Parental Payback

In the end I couldn't do it.  I just couldn't get rid of the bits and pieces of my grandmother's dishes. Or the baby keepsakes.  Or my collection of salt and pepper shakers.  It just seemed, I don't know...harsh?  Disrespectful?  Unfeeling?  Wrong...it just seemed wrong.  So everything was lovingly packed back into boxes, the boxes carefully labelled and neatly stacked back on the storage room shelves.

But not to worry.  I have a plan.  And this is it -- when I die, my kid gets to deal with them.  It's brilliant really.  When she goes grumbling and cursing me into the storage room to clean out, she's going to unearth all this stuff she's never laid eyes on before.  She won't give a hoot in hell where the ugly dishes came from or why on earth her mother would have bothered to wrap and save a pair of alligator shaped salt and pepper shakers.  She'll be able to donate them or garage sale them without a single pang of guilt.  It's perfect.

Oh, maybe she'll feel some attachment to the stuff she grew up seeing around the house.  She'll box those things up and put them in her own storage room.  For her kid to deal with one day.

Parental payback.  The circle of life.  The circle of our stuff.