Day 3

Tuesday, October 28, 2008
11:30:12 PM
Day 3

Today we went to Orangevale, CA. to have the chiropractor try and help Jerry with his back. Amazingly, with just one visit, Jerry's back was visibly on the way to recovery. At least better than it has been in over 10 years. We know he'll be in a great deal of 'aftermath' pain tomorrow, but he's got some good Glucosemine liquid and Tylenol pain killers that he can take to help ease the pain from it all. Thursday he goes back for his secondary treatment. To say the least, he's not happy about having to go down there, but he is happy about finally getting his back worked on.

Today also proved to be an interesting day for viewing the local wildlife. Before leaving town this morning, we had to make a stop up at the court house so my mom could run across the street area to pick up a check from one of her customers that works in the Medical Clinic. As we were waiting, we saw a baby Mountain Lion. It was absolutely adorable. It was slightly bigger than a Bobcat, but not by much, and its coloring was not as golden as an adult's would be. We estimated that it's approximately 6 - 8 months old.

Tonight, we saw our first set of Black Bears. One was spotted across the river near the Carriage House Inn, and the other in the parking lot here, inspecting the rear of someone's truck, before it headed up the way towards the river to fish. Not that big of a bear, maybe a young teen or older 'child' bear. Adorable, and actually very soft stepping.

This became the first of what is expected to be 'many' obstacles that we'll have to over come in order to barrel in on the house and get the work done. As a last resort, Jerry and I are fully prepared to get into the house ourselves and just start throwing things into boxes to get them out of there. Magazines get split in a 50/50 process. Half are thrown out, the other half are kept in boxes and thrown out at a later date. What it's coming down to is 'need' vs. 'want'. In other words, what my mom 'needs' and what my mom 'wants' are two very different things, and even she's fully aware of this. However, because of her mental stability right now, the 'want' over comes the 'need' 99.9% of the time. There's no way around that in her mind.

Example: Moldy Mountain Messenger newspapers found on her kitchen floor. She 'wants' to keep those in case they have something in there about Grandma, or Grandma's name and/or photo are there at some point. What she says is that she 'needs' to keep them, for the above mentioned reasons, which is really a 'want', rather than a 'need'. She does not think that the newspaper has well kept documentations about past papers, and therefore she 'has to' make sure that all of those newspapers are kept for historical purposes. Again, this is her personal inability to understand the differences between 'want' and 'need'.

Another example is typical of hoarders. This one involves 'personal property'. If she gave it to someone, in her mind, it's still partially hers. If a person does not keep her gifts around their home for any reason that she finds 'suspicious', she gets upset and assumes that the person has deliberately thrown the item in the trash, just to piss her off. The truth is, that the person may have used up the item, the item was no longer able to be used because it broke, or any number of reasons, but none of those reasons was even remotely in the area of 'just to piss her off'. Hoarders do not give gifts to people and just forget about it. Hoarders give gifts to people, and honestly believe in their minds that they are giving part of themselves to that person, and therefore the person needs to treat that gift with absolute respect, as if they were handling the hoarder's spirits in their homes.

When we were in the home cleaning out the kitchen, my mother kept making statements that are 'typical' hoarder statements. Statements such as, "The top two shelves in the glass cabinet there are good items of Mom's, but I'll let you use the bottom shelf because there are only meaningless trinkets in there that I don't want'. Other statements such as, "When we get into the closet, we'll have to carefully go through all the items to be sure there's nothing I want to keep."

Now, in her mind, she is 'sharing' the house with us. Meaning, she calls it 'our house', as in hers, mine, Jerry's and Max's home. She uses terms such as, 'Our stuff" and "Our belongings", which is also in reference to the items still belonging to her solely, but she is 'willing to share them with us while we live there'. She's also come up with several 'surprise conditions' for us staying in the home, such as:

1. Going to church with her every Sunday because she firmly believes that if anyone walks into a church a participates regularly, that they will then be forced to become a Christian and live the Christian life, openly praising the Christian God and denouncing any other belief system as being 'un-holy' and sometimes 'evil'.

2. Becoming instantaneously 'community minded'. This means that anything and everything that goes on in HER community projects, is what we 'have to' become involved with because it's 'the normal and right thing to do'. At 79 years old, just about everything she does has to do with senior citizens, the senior center, religious events and Mary Kay.

3. Making sure that Max participates in things 'with the local kids'. She does not see Max as a grown man, she sees him still as a young child (much in the same way as she sees me). She's mentioned having Max take some courses in the local High School (he graduated from High School last year), helping out the kids in church events (he's an Atheist) and getting involved in helping all the old people around the town (he'd sooner chop off his left testicle with a butter knife than get into doing stuff like that).

4. Making sure that she finds every single possible way of getting every single possible job for Jerry to work at, even if it means that Jerry would be out of the house at work for upwards of 16 hours a day. Considering that Jerry's physical condition is in no way able to handle even minor physical work at this point, my mother is pushing her limits beyond the norm right now.

5. Making sure we meet anyone and everyone she knows possible within the first few days of us being here. We're not even in our home yet, and already we've met half the town. Most people just pass off my mother's behavior as being totally eccentric and leave it at that.