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!

My friends mum also fills her own house with this tat too. X

Yes! My MIL used to do similar. She would buy an eye watering amount of stuff for the DC from charity shops. Bags and bags of toys and endless tat. At one point she would pick up a charity shop coat for DS every time she visited a charity shop. I once counted 16 coats for DS-he was 3! She did the same for prams from car boot sales - dumping half broken prams on us, at one point I counted 8 prams for DS. It was a huge problem especially as we have a tiny house.

At one point my FIL laughed saying thank goodness MIL has stopped filling their house with crap and has turned her attention on our house. Looking back I wish I had been firmer with her but DH stopped me saying anything.

kiraric · Today 07:06

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So I am not really sure that my mum does do it out of love.
I think quite a lot of it is about not liking to get rid of things and outsourcing that to me rather than doing it herself
I also think a lot of it is about a feeling that we don't deserve new nice things and wanting to prevent me from buying any of those
I think she also likes to feel like she has an influence over my home.
And I think she enjoys bargain hunting and wants to indulge that hobby at the expense of my house

Kiraric, I’m so sorry that your mum makes you feel like this.
I wonder if she “struggled” to afford stuff in her first home, and had to have used and hand-me-down stuff?
If that’s the case, then maybe she doesn’t understand why you should have new things straight away, when she had to be grateful for donations.
Its a weird one, coz you would think parents would want their kids to be able to buy new…. maybe it’s a kind of jealousy?

My DM is a pain for bringing food that I don't want or need. See, just recently - two massive cartons of fruit juice, still with a year's date on them) that "we won't drink" (neither we will, hence my not buying it), a massive packet of sponge fingers "I thought about making a trifle but I changed my mind" (sponge fingers are horrible, trifle or not) and four chilled quiches "they were on offer, you could have them for lunch" (I detest packaged quiche).

I haven't managed to stop her from doing this, though I do try; so it goes to the food bank (which she could easily do herself).

Fortunately my DM has never done this.

Maybe try some reverse psychology. Go and buy some really cheap random crap from a local charity shop, or clear out stuff from your own houses, and dump it on your DM/DF/ILs next time you visit. When they look confused, tell them this is what they do to you so you're returning the favour. Insist they keep it.

My nan used to collect crap from everywhere and present it to her GCs every time we visited. We would be polite of course but teenagers don't like toys aimed at PS kids. My parents and my aunts and uncles used to dispose of it discreetly.

When Nan died my aunt (her only daughter) found loads of unwrapped presents in a storeroom. So her kids were giving her birthday & Christmas gifts and she didn't even open them...for years! There must gave been a psychological reason for the way she was, but we never got to the bottom of it. She died in the mid-90s.

I haven't read every single post on this thread, but the op was about mums, mil etc buying stuff or offloading stuff...
It caused me to wonder if dads ever do this "thing"?

Yes, I do wonder what drives it. My mum doesn’t do it but my MIL and my gran (who are close in age) do. Neither of them had particularly nice lives as young and middle aged women and I’m sure it’s connected. But: it’s possible to be firm without being unkind. I’d never say “ugh what total nonsense, get it to the tip” but I’m fine with saying “thanks for thinking of me but I do not use a teapot/wear a petticoat/like the taste of powdered milk” and move onto a new topic.

DM does this
It started with 1970s baby couture with decayed elastic and 36 year old stains.
Then we worked through my grandmothers cookware, including the 100 year old pans with handles burnt to the point of uselessness. ("But they're Aga labs, they are such good quality....(I do not have an Aga)).
Now the dc are teenagers, it's every paperback book she, DDad and her ex partner have ever owned.

Well done - complete madness. (Your dm not you )

My DF was a proper hoarder (you couldn't sit down towards the end because even the chairs were buried under junk) and the difference was, he always told me he was saving things for me, which seemed sweet, but he couldn't actually bear to part with the things he was saving, so he kept them all. Clearing his house was very difficult.
Don't get me wrong, there's no judgement from me. He was very ill and I loved him to pieces. But it was hard visiting to be told "I found you a tea set in the charity shop, so you can't sit there, you'll squash the plates." But then there weren't any cups left in the kitchen and we couldn't just get out the tea set ones because he was saving it for me. But not really. It was very confusing.

On the other hand, why have you left all your old unwanted stuff cluttering up her house when you haven't lived there for 20 years? 😉

I'm going to message my mother and say thank you to her for not doing this. Shocked that it's so widespread.

MIL use to do this. I just had to be very blunt one day and refused to accept a cardigan aged 7-8 (dd was 3) and a toy pram (dd had a toy pushchair so it wasn't needed and we were living in a tiny terrace so had no space for it). I told her that if she didn't take them home with her I'd put them in the bin. I'd just had enough!

My dad has never had responsibility for shopping for anyone other than himself. So, no. I imagine that's fairly typical.

I think hoarding manifests differently in men and women. Men are more inclined to obscure collections and women to buying things for other people

For me it's my MIL too...

And I'm definitely stealing this as a MIL description!:

My MIL (who is lovely but her delivery is somewhat off)

My Fil is the worst for this,DH mum sadly passed when he was 2 and the things he brings over from the 1990s! I don't even know where he keeps these things his self but we have recently received DH mothers kirby hoover! He also sends out of date tinned food! Dh doesn't want to say anything so we are left with this tat!

@HelloYouGuys yep my dad is terrible for this.

For ages he was obsessed with the fact I didn't have a car (I live in inner London and drive very rarely - I don't want a car let alone need one) so he kept trying to palm off unwanted, crappy vehicles on me (being a farmer he has a range of decaying cars and vans to hand).

Then it was large, ugly, battered items of furniture he bought at auction or "inherited" from various elderly relatives and was "saving for us". My brother and I had to eventually put our foot down and say we didn't have space for it and didn't want it. He cannot get his head around the fact people of our generation simply cannot afford places big enough to store things "in case". We have the furniture we want and need and no more. We live in flata so there are not spare rooms, shed or attics to put stuff in.

He is storing all sorts of crap we may want. We have got through to him that bar some sentimental items we really don't need or want cases and cases of "best china" or battered items of furniture.

I think part of it is being from the post war generation, they seem much more attached to things than ours. Also I think he is also a bit obsessed with the fact he doesn't own property to pass on, so tries to make up for it with this.

It is exhausting.

Mine did this - boxes of school books, old t-shirts including school uniform(?!) would randomly appear with her at every visit. When they eventually decided to downsize I cut her off at the pass and went up to declutter the house with her - she sobbed as she watched me “bin my entire childhood” but if I hadn’t needed it in 25 years I was unlikely to need it ever!
I do think ‘stuff’ is less precious to my generation than to my parent’s, probably because we have more stuff than they did

Mine buys brand new fancy stuff for her nieces and nephews and their children and deliberately acquires broken useless items to give to me and her own grandchildren. She goes absolutely berserk if she thinks I have bought something new or nice for myself.

It costs money to dispose of all this. I would rather she gave the DC £5.

I grew up in an over stuffed house and now am absolutely ruthless about “stuff”. The rest of the family seem to hoard items. For my parents it was a post war thing as people had very little - but now tings are so cheap it doesn’t make the same sense it might once have done.

Mine also has the same feeling that me and my kids are unworthy of nice things

It physically pains her when I allow my kids to open their birthday presents, she almost can't watch as her preference would be to regift them all to worthy children and give my children (more) broken toys

It’s very interesting reading this thread. My mother threw nearly everything away. She fretted about ‘all the stuff in the shed that your father has kept’. She passed away a year before him. Clearing their stuff wasn’t difficult. He was today too. She wasn’t really right about the shed. It was mostly redundant electrical items - broken radio, telly, stereo - so we organised a kerbside collection via city council.

Local handyman went up in the loft for me. There was a moment of silence as he peered through the hatch. I said “What’s it like up there, Andy?” Yup Handy Andy 🤣 He replied “It’s Britain’s tidiest loft.”

The only thing there really was too much of was slides. However, no projector. I went through them with a slide viewer.