My mom had an antique genuine porcelain doll that my sister and I were never allowed to touch lest we break it. It was kept in a drawer wrapped in soft cloth. (We did sneak peeks at it from time to time, though, and I even picked it up once.) Years later, our daughters told us they were allowed to play with the doll lots of times. WTF??? Still later, my sister asked our mother if we could have the doll now since we were old enough not to break it, and she told us she had sold it. WHY???
Every year as a kid I went to a summer camp west of Austin in the Hill Country. It was the perfect opportunity for a mean-spirited little sister to get back at me in the cruelest of ways… selling my “stuff” in garage sales. My comic book collection, 2 bureau drawers full - gone. My baseball card collection, several shoe boxes full? Gone. My 45 singles from the Singer store? Gone. Absolutely the worst violation though was selling my Lionel Train Set for the princely sum of 75 cents. It’s been 40 years and it still ticks me off. Witch.
My best buddy went to summer camp when he was 14 and while he was away his dad decided to “clean his room” gave his hockey card collection to Goodwill. He had Wayne Gretzky’s rookie card and a few others that would have paid for law school.
Heh. My mom threw away my comics from the early '60s - including several copies of the first Superman annual and many early Spiderman, Thor and Iron Man comics. She also dumped my complete set of Invaders from Mars cards, the ones the Tim Burton movie was based on.
I got back. My parents had to ship me all my hundreds of sf books went I went to grad school. At least those I still own.
My mom gave away my cat, too. But it was okay, because she gave her to a big farm out in the country, where she could run and play and chase mice and… hey, wait a minute… 
:smack:
My wife… I went to BEST BUY and bought a brand new samsung widescreen computer moniter. I open the box and install it. I put the old moniter in the box the new one came in. I tell her, “You can throw it out, it’s broke anyway.” It sits there for a few days so I decide to throw the moniter away and keep the box. Why? Good question! I bought a couch for my computer room and decide to rearrange my computer room furniture. So Stupid me places the New moniter back in it’s box to keep it safe. The very next day I go looking for the box to put my brand new moniter on my desk in my freshly arranged room. Well lo and behold I can’t find it. I ask the wife, “Darling, wheres my moniter box hunny?” She says, “Oh the garbage men took it this morning.”
AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!! Son of a _____!
Yeah Smack Head - Face Palm
I didn’t really give it away, but it’s my own fault it’s gone.
When we moved from Iowa to Seattle we shipped heavy stuff, but I left a box of stuff with my brother’s in-laws. We’d been friendly and they offered to keep it until we got settled. The box was full of memories – diaries, autograph books, school yearbooks and photos, letters from my husband when he was 18 and working out of town, souvenirs, school papers – nothing valuable to anyone but me.
Things got busy and I forgot about the box until my brother and his wife split up, about a year after our move. I asked him if he wouldn’t mind asking the in-laws about the box. They told him they didn’t have it. Not “we tossed it” – they just didn’t have it.
It kinda sucks not to have something from my childhood and teen years.
Not valuable or big–except sentimentally. On top of the refrigerator in the house where I grew up, my mother kept a ceramic cookie jar in the shape of a huge apple. It was painted a nice translucent red with pale yellow in places, how a real apple would look with layers of different colors. The lid had a brown stem and green leaves. It’s where we put cookies that we made together when I was a little girl, which we did quite often.
Fast forward to when I’m a teenager and it’s gone. My mother gave it to her younger sister. Don’t know why. Maybe she liked it. I was disappointed because it was special to me. I probably never said it to my mom though how much it mean to me when we still had it. It was something that would always be there, you know?
My aunt had six kids and if you ever even loaned her anything for 5 minutes, it would come back wrecked and she would just shrug. When I was getting ready to move into my own place and was at my aunt’s house visiting, she gets the cookie jar and asked me if I wanted it. Of course, by that time the lid was missing and the main part was chipped. Naw… keep the freakin’ thing. No, I didn’t say it that way–I just said no. By that time my mother had gotten me a glass cookie jar in the shape of a smaller apple. It wasn’t a good one. In fact, it was one given away as a promotion at Dunkin’ Donuts–it came filled with Munchkins. It wasn’t the one we built my memories on, but the memory of her realizing how much it meant to me and her trying to replace it for me is even better. She probably searched high and low for an apple cookie jar to duplicate the original one and that’s the only thing she could come up with. Decades have passed and I still have it on my kitchen counter and put some cookies or muffins in it when I bake even though it is too small to hold a batch.
Crazy how little things can mean so much.
I’m pretty sure they’re complaining about never having been asked. I don’t expect my parents to keep my old junk forever, but I’d be hurt and annoyed if they didn’t at least tell me to come get them or they’re going in the trash.
My mom gave me an ultimatum a few years ago when she was moving house. I got the stuff I wanted, and now it’s my problem. No hard feelings that she didn’t want to store it anymore. But if I’d just showed up one day and all the stuff that I had been storing there had just vanished without warning, you bet I’d have been pissed.
My Mother had to move from her house to a small apartment. I was there helping haul stuff out of the house and into her new, tiny, apt. She rarely threw things away, but she had no choice and had filled several boxes to send to the Goodwill. I was charged with taking them to the donation center, which I did, after removing a few items that had meant something to me.
My elder sister’s sh*t storm was epic because I had salvaged two figurines from the boxes. She literally demanded my mother “Take them back from” me and give them to her.
When Mom didn’t comply she made the demand straight to me.
Nope, I didn’t give them to her. Took her around 6 months to decide to talk to me again.
Dad tossed my posters, including all three Alice Cooper’s. Considering my room still looks more like a sixteen year old’s (all of our AC tribute band posters, for starters) , you bet I’d still want 'em.
:smack::smack::smack:
I was on my way to my first term at college; gone from the house about 3 or 4 days when mother decided to “clean up”. I can’t speak for anyone else but in her case it was a way of saying “you’re gone and not totally welcome back”.
My Grandmother had a large family bible that she kept on a table in her formal living room. One of her brothers had written inside all the family births, marriages, children in calligraphy.
The bible went missing after her death. The situation was more difficult because she had moved to another house after granddad died. She didn’t have a formal living room and no one recalls seeing the bible there.
You save many things for your kids. When they are parents on their own, you offer the things to them. They say they don’t want anything… They have all they want already.
*
Always remember* that people suck and never forget that no one ever agrees on what is important in a family history.
This might not QUITE count:
When I was 15 (in 1995), my grandmother moved in with my parents (Alzheimer’s), and my mom and her siblings started liquidating her house and things, in the process of which my parents ended up with her less-than-10,000-miles, mint condition, candy-apple red '77 Ford Maverick hot rod. ((WFsites) - No se encontró la página.)
Why my sweet old lady grandmother drove that thing, I’ll never know (she would in fact lay rubber in the parking lot when picking us up from elementary school occasionally, though).
I begged and pleaded with my parents to keep it around until I was 16. They instead sold it for $1000 to the father of one of my friends.
(Joke was on him, though, his dad took such crappy care of it (basically running it in amateur races with no real maintenance between) that it was four different colors and rusted out within the year.)
My cousin (same age as me) collected baseball cards as a kid. He had dozens of shoe boxes full of them, but as far as I know, he never catalogued them.
The bozes were in his bedroom.
Years later (after he had moved out) my aunt decided to clean house-she threw them out in the trash!
God knows how many rare cards were lost that day!
OMG, thanks for triggering some resentful childhood memories at lunchtime.
When I was 10, I visited Taiwan for a month with my family. Somewhere in that trip we visited a large Buddhist temple, Fo Guang Shan, where I bought on my own, with my own money (in my first-ever round of haggling, which ended in dismal failure) a pair of carved Chinese stone lion figurines, about six inches high, that were dark green like (fake) jade but GLOWED IN THE DARK. To a 10 year old kid this was like three kinds of cool rolled into one.
Back home in the States I made use of these figurines in a throne setup on my desk for my primary GI Joe action figure (Snake Eyes), who was the Emperor Of The Second Floor of my house, with its capital in my bedroom. He sat on a plastic throne (actually a Playskool armchair), resting on top of a (solved) Rubiks Cube, flanked by these stone lions that glowed in the dark. Very Imperial if you ask me, especially after bedtime when the lions glowed on after lights-out. I also fashioned him a crown of tinfoil and other things, especially after reading the Lord Of The Rings, but this is not his story.
For years the mighty Emperor reigned in glory (millenia in toy years), until one day when I was about 13 or 14, when I noticed one of the lions was missing. Hmmm. I figured it fell behind my desk, as sometimes happened. I went so far as to pull my desk 2 feet from the wall to check thoroughly (not easy to do in my little bedroom, which was less than 10 feet square with no closet). I looked in my drawer, nope.
After a few days I mentioned this to my parents, and my Dad spoke up. “Oh yeah, that. I owed my boss a present from my last trip [he had just gone back to Taiwan on his own, for a week or so] and forgot to pick something up at the airport, and remembered you had those things from when you were a kid, so I took one of them to give him. I figured if you still cared about them any more, you’d still have one of them.”
Well, yeah! I did still care about them, and having just ONE of a pair of flanking lions was TERRIBLE! And I’d gotten them from freakin’ Taiwan half a world away! Myself! Arrgh!
One man’s resentful childhood memories are another man’s LOLs. 
Well, I’m not a man, but I dug it anyway.
Oooh yeah. Been there too. Mom wanted to redecorate my room when I moved out. She left my sister’s room alone other than sending off the stuff my sister requested. But mom was all hot to get my room redecorated and looking good. So she got all my stuff off the walls and furniture. And then…
…nothing. It seems that what she was eager to do was simply to remove evidence of my presence. She didn’t really care about the room beyond that.