Shock Horror! Adult Children STEAL from Aged Parents!
By MP on Saturday 23 September 2006, 15:50 - Background - Permalink
If stealing is defined as taking other people's belongings without their permission, then we're a family of reprobates.
I've got dad's GPS unit, his multimeter, binoculars, and his set of tiny screwdrivers. I've got mum's chip-maker, hand-mixer, and coffee-grinder (two of).Rachel has a set of saucepans. Greg has a set of tools.
In the old days there was never any problem borrowing stuff - long term - from mum and dad. But later, in mum's case, a new possessiveness surfaced, and she wouldn't let anything go. Dad remained fairly easy-going, but developed a habit of repeatedly wondering aloud whether we still had his [thing] and when we were going to bring it back, even though he didn't 'need it today'. This was all despite the fact that neither of them had the slightest interest in ever using their [thing] again. By then, it simply became easier (as it often is) to take things without asking.
The alternative was to watch things rust away, get broken, or at the very least fall into a benign but sad desuetude. Greg and I particularly hated watching the tools die. It felt good to take them away, clean them up, and use them the way they were intended. We were giving them a new life. It felt almost like redemption.
And on top of this, it is such a struggle to find anything in mum and dad's house - because every drawer is packed to the point where its contents press up against the underside of the drawer above, creating a kind of rolling wave of objects whenever a drawer is yanked open. The fewer unused things in the house, the better.
When I was clearing out the hundreds of plastic bags that accumulate in drawers and cupboards, I discovered a large glass bowl, still in its box. I remembered thinking I've lost count of the number of times I've wished I had a bigger glass bowl. I slipped it out to the car, and have been using it ever since. I found the hand-cranked coffee grinder encased in many layers of solidified coffee from the Devonian period. I dismantled it, washed it, probed its crevices with a satay stick, blew into its depths with compressed air, ground rice with it to clean its innards, reassembled it and got it working. It's forty years old and going strong. I did the same with the electric one, just for the hell of it. I spent a total of over 12 hours (I'm confessing to a certain pathological fastidiousness here, I know) cleaning the chip maker, though I've now decided I don't want to commence a deep-fried diet after all. Maybe E-bay is the way to go.
Dad has shirts that he bought twenty years ago and are still in their packaging. Too bad they're not my style. He even has items of mine that I threw away but were fished out of the dustbin. I recently discovered and removed my old boarding school blanket, complete with my name label. This was bought in 1968. The house is a veritable museum. But, given that so little appears to have ever been thrown away, I wonder what happened to the following:
- dad's old violin
- the rifle whose barrel Derek stuffed with bits of wood
- the armchair that belonged to our great-grandfather
- my oil paintings (from college days)
Comments
Well, all I can say is I'm displaying a grin of recognition, here. For awhile, my mom passed stuff off to her daughters and their children that she knew she'd never use. Then, when she started forgetting what she had, I continued for her. It's been awhile since either of us did this, though; contemplating going through the boxes is the horror, for us.
But, you know, if you feel any guilt about it, divest yourself of it, quickly. What we consider to be inanimate, material objects also have lives and I suspect their preference is to be maintained and used. I still have a Kitchen Aid from the late 30's or early 40's, with all the attachments, that Mom inherited from her sister-in-law and of which I lightened her because she was going to throw it away. My belief is that she thinks she DID throw it away. I carted it off to Seattle with me, and now it's back here...my intent is to restore it one of these days, once, of course, I am no longer restoring my mom. I also climbed into and rummaged through a huge community dumpster a couple of years ago to rescue some of my maternal grandmother's old, old cook books (one of which she'd compiled) that my mother had thrown out, one day while I was at work, in a "I've got too much stuff" fit.
My feeling is, go for it. It's all, you know, in the family.
I am so glad I'm not the only one who does this!!! I even have my mother's car! And I've got my eye on a set of dishes that I gave her many years ago... I think they called this "de-gifting" on Seinfeld. Mike, it's just so interesting to read this because my mother's house and habits are so similar. My father was a denizen of "dollar" stores--the ones that sell either discontinued or surplus stuff. Oh my God--my mother's cellar is full of gadgets and gizmos, still in their original wrapping: little sewing kits and eyeglass repair kits and sets of paintbrushes and little screwdrivers and dozens of flashlights that my father bought over the years and then forgot about. I have a fantasy of inviting someone from the Salvation Army over and telling them: "Take whatever you want, as much as you want." But I guess I'd have to grab the stuff that I want, first!