My MIL is 69 years old and she lives with my husband and I. Both my in-laws were hoarders/slobs and their house was a total disaster. It is an old house and it was not maintained, so the plumbing and electricity barely worked, the basement was full of black mold, and of course the whole place was piled floor to ceiling with sometimes literal garbage and it was covered in dust, mouse droppings, roach corpses, birdseed (they had pet birds...I know, it was pretty much the worst environment for birds), etc. Despite this my husband still flips out at me if I so much as suggest his parents were hoarders.
Anyway, my FIL died in 2013 of an illness that killed him because he refused to go to the doctor. My MIL had to move to Florida for work in 2009 and he was supposed to join her, but he preferred to stay in the hoard and kept putting it off. He refused to let anyone move or clean or try to fix anything. Since 2013 my MIL claimed she wanted to fix the house up and would spend entire months living in it to get it fixed, except barely anything got done. A bit of basic plumbing got fixed and the black mold was removed and everything in the basement was trashed, but that was about it. She would mostly move stuff around and put it in containers in the basement without actually getting rid of anything. We weren't allowed to get rid of anything while she was in Florida either. If my husband went through anything, he was supposed to sort it and then leave it there for her to go through again later. She and my husband once berated me for 30 minutes for throwing away a "Happy Birthday" banner that my FIL had hung on the wall 25 years prior and they had never taken down, and they made me take it out of the trash. On another occasion, I opened the refrigerator to find yogurt and other foods that had been left in there a year prior when she went back to Florida, that she didn't bother to make sure they were disposed of.
Anyway, last year my MIL got sick and almost died of an illness that would not have happened had she followed doctor's orders (are you sensing a pattern here?) and she was hospitalized for almost a year. When she was released she was disabled and, insanely enough, she wanted to move back into the house. BTW, the house was overrun by mice last winter, who fed on all the birdseed scattered on the floor that my husband lied to me and told me that he cleaned up, and the house is now covered in literal piles of mouse droppings. However, we insisted that she come to live with us and now any time something doesn't go her way, she bitches about how we are "abusing" her by not letting her move back to the house and making her follow basic rules like "don't be a total slob."
While she is no longer a hoarder in the technical sense of the word, the tendencies are still there, and the only reason why she isn't accumulating a hoard is because her disability limits her ability to go shopping.
Every surface in her room is covered in piles of stuff. She does need to have some stuff within easy reach since she can't bend easily, but a lot of the stuff on there is literal garbage, or stuff she hasn't used in months, or stuff that could be stored in a different area that she would still be able to access, and of course nothing is organized. For months the entire dining room table was covered in her stuff so nobody else could use it. Finally I got fed up and moved all of it to a different area (still reachable by her), and left a note saying that this table is meant for eating and should be usable by all family members. For the next several days she acted all pissy with me and any time I went to talk to her, she would say "Oh, what did I do now?" all victim-like.
However, the most immediate problem is with food. She has this obsession with food for some reason. She insists on cooking all the time and gets upset if people don't eat her cooking. This wouldn't be a problem except that she has problems following rules of basic sanitation. I have OCD and one of my main anxieties is fear of contaminated food, and now I'm basically forced to eat food that might potentially be contaminated.
She insists on keeping rotten produce around. On multiple occasions I have thrown away vegetables that were clearly rotten (a cucumber that was yellow and mushy on one end, eggplants and tomatoes that were wrinkled). She literally yelled at me about it and claimed they were still good as long as they didn't have mold. Even my husband asked me if they really were bad or if I was "overreacting", until I searched for "how to tell if [vegetable name] is bad" and showed him the results.
She contaminates everything. Thankfully we are vegetarian so we don't have to worry about her and raw meat. But last week I went to get the olive oil and there was a layer of unidentified food particles (I think it was a breading mixture she was using to fry foods in) all over the bottle. I had to buy another container of olive oil for my own use. Later I noticed the same food particles all over one of the spices. How could she not see that? On another occasion she cooked some rice with butter and used so much butter that my pot was covered in a layer of grease that survived multiple washings and boiling water in it...then she got pissed at me when I was upset about it.
And now this is what she did yesterday. She was able to walk to the farmer's market and got some basil. She put it in water so it would stay good longer, which is fine. Except, for some reason, she put it inside this plastic Dunkin Donuts cup that she has been using for months. She originally got this cup to use to wash herself in the shower! Last week she also put some kind of weird concoction of potato peelings that were soaked overnight in it, which she put in her hair (?) And now she's putting food in it! And now she wants to cook this basil in recipes and we are expected to eat it! I'm really concerned that I will get sick if I eat it, because I'm fairly certain she did not even wash this cup with soap in between uses, not to mention that it is a disposable cup and probably retains bacteria, etc.
So, sorry this turned into a long post, but what am I supposed to do to solve this food dilemma? I have tried just "forgetting" the food is in the refrigerator and she usually calls me out on it.
Submitted October 13, 2017 at 03:32AM by moresludge_lesswaste http://ift.tt/2ykgJH2 hoarding
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