone had hit it. And she never said a word.

Junior high was terrible for me. Other kids just had better stuff than me, and I just felt like I didn't belong. And when I was 11, my parents separated. My dad was living in this shitty little apartment. He was just starting a new job as a clinical psychologist and started his own practice, so he had no money. But I just remember that summer feeling

just sort of my mom was sort of absent. I started to notice that my mom was in a room a lot. She would say she was taking a nap or whatever. And I just honestly don't remember seeing her a lot. And then one morning she was home, but somehow my brothers and I decided we were going to clean the house. Then my mom walked out of her bedroom and she looked like hell. She just looked drawn and pale, so pale.

And she walked out in the kitchen and she was standing in the kitchen and I turned around and I heard a noise behind me. I heard something hit the floor and I heard this groaning noise like nothing I've ever heard before. And I whipped around and my mom was on the floor having a seizure and she was on her back and there was white stuff coming out of her mouth. And I was absolutely frozen, terrified.

The noise that she was making, this groaning, was so horrifying to me. And my brother yelled at me and he said, go tell your brother to not come in here. Keep him out of here. As I'm trying to tell my little brother, don't panic. It's okay. Mom's not feeling well. You need to stay here. And as I'm saying it,

My voice is getting higher and higher in the panic and I start just sobbing. And of course, my little brother's terrified now. The ambulance was wheeling her out the door and she stopped them and she wanted me to come and talk to her. And I didn't want to have anything to do with her at that point because I was so terrified that she would start to have another seizure. I couldn't even make myself go near her.

But she was insistent that I come closer. And I don't even remember what she said. I wanted to be nowhere near her at all. And then I don't remember anything until my dad was sitting with us in the living room. And he told us that my mom was an alcoholic and that she had drank so much that her body had started shutting down. And I didn't believe him. But she had cirrhosis and she would have died if she hadn't gone to the hospital at that point.

That was one of those points in your life where everything suddenly is different. We had such a sense of safety and comfort, and then it just got slowly eroded over time. And then it was like, everything changes and you can't go back. At that point, I think my father must have come and stayed with us. And my mom was in the hospital for maybe a week and she refused to go to treatment because

I found out later that my dad had learned that my mom had been drinking with us in the car. My dad wanted to put her in a 28-day program, and she refused. When she came back home, she told me that they were going to go ahead and get the divorce, and it was going to be final. And I just remember falling apart, just crying and crying and crying.

And I remember my mom just putting her arms around me and saying, it's okay. It's okay. You're okay. We're going to be fine. That was the last time in my life I think I ever felt comforted by my mom. I think that's probably the first time that I've ever realized that. After that, she never talked about it, about the seizure or the drinking or anything and sort of went on her way.

And we all did, I guess. Right around that time, my mom got this dog. She felt like she needed a dog. The dog's name was Emma. Cute as a bug, but naughty and didn't follow directions. She had run to the next door, neighbors or something, and rolled in like horse poop or something. And she came back, she was literally green. And she had this long hair. She was really hard to clean.

And then my mom saw her and my mom flipped out. And then the dog took off running. My mom picks up this roller skate and is yelling at the dog and goes pounding out of the house with this roller skate in her hand. And I remember thinking, well, she's lost it and I'm going to have to take care of myself.

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And then I was a senior in high school and all of my friends were so excited about getting the hell out of their houses and going to college. And I knew I wanted to go to college, but I was terrified to leave home. And at the time I hated myself for that. So I decided I'm going to go to a community college for two years, and then I'm going to transfer to a four-year university. And I wanted to major in psychology and I wanted to work with abused kids. So I had it all planned out. I knew what I wanted to do.

I don't think I moved out until I was probably 21 when I transferred to the four-year college. And then I decided I was going to go directly to graduate school and get a master's degree, which I did. But this whole time, every time I went back home to visit, the house was a little worse. And it was always some sort of crisis. By this time, she had cats everywhere.

which she had had off and on when I was younger. Mostly we had dogs and I had one cat, but then we had two other cats and then we had three and then four. And I think by the time we moved out of the house I grew up in, my mom had like six cats. And every time I would go back, there seemed to be another cat and another layer of trash on the floor.

One time I did go home and I spent the night at my mom's house on the couch and I fell asleep on the couch and I woke up the next morning. My eye was swollen shut because there were so many cats in the house and I'm allergic to cat dander. I later found out. So I couldn't even be in the house without getting an asthma attack because there were so many cats.

Apparently, my mom's solution to that was to not have me visit because she never would clean it up. And there just started to be more and more cats. By that time, I was doing my own thing. I was in my late 20s and I met this guy that I thought I was going to marry. But I was not in any position to be in a relationship.

My knowledge of what a good relationship was, romantic relationship, was sorely lacking. And you don't learn really good stuff from an alcoholic mother and a semi-narcissistic father about what's appropriate and healthy in relationships.

I learned that what you did to get your way was to guilt people and lie and do whatever you can to not get in trouble because that's what my mom did. She would lie about anything and everything for no reason whatsoever.

And so that's what I had learned growing up is that you don't tell the truth. And so I think I cheated on every boyfriend I ever had because I also learned that abandonment is terrible. I think for my mom, that was like death for her abandonment because that's what had happened to her her whole life. And so I would date someone until I didn't want to date them anymore, but I didn't want to tell them I didn't want to date them anymore. I would go find somebody else to date. And then that would be the thing that broke up the relationship.

In any case, I was in this relationship with this guy who was probably not the best person for me. And I moved out, living on my own. And at the time, I knew that my mom's house was getting worse and worse because when I would come home to visit her, she would watch for my car out the window. And then by the time I had my car in park, she would be out walking out the front door. And so I knew it wasn't good.

And the few times that I did get up to the front door, she would open the door, slip out as quickly as she could and shut the door behind her. And the other thing I noticed during this time is that she smelled. Her clothing smelled bad, like musty, rotting animal hair or something or other. I couldn't even define it. But I will tell you, I've smelled it since in other places and I immediately know what it is now.

But I think I was helpless to even know what to do about it. On the one hand, I didn't want to know. And on the other hand, I didn't know what to do. But then I felt guilty for not doing anything. I was living in an apartment that I had gotten on my own after moving out of my boyfriend's house. And I got a phone call one night at about 10 o'clock. So my father called.

And he said, "Okay." And I knew at the tone of his voice that it was something to do with my mom. My dad proceeded to tell me that my mother had been arrested for animal hoarding. And I remember sitting on the phone

I remember feeling this like hot burning sensation over my whole body. Like, oh my gosh. Like I don't even, I didn't even know what to think. But apparently the house had become in such bad condition that the neighbors had complained about the smell because it smelled so bad. The county or whoever it is had given her some ultimatums about cleaning it up.

She had ignored every single warning that they had given her. I don't know. She just decided she wasn't going to respond, I guess. And so then finally the police came and arrested her and the hazmat team had to be called out and it was on the news. So there were reporters there and the hazmat team had said that it was one of the worst cases of hoarding they had ever seen.

which is saying something because it's the hazmat team. Apparently, there were nearly 90 in the house, most of them feral, at least one of them dead underneath the hoard. But I imagine there were probably more. They took her to jail. She called my father.

And my father, interestingly, as a clinical psychologist, also worked with police and sheriffs. And he counseled officers involved in shootings and did fitness for duty evaluations. And so he knew all of these guys at the police and sheriff. And so, of course, he gets this call about his ex-wife and hoarding 90 cats and needing to be arrested and the house condemned.

My mom was so, had just completely deteriorated so much to that point that when my dad said, well, what was your plan after this? And she told him that she was just going to go home, go back home. I decided at that point that I needed to go home and see what the hell was going on.

My dog that we had gotten when I was four, my mom hadn't seen her in a while, which just worried me to no end because there was a fenced-in backyard that was really small, and it's not like you could miss a 40-pound dog. She hadn't seen Daisy in a couple of days. My dad told me, he's like, are you sure you really want to do that because it's not a pretty sight? And I said, yes, I want to see it.

And by this point, the hazmat had cleared out everything. All of the junk was out and all of the cats. So I went there and I remember sitting outside and almost leaving. I almost turned around and left. But I have always been the kind of person that has always told myself, you're going to just do it and you're going to be fine.

So I put the dirtiest, like oldest clothes I could find on, put some work gloves on and a baseball hat. And I crawled under the house and I found her dead, covered in ants and maggots underneath the house. And I had to drag her out. It was horrible.

And my mom was sort of like, well, I couldn't find her. And I'm like, no, you made your daughter come over and do this terrible thing for you because you didn't take care of the dog. I mean, she was old. She was really old at the time. So it's not surprising. She was mostly blind, but she wasn't going to do it. She would have let the dog rot under there, I think, which is just horrible.

I remember walking up to the door and I put the key in the door and I could smell it. The smell was just rank. It was so awful. Like you didn't even want to breathe through your nose. And I hadn't even opened the door yet. So I opened the door and I pushed it open. Just, I didn't even step in. I pushed it open so I could just see. And the floors were black, black.

It was grime and shit and I mean like literal cat shit everywhere. It was a light carpeted house and with light linoleum and it was literally modeled black. And I just remember going, oh my God, my mother was living, living in this house. I couldn't, I just couldn't fathom that happening.

So I walked into the living room to where my old bedroom was. There were two bathrooms in that house. One of them was not even working. It was black like everything else. It was the worst thing to know that a family member of yours, somebody that you loved had been living that way was so horrifying. I didn't even know what to do. So I walked into the kitchen and the faucet didn't work.

I turned to the oven and the oven, nothing worked. I didn't even, I had no idea what she was doing for food or anything. And I remember turning around and looking out the window that which you could barely see through because everything was so grimy. And I heard this noise behind me and it was this like a growl. And I turned around and sitting on top of the refrigerator and

was the cat, this feral cat, and he was growling at me. And I just remember thinking, "Oh, fuck. I got to get out of here." And I left. And I never went back there. And neither did my mom, for that matter. Apparently, they condemned it. They had to take it down completely to the studs because everything was just saturated with the smell. So once I moved out, I would still see my mom all the time.

you know i would stop and see her where she taught you know at her school and i would pick her up on the weekends and we'd go do shopping or whatever and for a while the house was not i wouldn't say it was clean but it wasn't a trash heap either but it would still be messy right and then when my brother finally moved out i think that's probably when the hoarding really took off

I feel like maybe at that point, we had all left her too. So she was abandoned by her parents and then by her husband, and then we grew up and didn't need her so much anymore. And there was nobody to police the hoard. If you haven't seen a hoarder in active hoarding, you just can't picture it. The pictures don't even do it justice, actually.

I can't even explain the feeling of standing there realizing that your mother was living like an animal. And I just, I remember feeling this constant turmoil of somebody has to do something, but then what do we do? Who's going to do it? It's probably going to be me. And then I feel guilty for not wanting to help her. And, you know, but I didn't know how to help her.

When this finally happened with the arrest and I was standing in that house and the cats growling at me and there's cat shit everywhere and the smell is making me sick to my stomach, I realized like this was a whole nother level of bad that I had not even anticipated could be a thing. To the extent that I was thinking she probably needs to be committed to

Because I don't know how bad it has to be for someone to live in something like this. That was a really scary place to be. And even this wasn't the bottom. She would act as if everything was fine. She was perfectly happy. There was nothing wrong in her life. She wasn't drinking. She had her shit together. And she was really good at that. So she went to jail. She got out.

My dad got her an apartment, even though he's not obligated to support my mother in any way. He always has. That was the beginning of her cycle of claiming everything was fine while she was slowly falling apart until it was another crisis. And that happened over and over again after this point.

About six months after I went back to my hometown, I got on an airplane to go visit my ex-boyfriend and I was running late. And I got on the plane, there was somebody sitting in my seat. There was a middle seat next to him. That was the last one on the plane, but he was kind of cute. So I thought, Hey, you know, whatever. And we talked for five straight hours and I got off the plane. We exchanged phone numbers and I watched him walk out the door of the airport and

And I had this sense that that was the rest of my life that just walked out the door. I knew I was going to marry him. My now husband called me the next day and we've been together ever since. During that process, when we were having a long distance relationship for a while, it seemed like every time I was getting ready to go out of town, my mom ended up in the hospital.

It was almost like every time she saw one of us heading toward a major life milestone, regardless of how happy it was making us, she took from it that it was sad because she was less a part of our lives or something. And that would make her start drinking again. And her body would slowly start shutting down. And it was always something.

So then I ended up moving back across the country away from my mother. But because I was so bad at relationships for a while, my husband and I broke up because I was so bad at relationships. And that's when I started going to therapy because I knew I loved this person and I wanted to be with them, but I needed to get rid of whatever shit was holding me back from doing that. I went to therapy and it really was so helpful. We got married and within a year I was pregnant and

Up until that point, I had taken medications for anxiety. I had had panic attacks and constant sort of generalized anxiety. And I ended up taking some medication, which was fantastic. And it worked and it was beautiful. No problems. But then when I got pregnant, I realized I needed to go off the medication. And I did. And honestly, I had zero problems during my pregnancy with anxiety at all.

but then of course i had a son and once you have the baby you crash you know your hormones are all over the place for some reason i thought because i was you know 41 when i had him that this was going to be a breeze because i could handle it i was older well you don't know any more about raising a child when you're 41 than you do when you're 21. you just do it when you're younger so that you have more energy and i had none and i had postpartum depression

I just thought I cannot do this. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm probably going to ruin him. He won't stop crying. I can't get any sleep. And I remember standing in the shower and my son might've been three weeks old. I was standing in the shower and crying and thinking, I literally can't wait until he leaves for college because this is the worst. I feel so awful. It was the longest three weeks of my life.

And I had this constant feeling of just dread and just crushing exhaustion, like a lead weight was on me all the time. And I really needed my mother. So I called my mom because I didn't know how I was going to get through. So I called my mom and I said, look, I need you to please come. Please come and help me.

She was coming, she was on her way. And I saw on the app that the plane had landed. So I called her and I said, "Hey, do you need help with your bags?" And she said, "I don't know." And I was like, "What do you mean you don't know?" She said, "Well,

I haven't really been feeling well. And I'm like, what do you mean? That's such my mom thing. Like you just know immediately. You're like, okay, something's fucked up. Like I know it. I'm like, what is she going to hit me with this time? She said that basically she'd been throwing, throwing up on the plane and she was unsteady on her feet. And I go pick my mom up and she does not look good. I was like, okay, well we're going directly to the emergency room.

I'm sorry, I can't. There's nothing I can do. I have to feed my son and you can't be around him. So you're going to go to the emergency room. And I literally dropped her off there and drove home. And I called my dad on the way and I said, I don't know what's going on, but I cannot do this. They took care of it from there.

And as it turns out, she ended up in the hospital for five days. She had MRSA, cellulitis, and something else. I don't even, probably liver problems. And during that time, I'm talking to the doctors at the hospital and I'm saying, did she tell you that she's an alcoholic? No, she didn't mention that. It was probably the worst time in my life in terms of emotional just depths, you know?

I made the decision to just say, look, I can't talk to you. I have to cut you out right now because I am falling apart. My family is falling apart. And just cutting her out of my life, and it wasn't even forever, it was for a period of time, was the most painful thing I think I've ever had to do.

One of the things I always told myself was that regardless of how shitty my mom's behavior had been, I always wanted to treat her with respect to the extent that I was able. And I wanted her to know that I loved her and I wanted to be able to live with myself.

And the other thing is, I know that my mother had so many amazing qualities despite all of this shit. She had such a shit start to her life, she almost had no chance. And I always wanted to respect that. But your mom is supposed to be your biggest fan and is supposed to always take care of you regardless of how big you are.

And my mom was completely incapable of being that in any way, shape or form. And I hated the thought that that was forever. It just felt so empty. The other thing was I knew that it was hurting her. It was so painful for me because I knew it was painful for her. I was hurting her. She deserved it.

She needed to go away and I needed to do that for my own mental health and for my son and my family. But I hated hurting her. So I cut her out. I probably didn't talk to her for about three months.

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From plumbing to electrical, roof repair to deck upgrades. So leave it to the pros who will get your jobs done well. Hire high-quality certified pros at Angie.com. She had moved into a new apartment. She was walking through the apartment complex and there was a woman sitting outside of her apartment. She said, hey, why don't you come with me to this meeting I'm going to this afternoon? And my mom was like, uh, yeah, no, uh-uh, I don't think so.

And the woman says to her, hey, don't bullshit me. You don't bullshit a bullshitter. I know what you're going through. She said, you're coming with me. So from that point on, my mom started getting sober.

This woman became her best friend, her partner in crime. They were soulmates. They just, they did everything together. And my mom just like became this whole different person all of a sudden. And it was the strangest thing. It's almost like she became her more than she'd ever been her in the past ever. And I would read the emails and I wouldn't roll my eyes.

And they sounded really authentic and natural. And it was such a joy, actually. So we started talking on the phone. And it was such a lovely time because suddenly it was almost like she was a mother again. The mom that I remembered from being tiny.

So I brought my son back home to visit my mom and she was bright and vibrant and funny and loving. And she just was a bright light. And I kind of attribute that all to her friend. It was a lovely time. Unfortunately, it didn't last. Her friend passed away and I think that was too much for her to bear because

She just became progressively more and more depressed. She just wasn't able to get out of it. In August of that year, I quit my job, summertime 2016 in August. And I decided to start my own company, a consultancy firm. I also had just gotten called back for a mammogram.

the radiologist came in. And so she starts talking about these spots. And I had one on each side, one on each breast, and they wanted to do lumpectomies. Holy shit. This is not a joke. And so my mind is kind of reeling. And so this is all happening over the period of a month or so. I speak to the apartment manager where my mom lives. And she says, did your mom tell you about the bedbugs in her apartment? And I was like, excuse me, what is going on?

And it was like the second or third time and they were going into fumigate and

During this whole month, I'm on the phone with my mom's apartment manager and the doctor and the nurses that are where she is. And then the apartment was too full of crap for them to be effectively treated for bed bugs. So we had to find somebody to clean the apartment. And it went on and on and on. And I have a five-year-old and possibly breast cancer. And I was trying to start a business and it was the craziest time ever.

My mom ended up going to an assisted living facility. And also during this time, I was speaking on the phone with her and I knew something wasn't right. She had zero affect. I would talk to her and she was completely flat. She wouldn't laugh. I would ask her a question and she would answer me with one word answers. And I knew that it wasn't right. And I kept saying, everything's okay. Yeah. So I was really worried.

She had agreed to go to an assisted living facility and then rescinded that. She said, no, I'm not going. I'm going to go back home. I kept telling the nurses, this isn't going to work. She is not going to make it on her own. She won't survive. They even found her a couple of places that would have taken her insurance. And my mom refused to

So I had my lumpectomy surgery in mid-December. My lumpectomies showed that I had lobular carcinoma in situ. My lifetime risk of invasive breast cancer in my lifetime was 85%. So at that point, they were like, okay, you got it. You can have it, the mastectomy. So it was scheduled for mid-January. My mom was discharged on January 21st.

She told the hospital that she had a friend that was going to be taking care of her at home. So it was a Thursday, I think, and I had tried to call her and she didn't answer her phone. So I kind of let it go. And then the next morning I called her again. So I had a meeting to go to. And on the way, I just had a really bad feeling because I hadn't been able to reach my mom and

So I called her friend and her friend said, I haven't talked to her in like a week. I think she said she hadn't talked to her for a week. And this woman, as it turns out, the one that was supposed to be helping her lived 45 minutes away, not even in the same apartment complex. And she wasn't going to be taking care of my mom. My mom had just asked her to pick her up and take her home. So that's what her friend did.

So now I'm starting to panic. I called the apartment complex manager and I said, would you do me a favor and go knock on my mom's door and see if she answers? And she said no. And that I needed to call the sheriff to do a welfare check. I called the sheriff. They said, okay, somebody will be calling you back. Two hours goes by.

I call the apartment manager. Hey, is everything okay? Like, can you tell me what happened? And she said, no, you need to call the officer that was on the scene. And here's the number. I dialed the number of the officer that was on the scene. The answering machine picked up and it said, thank you for calling the coroner's office. And I hung up the phone because I thought I got the wrong number.

So I dialed it again, same message. I pressed zero or whatever. And then somebody answered the phone and I said, calling because there was a welfare check on my mom this morning. And this was the number they gave me to call the officer on the scene. And she may be dead. Weirdest conversation I think I've ever had. It was a little bit later that they confirmed that yes, she had died and she had been dead for about three days.

Ultimately, I did read the coroner's report and there was maggot activity and all this other stuff. It was not pleasant reading. But I also read that my mother had opioids and alcohol in her system and no food. And so she quit eating and just drank and took medication more than she should have had in her system. Two days later, I went to the other state to have my surgery. I

You know, my mom, my whole life, at major transitions in our lives and really exciting big things like marriage and childbirth, moving out of the state to go be with my future husband, she always went downhill during those times. But this was the ultimate. I had breast cancer. And so I don't know how she could have taught that.

which sounds really callous, but it's sort of like gallows humor. It's funny because otherwise, if you weren't laughing, you'd be crying. After that was finally when I started to get through the shit. So I think what I realized, I didn't realize until she was dead, was that I still, still, still, still, after everything that happened, I still had hope. I still hoped that

that we could someday have the kind of relationship that I always wanted to have with her, where it's your mom. And when something bad happens or when you're excited about something, you want to call your mom because she's your biggest fan. And it was over. There was never going to happen. And I was so angry, just furious with her for everything.

for not being my mom, for making me be her mom, and for doing that to my kid, you know, not taking care of herself so that my son couldn't know her. We scattered her ashes in the bay, and we had a lovely memorial, and I saw people from all over that I hadn't seen in ages.

Everybody was like, oh, I loved your mom so much and I miss her. And I just so, oh, it was terrible. And I'm thinking, really? There's so many people who didn't even realize that she was an alcoholic. So I went back to therapy. Oh, I would just rail about her in these sessions. Therapy helps push all that stuff out of your head and you can feel the peace filling those places up.

It's almost like I've come to a point of balance. She had a terrible upbringing and I can have compassion for that and love the good things that she did and just hold on to that really joyous time where she was sober and I know she was sober. I'm much less angry and I feel much more balanced in my view of her. I think hope isn't reality.

Hope is the story that you tell yourself about what you want. It's almost like the hope is sort of this fantasy, which won't happen. And so it's almost like you're upset about a thing that was not going to happen anyway. So I don't know. I don't know if it's hope or just if it's loss.

I always would talk to people in my life growing up and in my adulthood, and they would say, my mom is my best friend. I talk to my mom every day. You see these posts on Facebook and thank you, mom, for all the amazing things. You know, you're the best person I know. Every time I would be thinking in my head, you are lying.

That is not true. Nobody thinks that about their mom. Nobody's mom is their best friend. That's just dumb. But on the one hand, I envied those people because they obviously believe that, but I couldn't. I really wanted to, but I couldn't believe that anybody had that kind of a mom, but that's the kind of mom that I always wanted.

When you become a mom, you're taking care of a small person and you're taking care of a house and a husband and your job. And then the question is, who is going to let me fall apart in front of them? Who's going to do that for me? And I wanted my mom to be that person and she never was. I couldn't fall apart on anyone. I guess I feel like if I fell apart, I don't know what would happen. What would that even look like?

What is it that would break me? You know? Okay. Was it my mom going to the hospital? No. Was it breast cancer? No. Was it my mom dying? No. Is it dragging my dead dog out from under the house when it's covered with ants and maggots? Was that it? No. I've never let myself get to that point, regardless of what was going on. But the idea that there would be someone there to fall apart on if I needed to,

That's who I wanted her to be. The good thing is all of those experiences with her sort of made me who I am and I can be completely independent, do my own thing, take care of myself, take care of my kid. I can be good in crises. And now that I've gone through all that, I feel like I can handle myself.

On the other hand, it probably would be good to fall apart every so often. It's not the end of the world. I think if I did fall apart, I would learn that's not the end of the world if I do. And I probably could learn to say, I can't do that. I think the most confounding thing for me was I always wanted to understand why, like understand why does she do the stuff she does?

One time, it was after she had done the whole hoarding arrest and all of that stuff, I was visiting. It was the last night, and I was going back across the country the next day. And I said, okay, Mom, we're going to talk about this whole hoarding thing. I'm going to get to the bottom of this. What is going on? Let's talk about it. It'll make you feel better. Get it out.

She immediately starts crying and she had like a whole body reaction to this conversation where she almost screamed at me. I can't, I can't talk about it. I can't do it. I can't.

She told me the story once about she was a teacher. She dropped one of the kids, her kids off at the parents' house and the house was disaster. It was disgusting. And I'm just staring at her thinking, do you understand what you just said to me? Her house was the worst house. Hoarders buried alive. Like she was like the poster child for that show. And she's complaining about some other person's house. That was the hardest thing is never understanding why I couldn't get to the bottom of why she did what she did.

It was a constant question mark. I think it's all related to that caretaking, independence. I got this thing that I built about myself. I can figure it out. I can fix it. I can do it. I started when I was young. If I clean the house for my mom, dad won't be mad. Everything will be fine. I can take care of it. But I was never able to figure it out. She just was confounding to me. I couldn't put my finger on it and I couldn't identify it and I couldn't fix it.

And it was constant, this constant trying to understand. It's almost like you feel like if I could understand, then I might be able to get through to her. But she just was so good at what she did that we couldn't figure it out. I like the place that I'm in right now with my mom where I can hold this love in my heart for her now, whereas before it just hurt to think of her.

But now she kind of made me who I am. And a lot of that is good. You know, she was a teacher her whole life and all of her kids loved her. The parents loved her. My mom had a lovely singing voice and she was a pianist and she would take spaghetti dinners to the homeless people in her neighborhood. She made quilts for cancer patients. I mean, she had such a good heart and

And I told her before she passed away, I said, Mom, you know, you're the reason that I worked with kids most of my career. I worked in child mental health. She's the one who taught me about being good to people despite her behavior and shittiness. We always knew she loved us. Those are the things that I take from her.

My business is rolling along and I have more work than I know what to do with. I have a great husband. My son is 10 and he's smart and obnoxious and amazing and I love him with everything. And it's a lovely existence. Life is absolutely wonderful.

Today's guest requested to remain anonymous, but if you'd like to reach out to her, you can email at ca.hummingbird.1970 at gmail.com. From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening.

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