Saturday, December 18, 2021
Welcome
This space serves to tell a story. I invite you to start at the beginning by clicking the link above "Touring the House" and start with Opening the Door. You can then read more about the process of "Cleaning the House" to hear details about our journey, if you are interested.
Redeeming the Past
Taken from original post July 2015.
In early July I took a last minute, super fast, trip to Nebraska. I was scheduled to leave at 8am on Tuesday and be back by Wednesday evening...giving me just about 24 hours in Nebraska. Well, I missed my flight and ended up hanging out in the Orlando airport with this little bird for nearly the entire day on Tuesday until I could get a 7pm flight that night.
Not a great way to start the trip, but really I just had one goal. Last September, Geoff and I sold mom's house to a couple that was renovating it. Early on they sent a few pictures of some things they did the outside of the house, but more recently they contacted us and invited us back to see all the renovations. It was an invitation I didn't want to pass up! My missed flight forced us to cancel dinner plans with everyone while I was there, but I did get to go to breakfast with my Dad and nephew, and we met sister-in-law and the kids there as well!
From there, Geoff and I headed down to Bellevue. Now, just to give you a little background...in October 2013 we had the house cleaned out. My previous posts that feature the images Geoff took were from before that clean up effort. Below you will see images of what it looked like when we actually sold it.
Here is the street view before:
And although I didn't get the exact angle after their renovations, you can get a general idea. They took out the big bushes, raised the tree line, painted and put in all new windows and a front door.
The entry way before:
And from the after shot you can get a better view of the new front door as well as how they replaced the banisters.
The living room/dining room before (obviously, this is before we moved out the final furniture pieces):
And after:
Because of the mold, they had to replace all the dry wall and ceiling in the entire house except the ceilings in the bedrooms. The also had to take up the floor and subfloor because of the water damage.
The kitchen before:
And look at the after! In addition to replacing all the plumbing, cabinets and appliances, they also removed the wall and opened it up a good bit!
Although the after isn't too dramatic, you can see that they also replaced all the doors in the house and they had to re-do all the electricity.
The hall bathroom before:
And after...amazing, right? He told us that they had to removed the tub through the wall!
My bedroom before:
My room and Geoff's room were probably in the best shape before, but you can see that they took out the two closet doors in my room and made one sliding door.
Geoff's room before:
And after:
Mom's room and half bath before:
And after:
The basement before:
Their renovations made it feel so finished! The one room was always sort of finished but the floor made it cold and dreary down there so the carpet really made it much more comfortable.
They also walled off part of the closet under the stairs and added a crawl space door to what was the playroom for more systematic storage.
One of the very first things that struck me was how much light was in the house. I'm sure it was mostly in contrast to my memories of the house always being hidden behind curtains and closed blinds. But it was so refreshing to walk in and see the light!
The other thing that really stood out to me was how open and fresh it was. Granted, it was all new with new drywall and paint, but more than the freshness in the air it really was almost like a weight was lifted from my chest as I took it all in. I could breath! In the months that we spent cleaning the house, we had to wear masks with filters because of the mold. But the mold being gone wasn't really even the reason it felt better. All the stuff, all the chaos, all the disorder...it was suffocating. And now, now there is freedom!
"He is wooing you from the jaws of distress to a spacious place free from restriction..."
Job 36:16
"He brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued me because he delighted in me."
Psalm 18:19
There were also small reminders that were familiar as we walked through each room. For instance, they left the rods in all the closets. And in what was almost like a completely new house, little things like that were reminders that it was the same house we called home for so long.
He and his wife knew just a little about our story when we sold the house to them last September. But when the story went viral back in the Spring, they came across it and saw Geoff's images for the first time of the house when it was full of stuff. Rick shared with us that he would often be working on the house and wonder what it was like for us to live there. It was so sweet of him and his wife, Sharon, to let us come back and offer us some closure. It really felt like they took ownership of the place and while they have listed it, Rick told us they will keep us posted on a buyer! He even wanted to take a picture of Geoff and I on the front porch before we left!
In the end, I am so very thankful I got to go see it! It is wonderful to be able to have memories of it so beautiful instead of just the broken, cluttered ones in my memory. It also offered great hope! Hope in it being a place of peace and refuge for a family one day. Hope in that the darkness and secrecy did not win...it was all brought to light and made anew! It was a very tangible picture of what the Gospel does to our hearts!
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!
II Corinthians 5:17
Thursday, April 23, 2015
My Bedroom
I often lie next to my daughter in her bed and admittedly, especially during these days of pregnancy, I often fall asleep with her when I put her to bed. But in the moments before sleep comes, we talk and snuggle and look around her room. Simple pictures, cut from scrapbook paper of a flower, a frog and a butterfly are in white frames on the wall. We talk about the colors and their smiling faces and how they match her bedspread. And I love every minute of it. In those moments I often wonder what that pink and green room looks like through the eyes of a little girl. I often pray that her room would be a place of comfort, peace, joy, laughter, love and safety...all the things I imagine a little girl's room should be. But sometimes, I feel like I'm not really sure what a girl's room should be.
Unlike Geoff's bedroom, when we returned to our childhood house, my bedroom was almost exactly as I remember. The pink walls and the ruffle valance. The flimsy strawberry shortcake desk and table next to the bed, barely usable because of the stuff that covered it. The white chest peaking out from the heaps of junk between the closet doors. I never actually remember using that dresser. I don't even remember where we kept our clothes. Often times the dryer didn't work, so we hung a lot of things on hangers in the doorways to dry. I also remember that there was constantly a pile of clean laundry on top of the dryer. That is probably what led to so much ironing.
Unlike Geoff's bedroom, when we returned to our childhood house, my bedroom was almost exactly as I remember. The pink walls and the ruffle valance. The flimsy strawberry shortcake desk and table next to the bed, barely usable because of the stuff that covered it. The white chest peaking out from the heaps of junk between the closet doors. I never actually remember using that dresser. I don't even remember where we kept our clothes. Often times the dryer didn't work, so we hung a lot of things on hangers in the doorways to dry. I also remember that there was constantly a pile of clean laundry on top of the dryer. That is probably what led to so much ironing.
Photo © Geoff Johnson
And then there was my bed. It was really the only functioning part of the room. As a young child, I remember lining the bed next to the wall with all my stuffed animals. I got spider bites frequently, and the stuffed animals covering the crack between the bed and wall somehow made me feel safer about what might crawl up there at night. Eventually though, when mom stopped sleeping in Geoff's room, she started sleeping in mine. It wasn't by invitation—like how my daughter begs me to lie down with her at night—it was by necessity, and I hated it. Especially as I entered my early teenage years and the twin bed seemed to grow smaller and smaller. It was terribly uncomfortable, but I will confess that it provided more warmth in the winter.
Someone once asked me if I kept my room clean despite how my mom kept the rest of the house. At the time, the question was incredibly insulting, but I suppose a part of me can now understand why someone would wonder. The truth is we didn't really know any different. Yes, we went over to other people's homes, but as a child I couldn't really articulate what was different about my situation, especially as a child living in the midst of trauma and in fear of anyone finding out. We also were never made to pick up or clean. And while it is probable that most adults would eventually clean on their own accord, I think most children are different. I know that my kids don't naturally want to pick up their toys, so I'm sure we never thought much about it when we were little. Probably ruling over those two things, however, was the issue that our rooms weren't really our rooms. At one point or another, Mom shared our rooms with us, and the heaps of newspapers and bags and boxes and junk were hers.
One thing that is different in my room now, however, is the writing on the wall. They are dirty walls, mostly from fingerprints that accumulated from years of having to brace ourselves with one hand on the wall as we walked through the house so we didn't fall. But in our last days in the house, after Mom's passing, I penned this verse on the filthy pink paint:
One thing that is different in my room now, however, is the writing on the wall. They are dirty walls, mostly from fingerprints that accumulated from years of having to brace ourselves with one hand on the wall as we walked through the house so we didn't fall. But in our last days in the house, after Mom's passing, I penned this verse on the filthy pink paint:
It is a bad picture, I know. (Remember, I'm not the photographer in the family.) But the verse is from Isaiah 51:3.
He will make her wastelands like the garden of the Lord! What a glorious picture of redemption! I have to confess: now that the silence is breaking, I sometimes have been unsure of what to say or how to say it. I don't have it all figured out yet. There was a time when I thought I did have it all figured out. I had been to counseling and come through the dark days of depression with new eyes. And then ten years later, after Mom's death, I came to realize there are parts that still weigh heavy on me. For a while, it seemed easier to wait...wait to tell the story until I could confidently say, "The Lord has completely healed those broken places!" But the truth is that while there has been much healing, there are still evidences of the pain that line my heart. It never really goes away. For each of us, our hearts will always bear the tender scars that remind us that things aren't exactly like they were meant to be. But those scars remind us that we are ever in need of a Savior.
I have struggled often to answer the question "Why?" Why was this a part of our story? Why didn't the Lord rescue us from it earlier? I fully believe that God could have protected us from such neglect and that He could have ordered things to be much different than they were. So why? Sometimes when horrific things happen in our lives, well-meaning people will recite verses to us or remind us of truths we already know—like the fact that "God will use all things for the good of those that love Him" or "There is a reason for everything." I told myself those same things for years, putting band-aids on the wounds and burying these things alive. The "right" answers only dismissed my pain. Yes, maybe God will use our story to help someone else, but that doesn't make the pain any easier to bear. Sometimes just stating a truth to try to make someone (or yourself) feel better overlooks the very real hurt and grief that that person has experienced. Yes, God will use it for good. But this side of Heaven we may never see it, or understand it, or really fully believe it. However, one thing I do know is that as I have been willing to venture into that hurt and grief, instead of hiding behind the door of silence...the Lord has drawn me near. He has shown me more of Himself in those places than I ever would have imagined had I denied the pain and hidden the shame. It is in such times that I have seen the truth of Genesis 15:1 (NIV).
Indeed, if I never have a good explanation as to why, I do know that He has revealed more of Himself to me and it has been a reward, a joy! The light of God's glory is most beautiful when we see the reality of the darkness in which we have been living. And if we are unwilling to come face to face with that darkness, we deny ourselves the joy of really experiencing the beauty of the light!
And now, even with the scars, there are new verses written on the walls of my own home, verses on the wall of the little girl I put to bed every night.
And every time I say those promises to her and I find my heart yearning for her to know the depth of their truth, my heart longs to know those same things as well. Because I know that every little girl...my little girl...the one in these pictures and the one in my womb...as well as the little girl I never got to be...we all need to know the truth of those promises more than we need a tidy and functioning bedroom, more than a place to play and grow, more than dinner around the kitchen table, or working faucets. A relationship with our loving and faithful heavenly Father is the only thing that will ever bring true comfort, true peace, true joy, true freedom, true safety and true healing for whatever dark and lonely place we find in our story.
The Lord will surely comfort Zion and look with compassion on all her ruins,
He will make her deserts like Eden, her wastelands like the garden of the Lord.
Joy and gladness will be found in her, Thanksgiving and the sound of singing.
He will make her wastelands like the garden of the Lord! What a glorious picture of redemption! I have to confess: now that the silence is breaking, I sometimes have been unsure of what to say or how to say it. I don't have it all figured out yet. There was a time when I thought I did have it all figured out. I had been to counseling and come through the dark days of depression with new eyes. And then ten years later, after Mom's death, I came to realize there are parts that still weigh heavy on me. For a while, it seemed easier to wait...wait to tell the story until I could confidently say, "The Lord has completely healed those broken places!" But the truth is that while there has been much healing, there are still evidences of the pain that line my heart. It never really goes away. For each of us, our hearts will always bear the tender scars that remind us that things aren't exactly like they were meant to be. But those scars remind us that we are ever in need of a Savior.
I have struggled often to answer the question "Why?" Why was this a part of our story? Why didn't the Lord rescue us from it earlier? I fully believe that God could have protected us from such neglect and that He could have ordered things to be much different than they were. So why? Sometimes when horrific things happen in our lives, well-meaning people will recite verses to us or remind us of truths we already know—like the fact that "God will use all things for the good of those that love Him" or "There is a reason for everything." I told myself those same things for years, putting band-aids on the wounds and burying these things alive. The "right" answers only dismissed my pain. Yes, maybe God will use our story to help someone else, but that doesn't make the pain any easier to bear. Sometimes just stating a truth to try to make someone (or yourself) feel better overlooks the very real hurt and grief that that person has experienced. Yes, God will use it for good. But this side of Heaven we may never see it, or understand it, or really fully believe it. However, one thing I do know is that as I have been willing to venture into that hurt and grief, instead of hiding behind the door of silence...the Lord has drawn me near. He has shown me more of Himself in those places than I ever would have imagined had I denied the pain and hidden the shame. It is in such times that I have seen the truth of Genesis 15:1 (NIV).
...I am your shield, your very great reward.
And now, even with the scars, there are new verses written on the walls of my own home, verses on the wall of the little girl I put to bed every night.
The Lord your God is with you.
He is mighty save.
He will take great delight in you.
He will quiet you with His love.
He will rejoice over you with singing.
Zephaniah 3:17
And every time I say those promises to her and I find my heart yearning for her to know the depth of their truth, my heart longs to know those same things as well. Because I know that every little girl...my little girl...the one in these pictures and the one in my womb...as well as the little girl I never got to be...we all need to know the truth of those promises more than we need a tidy and functioning bedroom, more than a place to play and grow, more than dinner around the kitchen table, or working faucets. A relationship with our loving and faithful heavenly Father is the only thing that will ever bring true comfort, true peace, true joy, true freedom, true safety and true healing for whatever dark and lonely place we find in our story.
Read about Opening the Door here.
Read about The Living Room here.
Read about The Kitchen here.
Saturday, April 18, 2015
Geoff's Bedroom
As we move on in the house, let me start by highlighting something that struck me when I first saw all these photos. The images appeared so bright to me! Naturally, for the sake of capturing the full scale of everything, we lit the rooms. But the reality is that when we lived there, most of the windows were covered and it was rather dark inside. Even more so when we returned to take the pictures and the light fixtures weren't working. The exception to this was in the bedrooms. Our bedrooms were above the garage and since people couldn't see directly in, we could keep the curtains open. Additionally, the AC didn't work, so the windows were open 24/7 in the summer months. This also allowed us to talk a lot through the windows to neighbors or friends in the driveway.
As I mentioned in previous posts, we didn't watch TV in the living room or eat in the kitchen, which meant we spent most of our time in our bedrooms. Geoff's room, in particular, became a substitute living room of sorts. The TV had been moved there at some point, and from then on it became a gathering place for us. While most of the carpet couldn't be seen in the rest of the house, there were patches of Geoff's carpet that were clear at the time. It was a royal blue carpet, which I'm sure was cool at some point in history. We would order pizza on Friday nights and watch TV or play Nintendo in his room. I'm sure he hated it...having mom and me in his room all the time with nowhere else in the house for him to go, but he seemed to take it in stride. However, by the time we went back, the room looked more like everywhere else in the house.
Generally speaking, Geoff's room holds happy memories for me. (With the exception of when we would play Nintendo and Geoff would pause me over a jump and kill me on purpose. Although I'm pretty sure that has more to do with having a big brother than with anything having to do with the house.) I also remember that we used to clean up Geoff's room entirely the week before Valentine's Day and then decorate it with balloons and streamers and surprise Mom. It was all meant to be a display of our love for her, but unfortunately, I don't think any area of the house getting cleaned up without her involvement led to much joy or gratitude. The same was true when my grandpa surprised her by cleaning out the garage one time. It was disastrous and led to months of silence between them.
Living behind the walls of hoarder is a terrible life of silence and secrecy that leads to loneliness and a deep need for acceptance. Wanting desperately for people to love you but knowing you can't really let them know all of you. Although those feelings may not have found their roots in Geoff's or my heart, we certainly felt the effects of them. I often still feel their residue and struggle to keep up appearances on the outside. And yet God has been so gracious in how He has carried me all these years. Slowly dealing with the wounds and allowing time to bring some healing. It hasn't been easy. Opening the door to friends was the first step. It was a really hard first step, but had fixing our brokenness been easy, I doubt the Lord would have freely given His innocent son to be slaughtered on the cross to deal with the deep depravity that our souls bear and to set us free from the weight of all our burdens. Again and again I am reminded of God's desire to "bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to those who are bound" (Isaiah 61:1). And that promise is universal, not just to children of hoarders, but to all of us who have broken places of our lives that need real healing.
As I mentioned in previous posts, we didn't watch TV in the living room or eat in the kitchen, which meant we spent most of our time in our bedrooms. Geoff's room, in particular, became a substitute living room of sorts. The TV had been moved there at some point, and from then on it became a gathering place for us. While most of the carpet couldn't be seen in the rest of the house, there were patches of Geoff's carpet that were clear at the time. It was a royal blue carpet, which I'm sure was cool at some point in history. We would order pizza on Friday nights and watch TV or play Nintendo in his room. I'm sure he hated it...having mom and me in his room all the time with nowhere else in the house for him to go, but he seemed to take it in stride. However, by the time we went back, the room looked more like everywhere else in the house.
Photo © Geoff Johnson
Generally speaking, Geoff's room holds happy memories for me. (With the exception of when we would play Nintendo and Geoff would pause me over a jump and kill me on purpose. Although I'm pretty sure that has more to do with having a big brother than with anything having to do with the house.) I also remember that we used to clean up Geoff's room entirely the week before Valentine's Day and then decorate it with balloons and streamers and surprise Mom. It was all meant to be a display of our love for her, but unfortunately, I don't think any area of the house getting cleaned up without her involvement led to much joy or gratitude. The same was true when my grandpa surprised her by cleaning out the garage one time. It was disastrous and led to months of silence between them.
Living behind the walls of hoarder is a terrible life of silence and secrecy that leads to loneliness and a deep need for acceptance. Wanting desperately for people to love you but knowing you can't really let them know all of you. Although those feelings may not have found their roots in Geoff's or my heart, we certainly felt the effects of them. I often still feel their residue and struggle to keep up appearances on the outside. And yet God has been so gracious in how He has carried me all these years. Slowly dealing with the wounds and allowing time to bring some healing. It hasn't been easy. Opening the door to friends was the first step. It was a really hard first step, but had fixing our brokenness been easy, I doubt the Lord would have freely given His innocent son to be slaughtered on the cross to deal with the deep depravity that our souls bear and to set us free from the weight of all our burdens. Again and again I am reminded of God's desire to "bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to those who are bound" (Isaiah 61:1). And that promise is universal, not just to children of hoarders, but to all of us who have broken places of our lives that need real healing.
Read about Opening the Door here.
Read about The Living Room here.
Read about The Kitchen here.
Wednesday, April 15, 2015
The Bathroom
This image that Geoff captured of the bathroom is appalling but it is one of the two that were selected to be published in American Photography 30. I think that seeing my daughter in the picture is even more unnerving. It stirs a bit of anger in me and rightly so...no child should ever have to live in these conditions! And so, in the midst of all these posts, I want to stop and ask you...do you know someone living like this? It is hard to know for sure, I know because they likely won't let you in to see. Maybe they never invite you inside, maybe their windows are constantly covered, maybe they are slow to answer the door. But are there children involved? I know it is easier not to get involved. What will happen if you do? Will it ruin your relationship with that person? Will the results really be better for the kids? I think if it isn't physical or sexual abuse it is easy to say that they are still safe. But please, I beg you...be a voice for that child! They may not even realize things aren't right, more than likely they will never speak up about it out of fear and out of love for their parent. But they are being neglected in so many ways and will grow up with deep wounds if you just brush it off and say, "It isn't my business how they live."
What kind of wounds you might wonder? The bathroom gives you just a glimpse into such things. The bathroom is a place that is home to so many things that should be private...like showering, going to the bathroom, dealing with your menstrual cycle. And not only do you want privacy for those things yourself, but it can be embarrassing to see others in those same situations. However, when there is too much stuff stacked in front of the door for it to close even a few inches, you are left to do all those things with the door wide open. To this day I have no idea why my mom never put a shower curtain up to provide privacy while we bathed, but she didn't. When we were little we took baths and it wasn't a big deal. But eventually it would become a terribly awkward situation.
Behind the tub faucet the tiles and drywall had been removed and never replaced. Mom didn't want water to get into the walls so we were left to suds up and rinse. We did it as fast as possible because the door was wide open, and especially quickly in the winter because it was so miserably cold. It led to all sorts of shame and self consciousness and issues with my body image. But, the kitchen sink didn't work and neither did the bathroom sink so besides a flushing toilet, the tub was the only running water in the house. Bathing, teeth brushing, hand washing, lemonade making...it all happened from the tub faucet. Eventually, about a year or so after I moved out, the pipes froze and there was no more water in the house at all. That is what ultimately led Geoff to leave as well.
I never really thought much about it from Geoff's perspective until we went back to the house together. He was the only boy in the house with two females and a bathroom door that didn't close. He spoke of how he trained himself to almost ignore that the bathroom was there when he walked quickly down the hall.
The hall itself was just another place for stuff to get stacked, not serving much purpose other than for getting from our rooms to the front door. This picture almost doesn't do it justice because as a child I remember a bigger pile of stuff against the left wall that spread the entire length of the hall. It seems to me that most of it was newspaper, but I'm not exactly sure. And although I don't remember what all that pile contained, I do know that to me it seemed like a long skinny table that was about waist high and took up about half the of hallway leaving a small trail to walk down. It is also hard to tell from the photo is just how deep the pile of stuff is that lines the floor. You can get a better idea if you look in the lower right corner of the image and see the furnace return. It stood probably about 12-15 inches off the ground, but as you can see it is mostly covered with junk.
I think the best way to describe it all is with the words a counselor spoke to me a few years ago. While some hoarders have piles of papers or stacks of boxes...there was no such order in our house. It really was like living in a garbage dump. Even so, I love what one of my dear friends said. She is one of the few that came into the house with me a few years ago and as she looked around she very rightly compared it all to the condition of our hearts. Full of junk...full of sin...anger, bitterness, jealousy, pride, fear, selfishness, impatience, an ungrateful spirit. And that is where we live, learning to survive around all the garbage and much like my brother and I as children didn't know any different, all of us are often unaware that things aren't meant to be this way, unaware that there is hope and life offered to us through Jesus Christ and that our hearts can be made clean!
Photo © Geoff Johnson
What kind of wounds you might wonder? The bathroom gives you just a glimpse into such things. The bathroom is a place that is home to so many things that should be private...like showering, going to the bathroom, dealing with your menstrual cycle. And not only do you want privacy for those things yourself, but it can be embarrassing to see others in those same situations. However, when there is too much stuff stacked in front of the door for it to close even a few inches, you are left to do all those things with the door wide open. To this day I have no idea why my mom never put a shower curtain up to provide privacy while we bathed, but she didn't. When we were little we took baths and it wasn't a big deal. But eventually it would become a terribly awkward situation.
Behind the tub faucet the tiles and drywall had been removed and never replaced. Mom didn't want water to get into the walls so we were left to suds up and rinse. We did it as fast as possible because the door was wide open, and especially quickly in the winter because it was so miserably cold. It led to all sorts of shame and self consciousness and issues with my body image. But, the kitchen sink didn't work and neither did the bathroom sink so besides a flushing toilet, the tub was the only running water in the house. Bathing, teeth brushing, hand washing, lemonade making...it all happened from the tub faucet. Eventually, about a year or so after I moved out, the pipes froze and there was no more water in the house at all. That is what ultimately led Geoff to leave as well.
I never really thought much about it from Geoff's perspective until we went back to the house together. He was the only boy in the house with two females and a bathroom door that didn't close. He spoke of how he trained himself to almost ignore that the bathroom was there when he walked quickly down the hall.
The hall itself was just another place for stuff to get stacked, not serving much purpose other than for getting from our rooms to the front door. This picture almost doesn't do it justice because as a child I remember a bigger pile of stuff against the left wall that spread the entire length of the hall. It seems to me that most of it was newspaper, but I'm not exactly sure. And although I don't remember what all that pile contained, I do know that to me it seemed like a long skinny table that was about waist high and took up about half the of hallway leaving a small trail to walk down. It is also hard to tell from the photo is just how deep the pile of stuff is that lines the floor. You can get a better idea if you look in the lower right corner of the image and see the furnace return. It stood probably about 12-15 inches off the ground, but as you can see it is mostly covered with junk.
Photo © Geoff Johnson
I think the best way to describe it all is with the words a counselor spoke to me a few years ago. While some hoarders have piles of papers or stacks of boxes...there was no such order in our house. It really was like living in a garbage dump. Even so, I love what one of my dear friends said. She is one of the few that came into the house with me a few years ago and as she looked around she very rightly compared it all to the condition of our hearts. Full of junk...full of sin...anger, bitterness, jealousy, pride, fear, selfishness, impatience, an ungrateful spirit. And that is where we live, learning to survive around all the garbage and much like my brother and I as children didn't know any different, all of us are often unaware that things aren't meant to be this way, unaware that there is hope and life offered to us through Jesus Christ and that our hearts can be made clean!
Come now, let us reason together, says the LORD:
though your sins are like scarlet,
they shall be as white as snow;
though they are red like crimson,
they shall become like wool.
Isaiah 1:18
Read about Opening the Door here.
Read about The Living Room here.
Read about The Kitchen here.
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
The Dining Room
I don't really have a lot to say about the dining room. It was another one of those unnecessary rooms and really was just another place to pile stuff. Mostly it was home to pictures. Mom took pictures of everything we did and we were involved in so many activities...dance, baseball, soccer, 4-H, scouts, etc. On top of that we tagged along with mom to meetings for PTA and Jaycees and a whole array of other organizations. In some ways it kept us busy and occupied outside the house, but on the flip side it gave us opportunity after opportunity to put on a good face and act like everything was okay. Either way, the dining room table - a wedding gift to my parents from my Grandpa - was buried under piles of photos and film canisters. A typewriter also sat on the back corner of the table, but for there was never a reason for us kids to go back in that corner of the room, so it somehow became scary to me. It wasn't until we went through the house in October 2013 that I realized it was the only corner of the house where you could see the carpet.
During that visit we also discovered a whole collection of tea cups that my dad's grandmother had passed down to my mom. They were stored in the china cabinet and with the exception of a little dust, they were in perfect condition. There were very few valuable or sentimental things that were salvageable from the house, but these are some of them and I'm so happy to have them and be able to pass them on to my kids one day.
Back when we lived there and the roof started leaking, the dining room had tubs and containers to try to catch the water and garbage bags to cover the things nearby. At one point the inner layer of the back sliding glass door shattered and a pile of glass remained along the door track until we cleaned the house last year. The dining room was also the place that I accidentally spilled my jar of mealworms that I had from an elementary class project. Because of the layers of surrounding mess, the spill was nearly impossible to clean up entirely and the crawly creatures seemed to thrive in the house. For years I would spot little mealworms here and there and every time I did I had such a sense of guilt. One innocent childhood mistake that should not have been a big deal but it haunted me for years.
Overall, with the exception of going in and out the back door, the only other memory I have in the dining room was shaving my legs for the first time with an electric razor. Random, I know, but I'm sure it had something to do with the state of the bathroom, which I'll post about next...
Read about Opening the Door here.
Read about The Living Room here.
Read about The Kitchen here.
Read about The Bathroom here.
Read about Geoff's Room here.
Read about My Bedroom here.
Photo @ Geoff Johnson
During that visit we also discovered a whole collection of tea cups that my dad's grandmother had passed down to my mom. They were stored in the china cabinet and with the exception of a little dust, they were in perfect condition. There were very few valuable or sentimental things that were salvageable from the house, but these are some of them and I'm so happy to have them and be able to pass them on to my kids one day.
Back when we lived there and the roof started leaking, the dining room had tubs and containers to try to catch the water and garbage bags to cover the things nearby. At one point the inner layer of the back sliding glass door shattered and a pile of glass remained along the door track until we cleaned the house last year. The dining room was also the place that I accidentally spilled my jar of mealworms that I had from an elementary class project. Because of the layers of surrounding mess, the spill was nearly impossible to clean up entirely and the crawly creatures seemed to thrive in the house. For years I would spot little mealworms here and there and every time I did I had such a sense of guilt. One innocent childhood mistake that should not have been a big deal but it haunted me for years.
Overall, with the exception of going in and out the back door, the only other memory I have in the dining room was shaving my legs for the first time with an electric razor. Random, I know, but I'm sure it had something to do with the state of the bathroom, which I'll post about next...
Read about Opening the Door here.
Read about The Living Room here.
Read about The Kitchen here.
Read about The Bathroom here.
Read about Geoff's Room here.
Read about My Bedroom here.
Monday, April 13, 2015
The Kitchen
The kitchen was one of the rooms that made our home seem most abnormal. Take, for instance, the sink. I have no memory of the kitchen sink ever working. I'm not sure if it was a broken pipe or a clogged drain. I just don't ever remember being able to use the kitchen sink.
Likewise, the microwave worked and that allowed us to eat more than our fair share of microwave dinners. Eating fast food and microwave dinners day-in and day-out caused me to develop an unhealthy relationship with food. If you give a child the opportunity to pick between chicken nuggets or a hamburger and french fries or Taco Bell for dinner every night, they never gain the knowledge on what healthy food choices look like. I was overweight by the time I was a teenager and when I finally moved out and had the opportunity to take control, I found myself on the verge of a dangerous eating disorder. I later learned how much eating disorders grow out of a need for control, and with such a chaotic childhood, this became one area I could actually control. Within about a year of moving out I had lost 50 pounds.
Thankfully, God has redeemed so much of that! And although I still struggle with control in other areas of my life, I now have a heightened awareness of it. It is a learning process but the Lord has been gracious to teach me so much about resting in His sovereignty and fighting not for control, but for those things that are good and right and true.
God has done so much more than that as well! It may not have been until I moved in with my dad that I really had a chance to experiment in the kitchen and although it wouldn't be until I got married that I built any habit of sitting down at the table for a meal, those are two things I value so much now...cooking at home and eating dinner with my husband and kids around the table each night. Not to mention having people over to my house for dinner! Maybe one day we will even live near family and get to host a holiday meal!
Read about Opening the Door here.
Read about The Living Room here.
Read about The Dining Room here.
Read about The Bathroom here.
Read about Geoff's Room here.
Read about My Bedroom here.
And then there was the refrigerator. It broke early and couldn't be fixed because how could anyone come into the mess to fix appliances? I remember on occasion my mom would let my grandpa come over to fix something, but in later years she even kept him out. We did get a small refrigerator for a time, but it too eventually broke and we resorted to keeping things on the back porch during the winter and in a cooler during the summer. All that made life more difficult when mom's car would break down because it meant we would have to make daily walks to the grocery store to get ice for the cooler or just enough food for dinner and breakfast so it wouldn't go bad. I hated walking to and from the grocery store so often. And I also hated pouring icy milk in my cereal for breakfast in the winter when it was already so cold inside the house.
The stove didn't really work either. The stove top may have worked, but we never used it. The oven, however, just barely functioned. It heated up to a low temperature and while it wasn't really useful to cook anything in, we did turn it on and would stand by it in the winter to keep warm.
Photo © Geoff Johnson
Winter in the house was almost unbearable. Maybe that is why I hate the cold weather. And now that I live in Florida it is almost hard to remember how cold it really was. But those of you who battle negative degrees in the winter can imagine how miserable it was to come in from outside to a house that was just about the same temperature on the inside. Not to mention the misery of taking a bath. Granted the walls blocked the wind and snow, but it was still bitterly cold. On occasion the furnace did work, but the vents were covered with newspaper and mom was too afraid of it starting a fire so she rarely ran it. We did have a few small space heaters, but those too were a fire hazard so they were turned off at night.
So what did work? The phone. It hung on the wall, and although it wasn't there when we returned to take pictures, I remember calling friends or answering Dad's calls when he was on his way to pick us up. I also remember making numerous phone calls to mom when she was at work and Geoff and I were fighting.
Likewise, the microwave worked and that allowed us to eat more than our fair share of microwave dinners. Eating fast food and microwave dinners day-in and day-out caused me to develop an unhealthy relationship with food. If you give a child the opportunity to pick between chicken nuggets or a hamburger and french fries or Taco Bell for dinner every night, they never gain the knowledge on what healthy food choices look like. I was overweight by the time I was a teenager and when I finally moved out and had the opportunity to take control, I found myself on the verge of a dangerous eating disorder. I later learned how much eating disorders grow out of a need for control, and with such a chaotic childhood, this became one area I could actually control. Within about a year of moving out I had lost 50 pounds.
Thankfully, God has redeemed so much of that! And although I still struggle with control in other areas of my life, I now have a heightened awareness of it. It is a learning process but the Lord has been gracious to teach me so much about resting in His sovereignty and fighting not for control, but for those things that are good and right and true.
God has done so much more than that as well! It may not have been until I moved in with my dad that I really had a chance to experiment in the kitchen and although it wouldn't be until I got married that I built any habit of sitting down at the table for a meal, those are two things I value so much now...cooking at home and eating dinner with my husband and kids around the table each night. Not to mention having people over to my house for dinner! Maybe one day we will even live near family and get to host a holiday meal!
Read about Opening the Door here.
Read about The Living Room here.
Read about The Dining Room here.
Read about The Bathroom here.
Read about Geoff's Room here.
Read about My Bedroom here.
Saturday, April 11, 2015
The Living Room
As I type this, I'm sitting in my kitchen, looking out over the table to the living room. The living room is where we all pile on the couch to read books, bedtime stories and Bible stories. It is where we video chat with family members spread out all over the US. It is where Friday night movies happen with popcorn and M&M's and where laundry gets piled on the couch until I can eventually fold it. It is where we have dance parties, perform songs, play board games, build forts and create other imaginary places. It is where the kids lounge on their bean bags, stack their bean bags, jump from the couch to their bean bags, hide under their bean bags. (We love our bean bags around here!) It is where we pray for our extended family and friends and the missionaries we support. It is where we open Christmas presents, do Jesse Tree and 12 Days of Christmas devotions, Resurrection Eggs, and Easter Baskets. It is where pictures of my nephews and niece are displayed as well as a painting Brandon gave me when we were dating. It is where picture albums from years ago line our shelves and wedding gifts adorn our wall. It is where friends have gathered for Bible Studies and birthday parties and just to catch up.
As a child however, my memories of the living room are much different. It is strange how much living we didn't, or couldn't do in the living room. It wasn't a necessary room and therefore was one that never even really had a path through it to any piece of furniture.
There are a few memories of random things that must have meant it was clean and function-able at some point. I remember one Christmas walking out to find gifts from Santa - a toy ironing board, among other things, on the floor under the tree. I also remember that the JC Penney and Sears catalogs were kept under the couch and I remember it scared me to reach under there as a child. But those two memories mean mostly one thing to me...at one point the floor was visible. I have very few memories of the floor in that house. Those memories are limited to certain places - but never do I remember looking at a room and seeing the whole floor or even the carpet. The carpet was a yellow color but the 'carpet' I remember was newspaper. Layers and layers of newspaper. Several inches deep. The newspaper carpet made the whole house seem smaller because as you walked down the hallway or into a room, you stood at least 6 inches off the floor and therefore the ceiling seemed to close in on you. I'm sure it wasn't just the newspaper. I'm sure it was, in part, the boxes of old records, piles of bills and bags of pamphlets that lined the walls. But all that faded into the background and those boxes and piles almost became permanent fixtures in the house, as if they were a table that stood there instead of heaps of trash.
I know there was a season when mom slept on the couch. And I have memories of coming home from school to watch TV - but even by then there was only a small section of the couch I could sit on and the TV was on the edge of a random table surrounded by junk.
The living room is actually one place I remember trying to clean. But that process was always so frustrating. Geoff and I had to stand and wait for mom to hand us something. She would tell us if we could throw it away or if we needed to put it in a new pile. Most things just went into new piles and we never felt like anything got accomplished. Those new piles soon were made on the couch and when it was eventually overtaken, mom started sleeping in Geoff's room. Eventually, the TV was also moved to Geoff's room and then one year we stopped getting Christmas trees because there was nowhere to display them. From that point forward, I'm not sure we ever went into the living room, except maybe to open a window on a hot summer day. One day, that same window got stuck and wouldn't close all the way. And despite our best efforts of putting a piece of wood in front of it, it did little to block the cold air from coming in during the winter months. Over time, the living room became wet and moldy because of the leaky roof. It wasn't until years after I moved out that the roof was fixed; however, the falling ceiling on the inside remained and the mold continued to grow.
I don't think I really missed the living room as a child, but now as an adult...as a mother...I realize how much life it could have held. In some ways I'm not sure that it was possible for me to understand and grieve all the loss from a childhood like this until I became a mother. Now I watch my children run and play freely in our home and find it hard to imagine their lives any different. I don't have memories like that as a child, instead we were trapped between the piles with nowhere to play.
I suppose the lack of space inside is one reason we played outside and at friends' houses so often, giving us some glimpses of normality as a child. Despite the fact that no one could come in our house, our yard was one of the best in the neighborhood! It had great climbing trees and a tether ball and a wooded area to build forts and hideouts. It was also large enough to play a decent game of baseball or football and mom let me dig out a few areas of grass to grow a garden. It was a place of many happy memories and that is probably why I often wish we had more of an established yard now for my kids to explore. Either way, I trust their childhood memories will be very different from mine! Memories filled with friends at our house and memories with space to run and play and dance and build and LIVE!
Read about Opening the Door here.
Read about The Kitchen here.
Read about The Dining Room here.
Read about The Bathroom here.
Read about Geoff's Room here.
Read about My Bedroom here.
As a child however, my memories of the living room are much different. It is strange how much living we didn't, or couldn't do in the living room. It wasn't a necessary room and therefore was one that never even really had a path through it to any piece of furniture.
There are a few memories of random things that must have meant it was clean and function-able at some point. I remember one Christmas walking out to find gifts from Santa - a toy ironing board, among other things, on the floor under the tree. I also remember that the JC Penney and Sears catalogs were kept under the couch and I remember it scared me to reach under there as a child. But those two memories mean mostly one thing to me...at one point the floor was visible. I have very few memories of the floor in that house. Those memories are limited to certain places - but never do I remember looking at a room and seeing the whole floor or even the carpet. The carpet was a yellow color but the 'carpet' I remember was newspaper. Layers and layers of newspaper. Several inches deep. The newspaper carpet made the whole house seem smaller because as you walked down the hallway or into a room, you stood at least 6 inches off the floor and therefore the ceiling seemed to close in on you. I'm sure it wasn't just the newspaper. I'm sure it was, in part, the boxes of old records, piles of bills and bags of pamphlets that lined the walls. But all that faded into the background and those boxes and piles almost became permanent fixtures in the house, as if they were a table that stood there instead of heaps of trash.
Photo © Geoff Johnson
I know there was a season when mom slept on the couch. And I have memories of coming home from school to watch TV - but even by then there was only a small section of the couch I could sit on and the TV was on the edge of a random table surrounded by junk.
The living room is actually one place I remember trying to clean. But that process was always so frustrating. Geoff and I had to stand and wait for mom to hand us something. She would tell us if we could throw it away or if we needed to put it in a new pile. Most things just went into new piles and we never felt like anything got accomplished. Those new piles soon were made on the couch and when it was eventually overtaken, mom started sleeping in Geoff's room. Eventually, the TV was also moved to Geoff's room and then one year we stopped getting Christmas trees because there was nowhere to display them. From that point forward, I'm not sure we ever went into the living room, except maybe to open a window on a hot summer day. One day, that same window got stuck and wouldn't close all the way. And despite our best efforts of putting a piece of wood in front of it, it did little to block the cold air from coming in during the winter months. Over time, the living room became wet and moldy because of the leaky roof. It wasn't until years after I moved out that the roof was fixed; however, the falling ceiling on the inside remained and the mold continued to grow.
I don't think I really missed the living room as a child, but now as an adult...as a mother...I realize how much life it could have held. In some ways I'm not sure that it was possible for me to understand and grieve all the loss from a childhood like this until I became a mother. Now I watch my children run and play freely in our home and find it hard to imagine their lives any different. I don't have memories like that as a child, instead we were trapped between the piles with nowhere to play.
Photo © Geoff Johnson
I suppose the lack of space inside is one reason we played outside and at friends' houses so often, giving us some glimpses of normality as a child. Despite the fact that no one could come in our house, our yard was one of the best in the neighborhood! It had great climbing trees and a tether ball and a wooded area to build forts and hideouts. It was also large enough to play a decent game of baseball or football and mom let me dig out a few areas of grass to grow a garden. It was a place of many happy memories and that is probably why I often wish we had more of an established yard now for my kids to explore. Either way, I trust their childhood memories will be very different from mine! Memories filled with friends at our house and memories with space to run and play and dance and build and LIVE!
Read about Opening the Door here.
Read about The Kitchen here.
Read about The Dining Room here.
Read about The Bathroom here.
Read about Geoff's Room here.
Read about My Bedroom here.
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
Opening the Door
Every time I start to write these posts, I hesitate. I feel like putting my childhood on display for the world to read about somehow only gives me one chance to say everything. And there is just so much to say. Where should I even start? This is not my first time writing about my childhood home. Many of my faithful readers have heard stories on my personal blog over the past year that have led me to this place. Others close to me, have seen pictures. And even fewer have walked through the door and into the mess with me at one point or another in the past. I could count those people on one hand. Many of you have asked about details. More of you have probably wondered. And as I have journeyed through it all to where I am today, I think sharing it here now seems appropriate.
A few months after my mom passed away, my brother, Geoff and I spent a weekend in the house together. He had been wanting to take pictures of the house and so we took a few days to capture images of it before we cleaned it out. It was a hard but wonderfully healing weekend. Geoff and I had not been back in the house together since I moved out in 1993, twenty years before. The few times I had returned, it was never for more than about 30 minutes. The months that led up to that weekend visit were filled with sleepless nights. I tossed and turned as I thought about so many aspects of our childhood years in that home. And the times I did sleep were littered with dreams having to do with the house. Somehow, the Lord used that weekend with my brother to break the hold the house had on me. Geoff and I talked about life back then, sharing memories and recalling stories that only the two of us would know. As we took measurements, metered light, angled the cameras and snapped pictures we captured glimpses of our life that no one else knew about. A few months later as we talked about the project and about Geoff submitting the photos for review and publication, it seemed appropriate that the title for the work would be "Behind the Door." Today, two of those pictures are published in American Photography 30 for all the world to see and the entire series has been highlighted on Feature Shoot as well as on DailyMail.com, Yahoo, and ABC Online news, among others.
However, for most of my life these things have remained hidden. Not only behind closed doors but deep in my heart with shame and grief and confusion. And while I came to a place years ago where I was willing to journey into that mess, I knew I couldn't do it publicly out of respect for my mom. Please don't think that my respect for her has faded since her death, I'm simply convinced that the state of her soul is no longer concerned about such things. Is airing her 'dirty laundry' tainting her memory? Is it dishonoring her? This is one of the questions I have wrestled with for the past 23 months. And while these posts are more of my story than they are about my mother's, it certainly points to her in many ways. My mom lived under the heavy weight of hoarding for more years than I know. She loved and was loved by so many people but they could never come to her house. She battled cancer for 10 years without feeling free to have people come over to visit or bring her dinner or help her with daily tasks. And now that she has passed from this life into eternity, she no longer is in bondage to such things. While no one wants their dark secrets on display for the world to see, when such things are seen in light of eternity and can now be hung up and declared forgiven and healed because of Christ, that dear friends, is praiseworthy! Darkness brought to light is worth shouting from the rooftops! Christ forgives! He heals! He redeems! He frees! And because of those great truths, I have no doubt that my mom would want Geoff and me to experience as much healing as possible this side of heaven; she would want us to open the door and start the conversation with any that might be in hiding in similar places.
But like I said, this isn't so much about my mom. These are memories from a child of a hoarder. So while I have a tinge of anxiety in my heart as I post, I trust that God will use the opening of these doors to friends and family to move my heart further into His grace and healing.
Without further ado, let's start at the front door. It is strange how familiar it all still is...the dirty cream-colored paint, the rattle of the door handle, the way you have to shake the key so it would turn. The front door carries so much meaning. It was what stood between us and the world...friends, family, neighbors, repairmen. Back then if there was a knock at that door, a part of my heart would stop. Who was it? What did they want? Can I get them to wait in the car or meet me in the backyard?
The door kept the hoarding hidden in the secret world that my mom, my brother and I lived in every day. Geoff went back to the house in August 2013 for the first time in probably 15 years. That initial flood of emotion that comes when you walk back into a place that holds difficult memories was interrupted within minutes of Geoff's arrival. There was a knock at the door. He instantly backed up against the door. It was instinct. It is what we would do if someone knocked or rang the doorbell all those years ago. We would hide, duck out of the way of any window in hopes that no one would know we were there. If they thought we weren't home, they would leave. At the very least if we didn't answer the door right away they would turn and walk away and we could eventually open the door without them being able to see inside. It is strange how those memories are still deeply embedded in us.
I responded similarly when I took two dear friends into the house with me last May. It was immediately after my mom's funeral and my youngest son, still 6 months old, was with me. He was asleep and taking him into the house with us was not an option. There was mold and other unknowns to which I wasn't willing to expose him. With the front door left open, I left him asleep on the porch in his car seat, knowing we would only be inside a few minutes and that I would only be down the hallway. My dear friends walked through the mess with me and as we stood at the top of the staircase they prayed with me...for me...for healing, for freedom. In the meantime, a neighbor had seen us pull into the driveway and before I realized it, she was at our steps. The door was wide open and the mess was there for her to see. I stood maybe ten feet from her, but everything in me was shrinking inside knowing all that those ten feet exposed.
I can't remember the door ever being so widely opened that I could see or talk to someone on the porch while I stood at the top of the landing inside. Feelings of embarrassment and shame flooded my mind. Everything in me wanted to shut the door, but my baby was there and I couldn't. And, besides, it was no longer necessary. Even as we had just prayed, light was beginning to come into the darkness. And now looking back, it seems appropriate that those first steps of healing came between us and the neighbors from whom we so diligently tried to hide it all from for so long. God was beginning to bring life back to those places in my heart that had been hidden for years.
I still have issues with 'doorbell dread'. When there is a knock at my door today my immediate thought is how the house looks. Are there dishes in the sink? Laundry on the couch? Papers on the counter? Toys all over the floor? This is one of the many fears that I still have to fight regularly to overcome. And yet, I love having people in my house. Perhaps because there are years to make up for or perhaps because I long to give those memories to my kids that I never had the chance to make as a child.
But what about when we had to open the door? Those times were obviously unavoidable so even as kids, we knew we needed to minimize the view into the house. Geoff and I were very aware of the real possibility that if others saw the mess, we could be taken away from mom. So we learned to crack the door just enough to see outside, but not enough for those outside to see the full picture of what was behind the door. It was a heavy burden for children to carry, living in fear of being taken away, not even really knowing what that meant. So as a child you minimize the view of reality. And then you grow up and maybe your house is neat and orderly, but you minimize the view of the reality of your heart. You hide. You pretend. You look good on the outside, but in reality, your heart is a mess and this is what lies behind the door:
The staircase was so full of stuff that as I grew, I literally would hold onto the railings and jump down the stairs instead of trying to navigate through the papers, books and bags.
The ledge on the right was where everything collected. Incoming and outgoing mail. Receipts, pamphlets, coins, cassette tapes, film canisters and everything in between. Last October, it is where Brandon found my mom's emerald rings and other valuable jewelry, tucked in with the expired jar of jelly and buttons from Jaycee conventions long past.
The coat rack behind the door has held the same clothes and hangers for as long as my memory serves me. They were never used, at least not that I can remember. They just became permanent fixtures like many of the things in the house.
Behind the door there was a pile of newspapers and magazines, overflowing to the point that we really couldn't open the door completely, even if we tried. That pile extended down the other staircase to the basement. Those stairs were even more full of junk than the one pictured above. And I hated to go down them. Some stairs had barely enough room to put your foot down firmly, others you had to step over completely. I slipped on the papers that lined those stairs more times than I care to remember.
But somewhere tucked deep in my mind is one faint memory that must have been before the clutter took over. In that memory, I'm sitting at the bottom of those stairs with my dad next to me. It is foggy and with little detail, but still it remains my only memory of my dad being in the house. So although I have no recollection of when it was or what we might have been doing or talking about, it carries with it a sense of tenderness that I treasure.
Those stairs led to the basement. It was a dark, unfinished (or half finished) room that smelled of mildew and where a myriad of other worthless things had been collecting. In the middle of it all was a ping pong table. It, too, was covered in junk, but you couldn't reach any of its four sides without scaling over piles of trash. At one point, before I was old enough to remember, a fireplace was being installed in the corner. It was never finished however, and a hole remained in the wall that goes through to the outside. I imagine that is why critters could get inside. That is probably why I hated the basement so much. Mice were not uncommon in the winter and my brother was even confronted by a squirrel as he came in from the snow one day. Bugs and spiders of all kinds lived probably more freely in the house than we did. And the basement was certainly in worse form than the rest of the house.
From the steps there was a narrow 'path' that lead about four feet from the stairs to the the laundry room door. The laundry room had the most open floor space in the whole house. That was likely because the sewer backed up frequently. And as filthy as it was, somehow the laundry room seemed the most normal. Maybe because it isn't uncommon for people's basement laundry rooms to be unfinished and in somewhat of a mess, filled with household chemicals and other utilitarian things. It also was the one place where my mom would let people come. If the sewer did back up, the repairman could come in through the garage without seeing the rest of the house.
The laundry room also was a means to an end. It was the place we could wash our clothes (when the washing machine was working) and iron our clothes so that we could look presentable to the rest of the world in hopes they wouldn't know the truth. To this day, ironing remains one of my favorite household chores. Perhaps it was the only routine thing I had to do around the house growing up and somehow looking put together on the outside always made me feel like I was more together on the inside, no matter what was behind the door.
Read about The Living Room here.
Read about The Kitchen here.
Read about The Dining Room here.
Read about The Bathroom here.
Read about Geoff's Room here.
Read about My Bedroom here.
A few months after my mom passed away, my brother, Geoff and I spent a weekend in the house together. He had been wanting to take pictures of the house and so we took a few days to capture images of it before we cleaned it out. It was a hard but wonderfully healing weekend. Geoff and I had not been back in the house together since I moved out in 1993, twenty years before. The few times I had returned, it was never for more than about 30 minutes. The months that led up to that weekend visit were filled with sleepless nights. I tossed and turned as I thought about so many aspects of our childhood years in that home. And the times I did sleep were littered with dreams having to do with the house. Somehow, the Lord used that weekend with my brother to break the hold the house had on me. Geoff and I talked about life back then, sharing memories and recalling stories that only the two of us would know. As we took measurements, metered light, angled the cameras and snapped pictures we captured glimpses of our life that no one else knew about. A few months later as we talked about the project and about Geoff submitting the photos for review and publication, it seemed appropriate that the title for the work would be "Behind the Door." Today, two of those pictures are published in American Photography 30 for all the world to see and the entire series has been highlighted on Feature Shoot as well as on DailyMail.com, Yahoo, and ABC Online news, among others.
However, for most of my life these things have remained hidden. Not only behind closed doors but deep in my heart with shame and grief and confusion. And while I came to a place years ago where I was willing to journey into that mess, I knew I couldn't do it publicly out of respect for my mom. Please don't think that my respect for her has faded since her death, I'm simply convinced that the state of her soul is no longer concerned about such things. Is airing her 'dirty laundry' tainting her memory? Is it dishonoring her? This is one of the questions I have wrestled with for the past 23 months. And while these posts are more of my story than they are about my mother's, it certainly points to her in many ways. My mom lived under the heavy weight of hoarding for more years than I know. She loved and was loved by so many people but they could never come to her house. She battled cancer for 10 years without feeling free to have people come over to visit or bring her dinner or help her with daily tasks. And now that she has passed from this life into eternity, she no longer is in bondage to such things. While no one wants their dark secrets on display for the world to see, when such things are seen in light of eternity and can now be hung up and declared forgiven and healed because of Christ, that dear friends, is praiseworthy! Darkness brought to light is worth shouting from the rooftops! Christ forgives! He heals! He redeems! He frees! And because of those great truths, I have no doubt that my mom would want Geoff and me to experience as much healing as possible this side of heaven; she would want us to open the door and start the conversation with any that might be in hiding in similar places.
But like I said, this isn't so much about my mom. These are memories from a child of a hoarder. So while I have a tinge of anxiety in my heart as I post, I trust that God will use the opening of these doors to friends and family to move my heart further into His grace and healing.
Without further ado, let's start at the front door. It is strange how familiar it all still is...the dirty cream-colored paint, the rattle of the door handle, the way you have to shake the key so it would turn. The front door carries so much meaning. It was what stood between us and the world...friends, family, neighbors, repairmen. Back then if there was a knock at that door, a part of my heart would stop. Who was it? What did they want? Can I get them to wait in the car or meet me in the backyard?
The door kept the hoarding hidden in the secret world that my mom, my brother and I lived in every day. Geoff went back to the house in August 2013 for the first time in probably 15 years. That initial flood of emotion that comes when you walk back into a place that holds difficult memories was interrupted within minutes of Geoff's arrival. There was a knock at the door. He instantly backed up against the door. It was instinct. It is what we would do if someone knocked or rang the doorbell all those years ago. We would hide, duck out of the way of any window in hopes that no one would know we were there. If they thought we weren't home, they would leave. At the very least if we didn't answer the door right away they would turn and walk away and we could eventually open the door without them being able to see inside. It is strange how those memories are still deeply embedded in us.
I responded similarly when I took two dear friends into the house with me last May. It was immediately after my mom's funeral and my youngest son, still 6 months old, was with me. He was asleep and taking him into the house with us was not an option. There was mold and other unknowns to which I wasn't willing to expose him. With the front door left open, I left him asleep on the porch in his car seat, knowing we would only be inside a few minutes and that I would only be down the hallway. My dear friends walked through the mess with me and as we stood at the top of the staircase they prayed with me...for me...for healing, for freedom. In the meantime, a neighbor had seen us pull into the driveway and before I realized it, she was at our steps. The door was wide open and the mess was there for her to see. I stood maybe ten feet from her, but everything in me was shrinking inside knowing all that those ten feet exposed.
I can't remember the door ever being so widely opened that I could see or talk to someone on the porch while I stood at the top of the landing inside. Feelings of embarrassment and shame flooded my mind. Everything in me wanted to shut the door, but my baby was there and I couldn't. And, besides, it was no longer necessary. Even as we had just prayed, light was beginning to come into the darkness. And now looking back, it seems appropriate that those first steps of healing came between us and the neighbors from whom we so diligently tried to hide it all from for so long. God was beginning to bring life back to those places in my heart that had been hidden for years.
The desolate land shall be tilled,
that which had laid desolate
in the sight of all who passed by.
Ezekiel 36:34
I still have issues with 'doorbell dread'. When there is a knock at my door today my immediate thought is how the house looks. Are there dishes in the sink? Laundry on the couch? Papers on the counter? Toys all over the floor? This is one of the many fears that I still have to fight regularly to overcome. And yet, I love having people in my house. Perhaps because there are years to make up for or perhaps because I long to give those memories to my kids that I never had the chance to make as a child.
But what about when we had to open the door? Those times were obviously unavoidable so even as kids, we knew we needed to minimize the view into the house. Geoff and I were very aware of the real possibility that if others saw the mess, we could be taken away from mom. So we learned to crack the door just enough to see outside, but not enough for those outside to see the full picture of what was behind the door. It was a heavy burden for children to carry, living in fear of being taken away, not even really knowing what that meant. So as a child you minimize the view of reality. And then you grow up and maybe your house is neat and orderly, but you minimize the view of the reality of your heart. You hide. You pretend. You look good on the outside, but in reality, your heart is a mess and this is what lies behind the door:
Photo © Geoff Johnson
The staircase was so full of stuff that as I grew, I literally would hold onto the railings and jump down the stairs instead of trying to navigate through the papers, books and bags.
The ledge on the right was where everything collected. Incoming and outgoing mail. Receipts, pamphlets, coins, cassette tapes, film canisters and everything in between. Last October, it is where Brandon found my mom's emerald rings and other valuable jewelry, tucked in with the expired jar of jelly and buttons from Jaycee conventions long past.
The coat rack behind the door has held the same clothes and hangers for as long as my memory serves me. They were never used, at least not that I can remember. They just became permanent fixtures like many of the things in the house.
Behind the door there was a pile of newspapers and magazines, overflowing to the point that we really couldn't open the door completely, even if we tried. That pile extended down the other staircase to the basement. Those stairs were even more full of junk than the one pictured above. And I hated to go down them. Some stairs had barely enough room to put your foot down firmly, others you had to step over completely. I slipped on the papers that lined those stairs more times than I care to remember.
But somewhere tucked deep in my mind is one faint memory that must have been before the clutter took over. In that memory, I'm sitting at the bottom of those stairs with my dad next to me. It is foggy and with little detail, but still it remains my only memory of my dad being in the house. So although I have no recollection of when it was or what we might have been doing or talking about, it carries with it a sense of tenderness that I treasure.
Those stairs led to the basement. It was a dark, unfinished (or half finished) room that smelled of mildew and where a myriad of other worthless things had been collecting. In the middle of it all was a ping pong table. It, too, was covered in junk, but you couldn't reach any of its four sides without scaling over piles of trash. At one point, before I was old enough to remember, a fireplace was being installed in the corner. It was never finished however, and a hole remained in the wall that goes through to the outside. I imagine that is why critters could get inside. That is probably why I hated the basement so much. Mice were not uncommon in the winter and my brother was even confronted by a squirrel as he came in from the snow one day. Bugs and spiders of all kinds lived probably more freely in the house than we did. And the basement was certainly in worse form than the rest of the house.
From the steps there was a narrow 'path' that lead about four feet from the stairs to the the laundry room door. The laundry room had the most open floor space in the whole house. That was likely because the sewer backed up frequently. And as filthy as it was, somehow the laundry room seemed the most normal. Maybe because it isn't uncommon for people's basement laundry rooms to be unfinished and in somewhat of a mess, filled with household chemicals and other utilitarian things. It also was the one place where my mom would let people come. If the sewer did back up, the repairman could come in through the garage without seeing the rest of the house.
The laundry room also was a means to an end. It was the place we could wash our clothes (when the washing machine was working) and iron our clothes so that we could look presentable to the rest of the world in hopes they wouldn't know the truth. To this day, ironing remains one of my favorite household chores. Perhaps it was the only routine thing I had to do around the house growing up and somehow looking put together on the outside always made me feel like I was more together on the inside, no matter what was behind the door.
Read about The Living Room here.
Read about The Kitchen here.
Read about The Dining Room here.
Read about The Bathroom here.
Read about Geoff's Room here.
Read about My Bedroom here.
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