Millennials are about to be crushed by all the junk their parents accumulated.
Every time Dale Sperling’s mother pops by for her weekly visit, she brings with her a possession she wants to pass on. To Sperling, the drop-offs make it feel as if her mom is “dumping her house into my house.” The most recent offload attempt was a collection of silver platters, which Sperling declined.
“Who has time to use silver? You have to actually polish it,” she told me. “I’m like, ‘Mom, I would really love to take it, but what am I going to do with it?’ So she’s dejected. She puts it back in her car.”
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Sperling’s conundrum is familiar to many people with parents facing down their golden years: After they’ve acquired things for decades, eventually, those things have to go. As the saying goes, you can’t take it with you. Many millennials, Gen Xers, and Gen Zers are now facing the question of what to do with their parents’ and grandparents’ possessions as their loved ones downsize or die. Some boomers are even still managing the process with their parents. The process can be arduous, overwhelming, and painful. It’s tough to look your mom in the eye and tell her that you don’t want her prized wedding china or that giant brown hutch she keeps it in. For that matter, nobody else wants it, either.
Much has been made of the impending “great wealth transfer” as baby boomers and the Silent Generation pass on a combined $84.4 trillion in wealth to younger generations. Getting less attention is the “great stuff transfer,” where everybody has to decipher what to do with the older generations’ things.
I can’t even get folks to use the right pronouns for me. I have no hope of getting my narcissistic mother to treat me as an adult. She won’t even believe me about basic facts about, for example, about how my city’s public transit works (facts listed on a very large poster she could read herself) if they contradict her first impressions.
I’m taking this as solicited conversation as we are still here. I also assume you are an adult.
I’ve dealt with this. If they use the wrong pronouns, or otherwise infantilize you, you calmly and respectfully say “mom we’ve discussed that I’m not going to be spoken to in that way. If you must, I’ll be leaving and we can try again tomorrow”. Then you get up to leave if they don’t correct, and try again tomorrow. No fighting, no yelling.
You do not deserve to be disrespected.
No worries. “No contact” is the only path to a peaceful existence with my mom. I’ve tried working with her and it doesn’t take. Latest example of why I should just lose her number which happened just now: I missed a text from her then got one less than 24 hours later saying
“Sorry to bother you. I thought you might give a fuck but I see i was mistaken. I won’t bother you again.”
That’s gross dude on a dating site behavior. Tbh, if it was important she could have called or emailed.
Anyways, I’m going to treat her like a gross date and lose her number. This isn’t the first time she’s threatened to go no-contact and I see no reason to protest.
