This post was inspired by the Creative by Nature podcast episode, “I’m the Daughter of a Hoarder: When Telling the Truth Feels Like Betrayal” You can listen to the full episode by clicking here.
Before I begin sharing this story, I want to offer a quick disclaimer. This is my personal experience of growing up with a mother and a grandmother who struggled with hoarding. This is not an attempt to diagnose, judge, criticize, or define anyone else’s experience. It is simply my story as a daughter.
For a long time, I avoided talking about these parts of my life. Some of that was out of love. Some of it was out of loyalty. Some of it was out of shame.
And honestly, I didn’t realize how much these experiences were still affecting me.
As I’ve continued my own healing journey, I’ve realized that telling the truth about my experiences does not erase the love I have for my mom. Both can exist at the same time. I can love her deeply and have very mixed feelings about our relationship, while also acknowledging the impact certain experiences had on me.
This story is less about hoarding and more about what happens when we carry secrets, protect other people at our own expense, and learn to hide parts of ourselves in order to feel safe.
My intention is not to blame. My intention is to understand, to heal, and to tell the truth about my experience in hopes that someone listening—or in this case, reading—feels a little less alone.
After recording my previous episode about my childhood home burning down, I realized that talking about the fire, experiencing the aftermath, and everything that came with it brought things to the surface that I didn’t even realize were ready to surface.
There were moments I shared that left me feeling raw and exposed.
You know those dreams where you show up somewhere completely naked? It was that kind of vulnerability.
There were parts of me that immediately wanted to retreat, to run and hide, to shrink and make sure nobody looked too closely.
As I’ve continued doing my own healing work, I’ve realized those reactions weren’t really about the fire.
There was more depth that came to the surface. The fire stirred something much older—something that has been with me since I was a kid.
This was about growing up in a home shaped by mental illness, later by hoarding, secrecy, shame, and the belief that I needed to protect the people I loved, even if it meant hiding parts of myself.
I’m not sharing this because I have all the answers, and definitely not because I have fully healed from it. I’m sharing it because part of my healing right now requires me to stop hiding, stop running, and face the shadow parts of myself that still hold a lot of fear.
When I was recording the episode about the fire—especially the moments when I talked about walking back into my mom’s house and seeing the destruction her struggles had left behind—I felt completely twisted up inside.
I felt exposed.
Like I was sharing a part of myself I didn’t want anyone to really know about.
I’ve talked about my mom’s hoarding to people close to me. I’ve touched on it in other episodes and blogs here and there. But I had never really shared the pieces that carried the deepest shame.
When I talked about going back into the house, I was reliving those moments.
I could see everything vividly in my mind.
I could see the dog feces on the cabinets where I remembered going as a teenager to grab snacks. I could see myself opening the lower cabinets and pulling out pots and pans to make lunch or dinner. I could remember helping clean up afterward—removing pieces of furniture, cabinets, and flooring because they were rusted from urine, covered in mold, and destroyed by years of neglect.
And I remember going through that experience thinking:
Mom, how could you live like this? What’s going on? Why couldn’t you have reached out for help?
Then another part of me fought back:
Jess, how could you have let things get this bad? Where were you? You were off living your own life, not worrying about your mom.
But the truth was I was worrying about her.
I was carrying resentment from years of estrangement while also secretly carrying concern for her. I was angry. I was sad. I was guilty.
It was an inner battle I had carried for a very long time.
And it still comes up even after she has passed away.
I remember opening the deep freezer with my brother. By that point, we had already gone through cabinets filled with items that had expired years earlier. But the freezer became one of the most telling signs of my mom’s timeline—the point where her depression, addiction to alcohol, hoarding, and other struggles had quietly taken over.
We found food that had been frozen for five years, ten years, even fifteen years.
And as a daughter, my mind didn’t immediately go to, “How did she get here?”
My thoughts went to:
You can’t let anyone know this is going on.
What are people going to think of your mom?
What are they going to think of you?
What were you doing, Jess? Why weren’t you checking on her?
I carried so much guilt and shame around all of it.
Looking back now, I can see that there were different parts of me that developed in childhood to survive what I was experiencing.
One of those parts was the good girl.
When my parents divorced, I believed that in order to receive love from the adults in my life, I needed to be on my best behavior. I needed to get good grades, stay quiet, not make waves, and do what was expected of me.
I needed to be good.
As the oldest child, I also stepped into the role of caretaker. I helped take care of the house, my siblings, and responsibilities that felt bigger than what a child should carry. When my mom worked late nights and couldn’t manage everything, I stepped in.
But another part of me surfaced recently during meditation.
The protector.
Not the protector who cleaned the house or took care of everyone else.
The protector who believed my job was to keep my mother’s secrets.
A memory came up from elementary school. My class was walking down the street near my home, crossing the bridge by the church where my brother and I used to ride our bikes.
Some classmates noticed a bicycle down by the stream.
I whispered, “That’s my brother’s bike.”
Someone told the teacher.
And I remember the immediate feeling that washed over me:
I shouldn’t have said that.
In that meditation, the message was loud and uncomfortable.
I’m a bad daughter.
I need to protect her.
Over and over again:
You’re a bad daughter, Jess. Why would you tell someone that? You have to protect her.
Looking back, I don’t even know if my mom knew my brother left his bike there. I don’t know if the teachers thought anything negative about her. That may have all been a story my younger self created in an attempt to keep everyone safe.
But it felt like one of the first moments where I learned that sharing information about my family was dangerous.
That telling the truth could hurt someone I loved.
That I had to hide.
And I think that’s where the little white lies started.
That need to hide didn’t just stay in childhood.
I can remember small moments where I would tell little white lies because I didn’t want to get in trouble. I didn’t want someone to think I was a bad person. I didn’t want people to stop liking me or reject me because I had made a mistake.
One memory that comes to mind is being at my friend’s house up the street. Somewhere along the way, we had learned about prank phone calls, and my friend had a telephone in her bedroom—which, at that age, I thought was the coolest thing ever.
I picked up the phone, dialed zero, and when the operator answered, I asked, “Is your refrigerator running?”
She answered yes.
And I said, “Well, you better go catch it.”
Then I slammed the phone down.
A few moments later, the phone rang. The operator had called back. My friend’s mom answered and came upstairs to address us.
I remember immediately denying it.
“No, I didn’t do it.”
But there was no way around it. It was obvious. It was my friend and me. I was caught.
It was such a small moment, but looking back, I can see the pattern. There were so many times in my life where I told little white lies because the truth felt dangerous. Because I didn’t want to disappoint people. Because I didn’t want to be viewed as bad.
That same pattern showed up in bigger ways as I got older.
In high school, I hung out with people who weren’t always making the best choices. I smoked pot. I went to house parties. I lied when my mom called to check where I was.
I don’t even know how I got away with some of the things I did.
And I’m not sharing those stories because I’m condoning those choices. Some of those choices were completely inappropriate for my age.
But looking back, I can see a deeper thread running underneath all of it:
I cannot tell the truth because I will get in trouble.
I cannot experiment. I cannot make mistakes. I cannot show parts of myself that are messy or imperfect because they won’t be accepted.
For a long time, I thought that if I told the truth about my experiences, I was betraying my mom.
And I’m realizing more and more that I can tell the truth about my experience and it does not erase the love I have for her.
Both can exist.
I always wanted what I considered a normal relationship with my mom.
Maybe when I was very young, there were moments where it felt okay. I remember one time being in my room after something had happened that made me sad, and my mom came in and comforted me. I remember the feeling of her giving me a hug.
But those moments were few and far between.
There were also moments where my mom projected her own pain and jealousy onto me. There were relationships she had with men who did not treat me well. It was not physical or sexual abuse, but there was emotional, mental, and verbal abuse in our home.
There were things I learned about relationships, sexuality, and the adult world at an age when I should not have been exposed to those things.
For many years, Mother’s Day was incredibly difficult for me.
Even after becoming a mother myself, I hated Mother’s Day.
Standing in the card aisle was one of the most painful experiences because I didn’t know what words felt truthful. The cards talked about a mother who was your best friend, your greatest supporter, the person who always made you feel loved and seen.
And I didn’t know how to write those words.
None of them felt like my truth.
So I usually picked something generic—something that could be given to anyone—because I didn’t know how to express the complicated reality of our relationship.
Most of the time, we didn’t even do much together on Mother’s Day. She was often working, and we didn’t go out of our way to spend time together because there was such a deep emotional disconnect.
It was complicated.
When my husband came into my life, it made that difference even more obvious.
He came from a family where they spent time together. They shared meals. They helped take care of the house together. There was a sense of connection, love, and belonging.
He and his brother adored their mother and father.
Even now, he calls his dad every single Sunday just to catch up and talk about everyday things.
That was so foreign to me.
Here I was struggling to figure out what kind of Mother’s Day card I could possibly give my mom, while my husband was having regular conversations with his parents because that was simply what love looked like in his family.
It was hard for him to understand my relationship with my mom.
And I think part of that was because this was my normal.
I knew it wasn’t his normal.
I wished I had the relationship that he had with his parents, but I didn’t.
Even after my mom passed away, I think there are parts of him that still struggle to fully comprehend how a relationship like that could exist. He understands it intellectually as an educator who has worked with children from many different backgrounds, but when it is someone you love and you see them carrying that pain, it becomes much more personal.
Maybe someday I’ll have him on the podcast and we can talk about what it is like to be the spouse of someone who has experienced estrangement from a parent.
To give you a better understanding of that estrangement and emotional disconnection, I want to share an excerpt from a blog I wrote shortly after my mom passed away called A Relief After Her Passing.
I couldn’t even mutter the words.
How did she get inside my head? What did I say that gave away my secrets?
I burst into tears because I knew what was coming. I had thought those words many times before that moment.
I covered my face, ashamed that breaking down revealed what I had kept hidden for so long.
I wanted to hide.
In front of my life coach and in front of my classmates, I sobbed.
In the moments leading up to my meltdown, my coach guided me as I peeled back layers of pain, memories, and resentments I held against myself and my mother. She listened as I poured out my heart and held space for me.
When she asked me to repeat something rather heavy, I thought I was ready to take it on.
She said, “Jess, I’d like you to repeat after me.”
And I think I may have actually smiled in anticipation of making a major breakthrough.
“There’s a big part of me…”
“There’s a big part of me,” I repeated, still smiling and wondering what was coming next.
“That’s relieved…”
She had barely finished the sentence before I burst into tears.
Because I had already finished the sentence in my own mind.
In a calm voice, she acknowledged my pain.
“You’ve been holding onto a lot of shame and guilt over those feelings. It’s time to let it out. It’s okay to cry.”
So I did.
Unmuted and with an audience.
I was a broken mess right there in front of everyone.
But it was a safe space with supportive, loving women who were also struggling with their own inner wounds.
I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
What was this really about?
My relationship with my mother always felt disconnected.
Instead of letting anyone see what I felt, I put a smile on my face every time someone asked:
“How’s your mom doing?”
“What’s she up to these days?”
My answer stayed pretty consistent.
“She’s doing fine. She works as a caregiver and really likes it. Mom loves taking care of others. Yes, she’s still at the same house.”
But what was really on my mind during those conversations?
I guess it’s time for me to open up.
So here it is.
How’s my mom doing?
I don’t really know, so I’m going to give you my best guess.
We barely talk to each other because each time we do, it’s painful. We text sometimes. Every once in a while, we talk on the phone. There’s such an emotional disconnection left from childhood that neither of us knows how to repair it and move forward.
Is that even normal?
To feel that way when you talk to your own mother?
As soon as we start talking to each other, my invisible wall goes up faster than the time before. It’s hard to talk about normal things because of it.
What’s she up to these days?
Again, I’m not really sure, other than working long hours, complaining she has no money to pay her bills, pitting her kids against each other, all while making us feel guilty that we don’t visit her enough.
You know what?
My kids have never been to her house and probably never will.
My husband has pulled into her driveway once in fourteen years.
Why?
I’m embarrassed of my childhood home.
It’s a mess—a hoarder’s dream or nightmare, whichever makes more sense.
We tried helping her clean it and fix it up. We tried helping with bills. But those were only surface issues compared to the problems she didn’t want to touch.
Instead of finding help, she kept holding in her pain.
She was good at that, so she kept doing it.
Mom took care of others because it was easier than taking care of herself. It was easier for her to be kind to others because being kind to herself meant she had to find it in her heart to love herself first.
She was always good at putting on a happy face while she crumbled inside.
That was the secret she kept hidden from everyone at all costs.
And there were severe consequences to that decision.
I so desperately wanted to have a loving relationship with my own mother, but I had no idea where to start.
Neither did she.
So we both kept doing the same damn things over and over again.
I just wanted her to love me—like really love me so I believed her.
And maybe then I could start to love her back the way I wanted to love my mom.
That’s how my mom was doing.
When we had to go into her house in 2018 and begin cleaning it out, it was because my aunt and uncle sat us down and said, “We have to take care of your mom. Something has to happen. We have to step in.”
By that point, I had ignored this part of my life for so long.
I had worked very hard to keep it separate.
I carried shame.
Embarrassment.
Guilt.
I didn’t know how to help.
And part of me also knew that continuing to rescue her in the ways we had been was only enabling her to avoid facing what was underneath all of it.
But when we started cleaning the house, I lost the ability to control who knew.
I’ve shared before that there was a personal and professional storm happening in my life around this time, where everything felt like it was unraveling. This was another piece of that unraveling.
I could no longer protect the secret.
There was a dumpster outside my mother’s home.
People noticed.
People asked questions.
“Hey, I saw the dumpster outside your mom’s house. What’s going on?”
And even when I answered, I was guarded.
I chose my words carefully.
I was selective in what I revealed.
I was terrified people would really know what was happening.
I was terrified they would know my mom was a hoarder.
That she struggled deeply.
That she had been living with alcohol addiction, depression, isolation, and a home filled with things she could no longer manage.
I want to share something I wrote about a year and a half ago because I’ve always wanted to write the full story of this experience.
Partly because writing is therapeutic for me.
Partly because I think getting the truth onto paper is another way of letting myself stop carrying it alone.
This is an excerpt from a day we were cleaning the house—a day that became one of the most terrifying moments for me.
In the cellar, I decided to set up wire storage racks to organize the ridiculous amount of cleaning supplies found in mom’s house.
She purchased them with sincerity, wanting to clean and find a sense of normalcy.
We found so many cleaning products it was as if she picked up a new bottle every time she went to the store, thinking to herself, this time… this time I’ll go home and get started.
But this time never greeted her when she got home.
Instead, the darkness welcomed her back inside, consuming any light she discovered while out and about.
While working in the basement, I heard a voice upstairs.
A wave of confusion crashed into my entire being, and I stood in front of the metal shelves, neatly organized by cleaning categories, completely paralyzed just by the sound of that voice.
Not my brothers’ or my cousins’, but another familiar voice talking with my uncle.
It was the sound of my childhood Christmas Eve celebrations at my grandmother’s home, of hearty laughter around the dinner table, and the invitation to bridge past and present, dropping titles and going with first names.
My chest tightened as I climbed the stairs, each step making my heart pound harder.
Disbelief washed over me, and tears poured out uninvited when I reached the top of the steps.
He stood there so casually, as if he had run into my uncle at the grocery store and was simply catching up since they last saw each other.
But there were no casual feelings about the weight of the circumstances resting on my shoulders.
For years after my parents’ divorce, my family always came together.
The bond my dad’s siblings and my mom’s siblings shared remained intact—supportive and caring, just as they had decades ago.
But there were things I had carefully kept separate.
My mom’s side of the family—those who were with me now sorting through the destruction of my mom’s deteriorating wellbeing—already knew.
They knew her history.
They had witnessed her struggles.
They knew about the concerns with her mental health, the hoarding, and the way the house had lost its sense of being a family home.
But my dad’s side of the family?
They had no idea.
And I had planned to keep it that way.
Standing in the kitchen with the door wide open was my dad’s younger brother—the middle of three brothers.
After hearing we were working on my mom’s house, he and his wife wanted to help. They called my youngest uncle and his wife, and together my paternal aunts and uncles contributed a check to help offset the expenses we were facing.
Such generosity should have been received with relief and gratitude.
But in that moment, the walls were closing in on me.
The ugly truth was now standing in front of him.
There was no way to hide what I had kept buried for so long.
As much as I wanted to disappear—to melt away into the fleeting moments just before my foot landed on the first floor—I couldn’t.
More people knew now.
More people knew what was happening behind the closed doors of my mother’s house.
The glaring truth burned through my heart as I realized they would see my mother’s breakdown as a reflection of me.
A daughter who failed.
A daughter who let this happen.
A daughter who couldn’t fix her relationship with her mom.
A daughter who chose to look the other way because she felt utterly helpless.
But nobody knew how hard I tried.
Nobody knew how many years were spent trying to save someone who didn’t want to be saved.
Gratitude and shame surfaced from my shadows, united in tears.
I sobbed on my uncle’s shoulder as he held me tightly, soothing the wounds time tried to forget.
As much as I feared his judgment, in his arms I found only compassion and understanding.
In those moments, I felt exposed.
Naked in front of every painful truth of my mom’s struggle.
Our family’s struggle.
My struggle.
With someone who was never supposed to see it.
My husband never saw my childhood bedroom.
My children never saw where I grew up.
They only saw the outside of my childhood home—and even that was in its worst condition.
And when I really sit with everything I’ve journaled about, everything that has surfaced in meditations and dreams, and everything I’ve reflected on throughout this journey, I realize those aren’t just facts about a house.
They aren’t just memories of my childhood home, the fire, or the overwhelming experience of cleaning up what was left behind.
They are clues.
Clues about how much energy I spent keeping different parts of my life separated.
How much energy I spent protecting people.
Protecting stories.
Protecting secrets.
And maybe most importantly, protecting myself from what I believed would happen if people truly knew.
What I’m beginning to understand is that hoarding was never the only thing I was hiding from.
That was just the surface.
Underneath it were deeper layers of shame, visibility, self-expression, and a wound that I have only recently begun to recognize.
A wound that says:
I’m a bad daughter.
Protect her.
Man, it feels so familiar.
And even saying those words out loud, it’s like there is someone sitting in the room with me.
That voice has followed me through so many chapters of my life.
It showed up when I was a little girl who thought she had to be good to be loved.
It showed up when I became the caretaker of my home and my siblings.
It showed up when I learned to tell little white lies because the truth felt unsafe.
It showed up in my relationship with my mom, where I spent years carrying the weight of wanting to save someone who did not know how to save herself.
It showed up in the shame I carried about my childhood home and the desperate need to make sure nobody saw behind the closed doors.
And I’m realizing now that it has shown up in places I never expected.
In my creativity.
In my art.
In the way I present myself to the world.
In my relationships.
In my work as an educator.
In my ability to fully be seen for who I am.
Because when you spend a lifetime believing that revealing the truth makes you a bad person, it becomes very difficult to show your whole self.
It becomes difficult to create without worrying about judgment.
To share without wondering what people will think.
To speak without editing yourself first.
But this is what healing has been asking of me.
Not to erase my love for my mom.
Not to rewrite her story.
Not to pretend there weren’t moments of compassion, care, and love.
But to allow my story to exist alongside hers.
To acknowledge that I can love someone deeply and still grieve what I didn’t receive.
I can have compassion for the pain she carried while also honoring the pain I carried.
Both can be true.
For so many years, I believed that telling the truth meant I was betraying my mother.
But I’m learning that telling the truth is not betrayal.
It is honesty.
It is understanding.
It is compassion.
It is the beginning of allowing the parts of myself that hid in the shadows to finally step into the light.
This conversation isn’t over.
In the next part of this journey, I’ll share what has continued to surface through meditation, journaling, and reflection. I’ll explore some of the additional beliefs that have emerged and how I can now see them showing up in my creativity, my art, my relationships, my work, and my ability to be fully seen.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you for holding space for this story.
And thank you for allowing me to share these pieces of myself as they continue to unfold.
Listen to the Full Conversation
If this blog post resonated with you, you can listen to the full podcast episode:
“I’m the Daughter of a Hoarder: When Telling the Truth Feels Like Betrayal