To be so angry sorting out my parents stuff

[DazedorBemused]

I've just cleared another carload of stuff from my parents attic. They were born either side of WW2, and talked. Talked so much about rationing, poverty, striking, unions, etc.
My brother was occasionally ill as a child. To compensate he had fancy Lego, computers when they first came out, hand held video games.
The contrast between his pricy toys and my enjoy your family board game type stuff is obvious.
Then my parents got into collecting stuff - porcelain, dinner services, up scaled their Christmas decorations again and again.

I'm sorting through all this stuff and finding receipts for expensive trivial stuff in the early 90s when I was at uni, working two term time jobs and full-time in the holidays and I'm a 50 year old woman upset at having to go to the tip again.

That part made me laugh too

😆

Agree - I was at university around the same time but a couple of years later: the maximum grant (it was being phased out) was about £1.5k a year; max student loan was approx. £1.5k a year, and they recommended a bare minimum of 4.5k a year to live on, so you or your parents needed to stump up at least £1.5k just for basic no-frills living costs. But it wasn’t at all easy for a student to earn that amount of money then! It was pre zero hours contracts and pre minimum wage, so you were looking at casual bar/waitressing work or retail, a few hours or in vacations only, mainly cash in hand, and they could quite legally pay you absolute bobbins. In my first job as a student, aged 18, mid-90s, I got paid £1.88 an hour for waitressing and that was perfectly legal.

So no, it was not easy to fund it yourself by working - not at all. I do hate these very self-righteous posts by people who either didn’t really do it or who have conveniently forgotten the actual costs and realities in the mists of time.

There was a post yesterday about house clearing and a repeat what I said then. All ‘elderly’ couples should declutter substantially while they are fit enough to do it rather than leave it to the kids. if that is you DO IT NOW.
Re the Lego… I got £350 last year by selling an 80’s space rail set. It was in the original box and intact. Downside it took a week to build so I could take photos.
I did the ‘clearing mums house stuff’ last year. Fortunately just a small 1 bed place but still not easy on several levels.

Did you see the difference in how they treated their children?

Yes, collectibles are heartbreaking. A relative of mine had spent a fortune on Lladro that ended up being worth a fraction of its cost as it's so out of fashion. They'd have been so sad if they knew, as they really thought it was a nest-egg for us.

My parent has a 4 bed house stuffed to the max with crap. A single person with at least 50 individual plates, cups etc. They have an attic, 4 massive wardrobes full and a garage and shed piled up. Then there are the mountain of papers.

Every time I speak to them and they tell me they’re bored I suggest they declutter. They start, then tell me they can’t get rid of anything as “it’s too good to let go”.

It’s ridiculous.

Totally get the resentment OP, as a daughter that was also always treated vastly different to my brother. My brother wasn’t unwell to even explain some of the guilt buying.

This is really shit and I’m so sorry.

As the mother of a child with a rare and painful disorder, I still strive to treat both of my children fairly. I would never buy for one and not the other.

I’m sorry you had to work so very hard. I imagine the resentment mixed with grief is really hard to process. Counselling has been invaluable in helping me sort through my own resentment towards my parents, it is a feeling many experience and please don’t feel bad.

I am about the same age as you and this really jumped out at me

I'm angry and sad, I think, at the disconnect between what they said and what they did

I will never be as well off as my parents, am close to the age where my mother retired and had a well funded retirement - I am looking at another 10 years of work and desperate attempts to make sure I wont be in poverty. I know every generation can look at the other and point out foibles, but the 'we were/are so badly off' really grates. Sorry this is happening to you.

I’m an antiques and vintage dealer, it’s mind blowing the amount of “collectibles” people have been hawked into buying since the 50s. People paying hundreds of pounds for royal doulton and Coalport etc figurines, or full collections of dresser plates thinking they would be family heirlooms worth thousands one day, and now they go through auctions chucked in mixed lot boxes that struggle to reach a fiver. Prized possessions consigned to the scrap heap.
House clearances are heartbreaking.

Your MIL sounds lovely and what a kind thing to have done to make things easier for your DH and you at a time of grief.
My mum is like your MIL and when the time comes it won’t be a burden. Downsized, regularly gets rid of things to charity and doesn’t overbuy.
My MIL is opposite in an big poorly maintained cluttered house and will be a huge burden sorting.

On the house clearing topic - my sympathies, OP! And the tales of the parents on this thread are hugely relatable (also remembering that they will almost certainly be boomers, not war generation, so have actually had great luck in life generally with house prices, investments, retirement ages etc.) PSML at the “looting Tutankhamen’s tomb” 😆 I used to go to a car boot sale near us for a quick look every weekend, but it just got far too full of boomers who seemed to think that their vast tables of old-fashioned repro tat from the 80s were priceless heirlooms. Week after week they would be there charging insane prices for some dusty old porcelain and ugly glassware and refusing to take any offers.

Thankfully my parents seem to be trying to make a bit of an effort to do some decluttering, and my mum in particular is very self-aware that she struggles with hoarding things, but it’s still an uphill slog. My MIL on the other hand is a bona fide hoarder with a loft full of previous generations’ tat as well, and the mentality that she is “saving” priceless heirlooms for us all. I keep trying to explain to her, gently, that no, we don’t actually want a loft full of not very nice but dusty heavy dark wooden furniture or yellowing watercolours of sheep, but she does not believe me because she is absolutely convinced that it might all be worth a fortune. Ditto the (literally) five thousand photos of now-dead people we never knew, and every piece of childhood artwork DP ever put to paper, which she is saving for us for “sentimental reasons”.

A friend of mine grew up in an antique dealer family and is very vocal that the bottom fell out of even the fine antiques market a long time ago, like twenty years ago or more! Pseudo-“collectibles” are even more worthless - you might as well not even bother.

@Namechangefordaughterevasion

As one PP has mentioned there were boxes of gifts we'd bought her over the years, chosen with love and care and put away unused. That stung

Famous Pharoahs aside, if your DM was the pre war born generation (as mine were) I think it was incredibly difficult to throw off that "make do and mend", "It might come in useful" mindset and its old friend "save it for best". My parents both grew up with next to nothing and so throwing out anything which might be useful was genuinely hard. Come the '80s when they finally had some money to spend on themselves my DM certainly bought her share of crap from Bradford exchange thinking it would pass on to the grandchildren (whose only use for them would be as hardcore).

They both (but especially DM) sometimes kept gifts "for best" because they were especially valued. It took us years to get DM into the habit of "enjoy it now, there are more where that came from" because she grew up without there being endless replacements if a precious item was lost.

Having very much not enjoyed clearing our parents' houses, as we came up to retirement we moved to a flat and threw away almost everything, including DCs' childhood relics (with their blessing). We got all new furniture from Ikea, and sold or gave away our vinyl records and most of the books.

Now if (when) we both drop dead, DCs just need to open the box with the wills, and throw away two small wardrobes worth of clothes. But this something to do in your early 60s — you can't expect someone in their late 70s to do it, I think.

No! I’d high hopes for my mother in laws lladro!

Collectables were a fantastic con job largely targeting women who had grown up with next to nothing and for the first time had a bit of spare cash. The marketing was all about "collecting for future generations" - something which had never been possible for them before. In my memory it was part and parcel of the shift to valuing people for what they had rather than what they did in the '80s.

I look around my own house sometimes and wonder what I'm keeping, thinking it will be of use/value to the DC but which will likely end up in a skip. I supposed if you have enough attic space you just pack it in trunks for the great or great-great GDC to dig out and sell as ephemera of a historical era, most of which was lost in skips 😀

I’m same age and it was grant no loan but only low income families or children of single parents got the grant. My parents worked modest jobs but no grant. Obviously no tuition fees. I worked every holiday. My catered halls were £58 a week. I was earning £123 a week in a factory the summer before I went (still have building society book I put my wages in every week) but without parents support it would have been hard, I was fortunate.
I can understand seeing all this tat is hard when they didn’t help her at all and could have. It’s a difficult time, lots of memories dredging up.

Her brother who is only slightly younger than OP didn't work while at University as he was subsidised by their parents. There has obviously been unfair treatment between the siblings which is still playing out as OP is doing all the work to clear her parents' home and her brother is nowhere to be seen.

The ‘worth something’ is very hard. My mil’s house is full of antiques and collectibles but any suggestion to get rid is met with resistance as they have value in her head. Fashions change and even charity shops won’t take items that don’t sell.

Nobody wants it. My local tip has a big and popular "freecycle" section and manages to sift books, cds, computer games for reuse. They really go to some lengths to maximise reuse. China however goes straight in the "china bin" because nobody wants it even if its good quality.

"Stuff" is just so cheap these days that where I set up home with hand me down furniture, mismatched china etc the equivalent now is to go to Ikea and buy a "house pack" or a "kitchen pack" - lessor quality but its new and modern designs and affordable.

If there is a Franklin Mint snowy owl lamp, they sell on eBay for about £60-80.

But perhaps it'd be more satisfying to smash it all to bits!

Worth asking BHF to do a house clearing.

If the single person still has a dishwasher, then they need multiple sets of crockery to fill the dishwasher and not run it half empty.

Make sure they know you’re planning to bring in a house clearance company

Yes, people still have these very outdated assumptions about the value of objects, but it's often not true at all. Charity shops aren't a repository for everyone's old crap.

Yes. Fully agree.

However I still maintain it was normal to work at Uni. It was the brother who was unusually subsidised, not OP treated unusually badly.

The OP’s gripe is that she was treated differently to her brother. If he’d also worked 2 jobs to get through uni, I doubt she’d be so upset.

Normal to work at uni in mid 90s but I didn’t know anyone with 3 jobs (Op says 2 x term and in holidays) I worked in factories in my hols long hours but not term time. Others might have a Saturday job in a shop or bar/waitressing.
If Op didn’t get a grant she would have struggled. My bf was full grant and only needed to work in hols.