You can be offended if you want. You have the grounds to justify it, if you choose to look at it that way. But what good would that do?
This thing about the trunks is no more offensive than her whole attitude about your choosing whom to marry and where to live.
The score-keeping isn’t helping your argument any. It’s petty. You don’t “deserve” the trunks any more than anyone; they’re your mother’s things, and she can do with them whatever she wants.
Maybe “whenever you might be ready for it” means “whenever you are ready to call/email/IM your brother and arrange delivery of the trunk, which could involve you paying him for delivery charges beforehand, buying insurance, having enough space available in your living quarters, having everything you need to archive the contents, etc.”
Orville, first understand that this is not about the trunk. This is about longstanding issues with your mother, not about an old object.
So if you want peace, I suggest you take a deep breath and figure out what it is that you really want to say to your mother. Not about the trunk, but about the million other issues you brought up. Because as long as you make this a fight about a trunk, rather than a son looking for validation, you are just going to create petty fights, tension and resentment. But if you can address the real issue, you may be able to find the resolution that you are looking for, or the acceptance that your mother is who she is and she may not be able to give you what you are looking for.
Oof, although I truly value the inputs I get from Dopers, sometimes it drives me crazy how people grab onto the wrong parts of the argument. It just goes to show how important (and difficult) it is to write a good OP.
DCnDC, just to clarify, my point about my brother not visiting the Italian village is a response to yellowjacketcoder’s point in post #5 (which I did not include in the quote box) where he called me out on being more easily able to visit than my brother, which I then conceded. I was just clarifying against that point, but until that moment hadn’t ever thought about who had been to the village or not. :rolleyes:
Observation: She’s trying, and not at all subtly, to guilt trip you for moving away.
Question: Do you and “Wilbur” get along well enough that he would send a trunk to you?
Incidentally: have you ever looked inside the trunks? What’s inside?
You are absolutely right even sven, but I can tell you from experience that it doesn’t work to talk things out with my mother. It’s just better to grin and bear it, and just decide which things are worth fighting over, and which aren’t. And I have now concluded that this is definitely not worth fighting over.
So these are my conclusions from this helpful discussion:
- regardless of my mother’s intention, it is not unreasonable for her to want the trunks to stay in the US
- it is not worth my getting worked up over it
- it might be worth taking this discussion offline with my brother about my feelings, but only if it continues to bother me
The last person who tried to argue with my mother. 
on the qt, ask your brother…