Borrowed Trifle bowl broke

[outthereandbeyond]

AIBU? My cousin lent me her trifle bowl for a dinner party. She took it off the top of her shelf where she said it had say for about 10 years unused. It was black with dust.

anyway, washed it up and it would work for the dinner. I noticed it had a slight hollow sound and glass unusually thin.

anyway, I used the bowl for the party, just before serving, it fell apart in my hands. The stem broke off from the bowl. We had to serve from a saucepan. It was all a bit of a laugh.

Next day I call cousin and say ‘I’m incredibly sorry, bowl broke, I’ll replace it asap’.

she starts saying, ‘oh it was sentimental. Please replace it quickly’.

I say ‘ I can’t replace the sentimentality for you. But I will replace it as soon as I can’. Anyway I spend the next few days running to about 10 different shops, charity shops, look online and nothing similar. I tell her ‘I’m having issues but will get there’. She then says ‘I’ll send you a link to something’. I say ok. But inside I am thinking what the Fk! This bowl say unused on her shelf for a decade and I said I’ll replace it asap!

after a few days she text me to say ‘don’t worry’ but by this point, I have found something and frankly I am annoyed at her expectation to replace something sentimental she hasn’t used in 10 years.

my cousin is known to be a hoarder. She’s one of these people that drives around looking for free junk in peoples gardens. Her house is like a charity shop with dozens of mismatched chairs, cups saucers.

anyway, I returned the new bowl, along with the pieces of the old bowl for her ‘sentimental value’.

Righto

The answer is ‘don’t borrow’. You could have bought a bowl to use (cheap or otherwise) and kept it for next Christmas.

I'm not sure what your point is.

You borrowed something and broke it. Your cousin asked you to replace it which is absolutely fair.

Do you think she was wrong to request a replacement? It's irrelevant if she's a hoarder or where she gets her items from. They are hers, and she has a fair expectation for items she lends out to be returned and/or replaced failing that.

Just because you place no value in the item you broke doesn't mean that she doesn't, and her not using it for 10 year is, again, irrelevant. It was her bowl, you broke it and she rightly requested a replacement.

Maybe next time just purchase your own trifle bowl and store it away for future use.

It doesn't come across that you're particularly sorry for breaking her bowl.

You might think if she's a hoarder that her possessions sort of matter less, (if she has loads and you're almost doing her a favour by reducing the amount of stuff she has) but actually one of things that goes along with hoarding is having an unusual relationship with items - feeling more sentimentality or attachment to things. That might explain why she was upset to lose it.

Well you don’t have to be “a hoarder” do you, because when you need a trifle bowl you borrow one.

This really.

If you borrow something and break it, you replace it.

It doesn't matter if it's something they don't use often and it doesn't matter that she's a bit of a hoarder.

And you did replace it in a very short time frame and returned the pieces of the original so it's all done amd dusted surely?

There are loads of sentimental value items I have that I never use. You are very judgmental and unkind to be moaning about replacing an item that you broke.

Sadly in my experience for hoarders every item has sentimental value. I think she felt like that then realised she was being a bit over the top.

Shame about the trifle.

I have my grandma’s trifle bowl. I don’t use it. I would still be upset if it broke.

YABU
Just because you don't use something very often doesn't mean it can't have huge sentimental value.

You broke it. You replaced it. Sounds fine to me.

buy your own bowl. How the heck did you make trifle in a saucepan?

and get some canestan for the thrush those hoiked-up judgy-pants are going to give you

You don’t have anything with sentimental value that you don’t use but which matters to you?

I tried. We went looking for one together that’s why she said ‘borrow mine’

No, my point is how does she expect me to replace the sentimental value? I tried to do the right thing and replace it - and give her the pieces back.

I’m not sure what the drama is? The breakage was an accident, these things happen. You did the right thing to replace it. It’s a shame that it was sentimental but your cousin chose to lend it, you aren’t to blame for that. And now it’s all resolved. Just one of those things, surely?

Just to emphasise, because a lot of comments here have missed this fact: my course of action was immediately to replace the item. That was always my plan. It was never my intention to not replace the bowl.

the day she lent me the bowl, we had been out looking for a bowl for me to buy, but had been unsuccessful.

my point is, I think she is unreasonable to say that replacing the bowl with another would replace the sentimentality.

Turns out my mother had given the bowl to her mother so it was sentimental because of our mothers. Plus I returned the stem and bowl that had broken so she has still keeping it

What makes you think she wanted you to replace the sentimental aspect?

She was telling you it was sentimental because was trying to justify why she was upset (and you were acting like it wasn't a problem you'd broken her things, because you sound like you don't give a shit)

Interesting. I’ve never thought about the relationship with her things have. She has an incredibly addictive tendencies with buying things. It’s an obsession and many times the family have tried to convince her to address this issue.

To me, this bowl incident isn’t isolated. It’s part of a bigger picture.

She wants to keep things like used tea bags and eggshells and the trifle bowl is just another.

OP, is it more that the 'sentimental'element of it is/feels arbitrary?

I think most people have something of 'true' sentimental value that they'd be upset about if it were lost or broken.

Some people.might even feel a sentimental attachment to something unusual, say a piece of wrapping paper, if it represented a connection to someone who is no longer there. But when everything has sentimental value just by virtue of the fact it has passed through the house/their life at some point (like egg shelps and ised tea bags) then it becomes difficult for others to take it seriously.

I think you did the right thing by replacing the item but it was odd of her to want you to replace the sentimental element of it becaiae that's impossible. Unless the sentimental value of the replacement will now be this is the trifle bowl that outthere bought for me when she accidentally broke my previous one and that becomes its own sentimental value.

I don’t think it’s necessarily relevant to you whether or not she had a sentimental attachment to the bowl. As you’ve said, you knew you had to replace it because replacing things when we break them is the right thing to do. Her feelings towards the bowl don’t really factor in to what you have to do at all. You’d replace it whether it was sentimental or not.

The sentimentality is a red herring in the whole situation - it’s something for her to deal with, not you.

Did you look on line? Plenty of trifle bowls on Amazon.

I tried. We went looking for one together that’s why she said ‘borrow mine’

And yet you found the perfect replacement bowl in a few days.

I think she mentioned the sentimental aspect to OP because she may have had the impression OP was being a bit blasé with "i'll replace it". Maybe she wanted to emphasise that it was actually pretty irreplaceable.

And maybe she said that so OP would give her the pieces, which she did.

However in OPs shoes with her disdain of the hoarding aspect (and i totally get that hoarding can be very harmful, we are dealing with it in our wider family) i would not have given the pieces back, and i probably wouldn't have replaced the bowl either. I would have sympathised, said "do you really need a bowl, you kept that for sentimental reasons rather than use" and tried to deflect by maybe looking at photos of her mum and so on. But that takes time and maybe OP doesn't have that?

(am still curious how a trifle was made in a saucepan tho. I would have just made it in the individual bowls i was going to serve it in)