JazzVibe

I happened to catch the "A VCR for Every Day of the Week" episode tonight in reruns, and I have rarely wanted so badly to be able to reach through my TV screen and slap multiple people. I sometimes feel sorry for hoarders when it's obvious they have some major mental illness going on, but not this time.

I don't think the father was mentally ill, at least not in any serious way, so much as just lazy. He was able to comprehend what he needed to do to avoid going to jail and possibly losing the house, but came off as he just didn't want to be bothered. Yes, there's obviously some underlying pathology or he wouldn't be a hoarder, but he seemed able to function reasonably well. He lost any sympathy I might have felt when I saw the 12 cats, all locked up in cages, and all yowling in desperation to get the fuck out of there. When the psychologist went in there and saw the first cat, she was taken aback but by the time she saw the cats in the basement, she was horrified. It was a "hell, yeah" moment for me when she decided to call the SPCA. And the father can go to hell with his comments that he feels betrayed by what she did. Psychologists and other health care professionals have an obligation to preserve patient confidentiality, BUT if they see something that indicates a child is being abused, they are obligated to notify the authorities. Those cats, while not human, were clearly being abused. I could understand putting the cats into cages on a very temporary basis, such as a trip to the vet, or even just to keep them confined for a few hours while strangers are tracking in and out of the house and constantly opening exterior doors to haul stuff off. But this was how those cats were living 24/7. No fucking excuse for that. 

The son was a piece of work, entirely too prone to confrontation and probably violence. Someone upthread mentioned possibly Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, and maybe that is part of the problem. His speech patterns were odd, to put it mildly, and he seemed unwilling to accept the reality that the house was entirely unfit for a baby (or anyone else, for that matter). You could tell he was slightly willing to go along with cleaning out the house so the baby could live there, but he had no instinctive sense that it would have been  unsafe to bring a baby into the filth. He seemed volatile, and I would have been afraid to interact with him. 

The son's girlfriend was apparently as dumb as a box of rocks. First, why on earth would you ever have had sex with the son?  Nothing about the son was in any way attractive (physically, intellectually, or emotionally). And second, what kind of delusional world are you in, that you would think it okay to bring  your infant, who has spent 2 months or something in NICU, into that house without having all the junk cleaned out and then having the entire house scrubbed down with bleach or something to kill off all the bacteria, mold, and who knows what else is there? I have gone through the horrible experience of having a newborn in NICU (thankfully, only for 3 weeks and for what turned out to be something very minor, gastrointestinal bleeding caused by an allergy to the protein in milk, which was fixed by using a very expensive baby formula with the protein already broken down). As a parent, generally you can be in the NICU with your infant except during shift changes, so there's maybe a couple of hours a day total when you can't be there. And in fact, the NICU nurses encouraged me and other parents to be there as much as possible, because they said the infants whose parents spent a lot of time there were more likely to survive and do better than those whose parents didn't come very often. Now that might be because for infants who are unlikely to survive, the parents just can't deal with being there that  much, but certainly at the time my daughter was in the NICU, I spent every possible moment I could there. The girlfriend in this episode, though, seemed like she wasn't spending any huge amount of time at the hospital, and was way more wrapped up in trying to mollify the son. Wasted effort there. As for the stepmother, I suspect she would have been willing to have her stepdaughter and the infant come live with her but on the condition that the son not join them. The stepmother was also obviously appalled at the condition of the house, and I suspect the reason she didn't haul the stepdaughter out of there on the spot was fear of physical violence from the boyfriend. The girlfriend needs a serious reality check: how on earth do you think a guy who has let a house get so bad, and who contributed to the hoarding, will be able to help take care of an infant?

That entire trio were just disgusting excuses for human beings. 

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