Reply to I want my parents to get rid of junk so I don’t have to!

Forum Index » Family Relationships

Reply to "I want my parents to get rid of junk so I don’t have to!"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]In my experience, the boomer and older generation values all this stuff more than their relationships with other people.   Sad really.[/quote]

I would say their "love language" is stuff, and they aren't able to understand that mine isn't. Their attachment to stuff as love gets in the way of actual relationships.

[/quote]

+ 1

This is my experience with my boomer parents.  Stuff is so important to my mom because she grew up poor and feeling deprived, and now has a shopping/hoarding problem.  She is constantly mailing me some junk she bought, and gets offended when I don't want to keep it.  She will also mail the exact same stuff year after year, because she doesn't remember that she bought it and mailed it already.   She has special display cabinets around her house for all of her ceramic tchotchkes.  When their 3-bedroom house I grew up in was getting cluttered, they actually moved to a larger 5-bedroom, 4000SF house after retirement. (they upsized!) so they wouldn't have to part with ANY of their junk.  When I stayed at their house last Christmas, I opened a few drawers in the bedroom I was in and found things like pipe cleaners (I mean, WTF? These are from when I was a child - I'm 40), my cousin's high school graduation invitation from 20 years ago, random church bulletins and cat calendars from the 80s.  Don't even get me started on the cookie tin collection, the VHS tapes, the aging Barbies, and the drawers of unused candles.  They have storage rooms in their basement with things like my grandpa's old luggage, blenders that don't work, and seashell art they bought in Florida.  The situation was worse than I thought, because it seems like they can't distinguish between what things have value vs. what should have been recycled or trashed between moves.  I absolutely dread the decluttering task that will fall to me and my sister when the time comes.[/quote]

There is no need to panic about it.  You can get rid of it after she is gone just as easily as you can get rid of it today.  You can even throw money at it to make it go away.   [/quote]

NP.  But they will more than likely need to move out of that large jammed packed home and into a smaller place or assisted living or a nursing home as they get older and less able to take care of the place and themselves.  If that is the case, the adult children will have to step in and help them get rid of the stuff.  Every time their grown kids visit them now all they see is the huge, monumental task that awaits them.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics