Does your mum bring bags of random shit to your house?

[whyeyeeyeeyeeye]

I swear DM can’t walk past a charity shop or a tat shop without buying something. She doesn’t care if it’s age appropriate for DC, in good condition if it’s for any of us, whether we’d like it, whether it’s worth the £…it’s infuriating. I’m just re-donating bags and bags of stuff after every visit. She even sends parcels of this in the post because we don’t live close. Today received 3 T-shirts for the kids in sizes way too big, a recipe book stand with splashes of someone else’s cooking on it, a 2024 diary and a kids’ game with half the pieces missing. I wish she’d just put a fiver in an account for the kids every time she got the urge. Or even just donated the money to the charity!

'A guide to a country that no longer exists'

Brilliant 😂 is it Yugoslavia per chance?

@FrozenLimeMargaritaWow. I'd change my number and not tell her... or kill her. Whatever was easier 😂

Ooh I don't like chucking out my dds stuff so I do pass it to them to take responsibility for and sort out

MIL was terrible for this. Broken, non-age appropriate toys. Unusable clothing. Used colouring books. Ancient calendars. In the last few years (as DC hit mid-teens) she has improved. I think after years and years she finally realised that I really did throw it all out almost immediately. I wasn’t being polite and trying not to be a bother. Now she brings snacks and sweets which we still don’t need, but the kids will eat or take out with them. There’s some sort of siren call to provide that is irresistible to women of a certain age.

To be fair, you really should clear all your rubbish out of her house if you haven’t lived there for twenty years, or give her permission to do it herself 🤷🏻‍♀️

My MIL is obsessed with charity shopping and tat. Her and DH have a regular 'thing' where she gives him an item that she must know he'll hate (massive 2nd hand slippers, itchy jumpers, cheap ties etc.) He then says he hates it. She asks him to give it back if he doesn't like it and then acts all hurt because he has rejected it and been rude enough to give it back.
The most annoying is that she is always giving the DCs Christmas crackers all through the year. She buys them in bulk in january sales. DCs sort of pretend to look interested and then look at me with a sort of wtf? expression on their little faces. It stresses them out because they worry about waste and plastic rubbish.
Crackers are crap even at Christmas!

My mum is a shopaholic, buying for someone else makes her feel less guilty.

She cannot possibly pass up a bargain, even if it's something she didn't want it already has. She recently bought 3 coffee makers because they were a bargain (they were), neither her nor dad drink coffee. She's given one to us despite the fact we have one so I don't know what to do with it the other two are cluttering up her utility indefinitely.

My dad does this 😂 I think he knows sometimes the stuff he finds isnt great, and always starts with a caveat about how it’s absolutely fine if I don’t want it etc 😂

Yes! Omg, she kept trying to give me granny’s old tea towels. 8 times at least. She mentioned the other day that she’d taken them to donate to the church kitchen and dad laughed “so she won’t be trying to sneak them into yours anymore!” I have 3 teens and plenty of our own tat I can’t convince them to get rid of!

@whyeyeeyeeyeeye yes mine does, at one point she kept buying me potatoes, I asked her not to.

Now everytime I visit I am given bags of stuff she doesn’t want, I’ve asked her to stop, but she doesn’t listen.

I don’t have the energy to sort through any of it, so I give it straight to the charity shop.

My mum's favourite charity shop does four mugs for a pound.

Guess who gets three mugs every time she likes one?

(Super infuriatingly, she also likes quite small mugs, so not only do I have to get rid of three mugs every so often, there's also no decent sized mugs at theirs AND THEY THREW AWAY THE ONE MUG I LIKED.)

We also keep a very small stash of stuff for when we visit their massive house. Tends to be a bottle of port in their drinks cupboard, and a few items of clothing each, a hairdryer etc, because they live super rurally and stuff can get mucked up, it's useful to have spares.

She keeps returning them to us like a dog with a stick. Whilst asking us all the time what facilities we'd like as guests at theirs. They put in a whole extra bathroom for visiting guests, but won't accommodate a small carrier bag of clothes. Oh and we are their only guests, and each child still has their own guest room.

My mum gives me random food instead of stuff. A couple of weeks ago she gave me a bag containing a couple of melons (fair enough we'd eat melon), and a coconut. No idea why. Mum doesn't eat coconut, I don't eat coconut, I don't even know how to open the damn thing much less what to do with it. Other times its like "oh I bought this butternut squash / aubergine / whatever because it looks pretty but I don't know what to do with it - do you want it? In the grand scheme of things its not terrible and better than the tat you get given, but its such a shame & a waste when its something we wouldn't use or be able to get through before it goes off (enormous watermelon was another- I like watermelon but I couldn't eat a whole one!)

This! Random photo albums and pictures I drew when I was 6 too. I wouldn’t mind quite as much if I didn’t have cancer, going through chemo and the last thing I need is more crap I have to put somewhere.

Same here @thejadefish, my mum gives me random food, and it rarely works well together: half a pumpkin grown in her garden, and say half a box of very ripe mangoes. I don't need about 6 overly ripe mangoes, just one or two will do. The half of the pumpkin has to be cooked that same day or cut and frozen; bearing in mind that I have a very long car journey to see her (more than 4 hours), and yet she will emphasise that the pumpkin has to be eaten on that same day bless her

The mangoes being on special offer at Asdas or Lidl, not home grown.

It's your stuff though! Perhaps go round to your mums and have a clear out to help out!

My gran doesn’t let me leave her house without taking something. It’s a packet of biscuits, bulbs for the garden, sewing stuff, a Christmas decoration. I never leave empty handed!

Half of your bin bag can be for that , the other half for your toilet and food waste

This is the kind of MIL I’m going to be hahaha

This is exactly what my mum does.

For extra bonus irritation, my mum will take the random crap to different rooms in the house where she thinks it belongs and so I keep finding plastic bags full of tat in different rooms and cupboards

My ex MIL used to do this, with things for my oldest daughter. When I divorced her dad, I lost my MIL. She also died at the end of 2022. I used to really moan about all the stuff she would buy- toys and clothes. Now I look back and think of the pure love she felt for my daughter, and miss a time when my daughter had that in her life.

However, my ex husband had to clear her large house when she died. It took him almost a year of spending weekends and evenings there. He had to give away a lot, but the majority was binned as it had got mouldy. Rooms were filled with stuff. Whether they buy it for others or hoard it themselves, it always creates work for whoever is left behind. This taught me to stop holding onto things, because one day my children will have to empty my house.

My mum had kept my plaits from when I had my hair cut to collar bone length aged 13.

She tried to pass them onto me a few years ago when she moved house. They were about 40 years old at this point!
The hair was horrible. Dry and brittle and slightly rough.She actually brought them to my house

I said I didn't want them and they could go in the bin. She said "Oh alright then" but in such a sad reluctant voice.

Why on earth would I want my own 40 year old hair!!! I am actually still growing it myself.

Do you have the same mother as me?!

Get the anthropologists in!

Aw mine did but she isn't mobile any more and I miss it.

Random shite She'd bought any didn't want, random food items an onion a couple of bog rolls. Multiple mini pop bottles she accrued from somewhere. Her old clothes!