I haven’t experienced this yet, but I figure it’s only a matter of time.
I’m thinking mostly about toddlers annihilating something delicate, but I suppose the question could just as easily apply to teenagers wrecking your vintage car.
What were the circumstances? How did you respond?
Speaking as the mom of a teenager, it’s less that they destroy your prized posessions (which, after all, most of us are careful with) than that they do daily damage to everything in your damned house.
I can’t think of any one thing that my daughter absolutely destroyed, but just within the past few months, she’s spilled candle wax all over the floor, left nail-polish-remover-soaked cotton balls on the kitchen table, and thrown a sweatshirt into the washing machine with a lipstick in the pocket. :smack: They’re just *incredibly * thoughtless.
When my daughter was a toddler, she found a cassette tape a former friend had made for me. It was a tape of my friend just talking to me about all the fun things we’d done that summer and stuff we planned to do, and it had a ton of sentimental value. My daughter had pulled out the tape and strung it all over the room, far beyond repair. I took it away from her and cried for about three days, off and on, but I don’t think I ever yelled at her or even said anything at all. I was just sick.
Yep. It sounds silly, but I had a Muppets book from…oh, I don’t remember not having it. It had some activities and some comics and Oh! here it is: Muppet Madness 1980, so I got it when I was ~5. I loved that book as a kid, and the shocking thing was that I read it about every day, but the book was nearly pristine. No writing, no dogears, no rips, not even a scratch on the cover. Even in adulthood, I’d sometimes take it out for a trip down memory lane with Kermirella!
But because it is a “kids book”, my husband put it on my daughter’s bookshelf instead of my (higher up) bookshelf. And it took her about 20 unsupervised seconds to destroy it. Tore every page out of the binding.
I cried. I’m not entirely proud of crying in front of a 2 year old over a children’s book, but that’s what I did. Full on waterworks for a good 10 minutes. Scared the poor little thing half to death! I figured after that, there was no appropriate “punishment”. She understood that what she did made Mama very, very sad. She spent the next two weeks saying, “I sorry, Mama. No be sad!” 
When I was little, we were playing dress-up and I spilled nail polish on one of my mom’s dresses. I attempted to fix it with nail polish remover. Made sense to me, right?
It was the dress she wore to her wedding reception when she’d changed out of the wedding dress. 
Well, I was wrestling with my then 2-year-old or so daughter and she was having a blast. At one point, I had her in my arms and her mouth was right up to my ear when she sqealed at the top of her lungs.
I heard a “pop!” and my hearing has never been the same. I’ve played guitar for 30 years and always been careful but it just took that one incident.
At the time, it hurt and was scary, so I kinda grabbed her and held her away from me. Nothing mean or inappropriate - but it was clear from my actions that something was up so she got a little scared herself, but we got past it and as far as she knew we were back to wrestling…
It bums me out - on days like today, I have some pain and ringing that I don’t have in my other ear - but what’re you gonna do?
Um, have it looked at by a doctor?
Certain acute acoustical injuries are treatable.
When I was 7 or so, my friend and I decided to wash her Mom’s Camaro. With steel wool. :smack:
I don’t have children, but over the years my cats have destroyed two computer keyboards, a futon mattress, a satin comforter, curtains, leather boots, a porcelain music box given to me by my late mother . . .the list goes on and on.
Yes, they have, though I’m not remembering exactly what just now. I well know that awful sinking feeling when you see something you love destroyed beyond repair.
As a 3yo I was playing on my mom and dad’s bed, putting pins into the quilt as my mom sewed. Which would have been fine if it hadn’t been a waterbed.
Not me… but my wife’s new puppy chewed up my iPod earphones the day before yesterday (I say “my wife’s new puppy” because my sweet puppy wouldn’t do that!).
I don’t remember my kids having done this yet, but if they do I’ll have to cut them some slack… after all, I’m the one who (accidentally) burned down part of my parents’ house when I was home from college…
Since the fire started in my room, I managed to destroy all of my own prized possessions… :rolleyes:
When I was 13, my mom had a set of 8 little dessert glasses made of orange carnival glass which she collected (as she still does, I think). I got to messing around with a couple of those dessert glasses one day and dropped one of them and broke it. She heard the breaking glass sound and came to see what was going on. At the moment my only reaction was too be scared shitless – my mother had always taken what you might call a *hands-on *approach to my upbringing, even for Appalachia at the time. I said in a rushed breathy near-whisper “I, I can pay you back for it, I have ten dollars…”
Ma just looked at the little puddle of orange opalescence and said “my carnival glass…” very quiet-like. She didn’t hit me that time, she just kind of slouched out of the room and laid down on the sofa. I escaped out the back door and felt about as bad as I’d have felt if she had done what I expected her to, like backhand me upside of the head.
This happened 35 years ago. Now and then I remember again, and think about how much she loved her strange old glassware and still does, and the innocent simple pleasure she took in collecting it; about that perfect set of eight beautiful little glass dessert cups and how a dumbass kid who shouldn’t have even been handling them just suddenly smashed one and how that must’ve felt…and even though she treated me like shit a lot of the time and we don’t get along and I haven’t set foot in West Virginia for nigh on to twenty years, my throat lumps up and my chest gets tight and I feel rotten about it all over again, like I was about nine inches tall.
Last summer, Bonzo, who was 20, was paid to paint the front porch. He did so, enthusiastically.
With the Taurus in the driveway right next to it.
Yanno, white paint wears off a car’s finish faster than we thought. We hardly even notice the dribbles and specks that are left.
I’m not really into things and can’t remember getting really angry about anything the kiddies broke when they were small. (Feel free to come in and contradict me sinkids.)
The one thing they did break, that we chastized them about a little was the Cuckoo Clock my brother got me when he was stationed in Germany. The clock was hanging in the entryway and they were tossing a ball back and forth over the balcony railing. Always a good idea to play ball in the house. :dubious: So they knocked the clock off the wall and it was never the same again.
The funny part was, they didn’t really break the clock, it just didn’t work the same anymore. It still keeps time but instead of the bird gently singing coo coo, he is now an angry bird who goes COO COO, COO COO… and then he SLAMS the door when he goes home. Yeah, we now have the only ANGRY Cuckoo clock in the universe.
Can I toss in the opposite situation?
My dad collected baseball cards voraciously as a kid in the 50’s and 60’s. He had a collection that, today, would be jaw-dropping. He went off to the Navy at the tail end of Viet Nam and came back to find that his parents had thrown everything he owned in the dumpster, including his baseball cards.
Oh! You make me want to give you a big hug, you do!
Listen, since I feel bad for being the mom who cried, and you feel bad for making a mom feel bad, can we just sort of agree to forgive one another, sort of like a proxy thing, since we’re both here as representatives of the parent child bond?
I want sinjin’s cuckoo clock!
My Black Forest cuckoo clock (what, did they dole them out to everybody in Germany?) just doesn’t work at all and has been in the attic for 16 years, following something done by either (a) the cat (b) the dog or © one or the other of my now-grown sons. (Right; probably the cat.)
Of course, that isn’t all. When they were really little, the boys had a room that was a long way from the bathroom. And right next to the room was a closet with a dark hole in it. Much closer than the bathroom.
Inside that hole (which I thought was a nice, safe place) was my father’s collection of 78s, mostly Spike Jones. Nothing that can’t be replaced, and we couldn’t play them on our turntable then and don’t even have a turntable now, but…that hurt. (Made worse by the fact that we didn’t know this about them for years, until we moved. Eww, smells bad in storage closet! Like…a latrine. Nasty little boys.)
We spent many bucks and a lot of time planting a nice lawn. A couple of years later they --well, let’s just say that one is covered by the phrase “We aren’t growing grass, we’re growing boys.” It wasn’t a prized possession, it was a status symbol, um, at least we didn’t live in one of those neighborhoods where you have to maintain a certain appearance on your lawn.
And that still isn’t all, even as I speak there’s something I love that my youngest will probably break or otherwise desecrate–but they’re worth it.
Does my sanity count?
My daughter deleted all the photos of first 3 months of her little brother’s life. I left the camera within reach and even knew she was playing with it, but didn’t foresee that she’d hit the exact right combinations of buttons to completely erase the card.
Earlier that week I bought new picture frames, planning to print some of the pictures. I never got the chance, but my daughter loved the fake sample picture of kittens that came in one of the frames.
When I realized what happened and that the pictures were gone, I cried and cried. She went into the kitchen and brought me the kitten picture and said “Here Mommy, here is a picture.”
I carry that kitten picture in my wallet to this day.
About 15-20 years ago, my father and I, together, were trying to install my new video game, and we deleted my mother’s thesis. It was about 100 pages and almost ready to be defended.
When she found out, she laughed it off and said, “Well I guess that just wasn’t meant to be,” and she never finished her masters.
As I have progressed through academia I have come to appreciate the enormity of what we did to her. It still gives me the chills.