Tradition: Giving kids things they don’t want
“Mom, do I really have to keep these dressers?”
The call was from Ari, 23, who was standing in a storage locker an hour away. He’s temporarily been living at home until he sorts out his job and final semesters of schooling, and I’d told him just store what he wasn’t using. It took me so long to get everybody to clear their junk out of here a year ago, no way was I letting anything leak back in.
“Those dressers cost a fortune,” I began. I could hear him roll his eyes. “Stop rolling your eyes, I can hear you.”
“I’m not rolling my eyes,” he lied. “I just don’t need them, and they’re heavy.”
“That’s why they’re so good! They’re real wood, not the ones you make with an Allen key, swearing and desperate hope.”
I’ve passed through that phase of my life (more than once) and thought I was helpfully allowing my children to skip it. You would think by now I would know the only person who can learn from my mistakes is me, and even then, there are no guarantees. And yet here I was, thinking I could tell my son what my mother could never tell me.
“Nobody needs a dresser until they do. And then find out how expensive they are,” I began.
And then I shut up. I’d bought the boys decent furniture when they were small so I wouldn’t have to keep buying things as they outgrew them. Even to my own ears, I now sounded exactly like my mother as she’d tried to pawn off unwanted things on her daughters.
“You’re right. Unload them however you want,” I told him.
“Awesome. I’ll throw them on Kijiji. Somebody might want ‘em, though they won’t be worth much,” he said.
I sighed not because he was wrong but because he should be wrong.
He lugged them back home and posted an ad. He got two quick hits from people who never showed up. I told him not to forget the mirror in the garage that went with one of the dressers. He shrugged.
“They’re a set, and the mirror is part of the set. People will appreciate getting a set in good condition,” I told him.
“The only people who’ve responded haven’t even bothered to show up. Can I just take what I can get for them?”
“Yes, but don’t tell me. You’ll break my heart.”
“I got a guy coming, but he only wants one,” Ari told me the next day.
I’d already decided that dressers are like littermates; you get one, you get ‘em both. I vetoed adopting them out separately. I was still smarting a little about the fact that nobody appreciates a good dresser anymore — with a mirror.
I’d like to tell you somebody showed up who was overjoyed at getting such lovely furniture. Instead, somebody showed up and the only way Ari could get them to take both dressers was to let them pay less.
I’m aware he wasn’t doing much bargaining. He’s envisioned dragging the dressers all over the country when he graduates, like well-crafted albatrosses. The thought of them living in my garage frightens me more.
When Ari came home, I’d cleared out a closet and most of a dresser. He put Frankie’s litter box in the closet, and as I passed his room the other day, I realized he was living out of two laundry baskets: one clean, one dirty.
I realized I have dressers full of things I never wear. Maybe if I post an ad, I can pay someone to take it all away.