When my daughters were babies, my Pinterest board was filled with minimalist porn: white walls, vacuum-striped floors, zero poop on the counters. All I longed for was an empty house whose only decoration was a vase full of peonies. Maybe my aspirations were too high, or wishful thinking. But I really think I could have been a minimalist…if it weren’t for the fact that stuffed animals now take up 90% of the surface area of our home. I knew exactly where the source of the problem was: my mother-in-law.
Things started out innocently enough. Minutes after the placenta left my body, my mother-in-law gave us a bouquet of flowers and a pink teddy bear with “My First Teddy Bear” embroidered on its feet. Very cute. This seems harmless. But it’s a memory tinged with horror movie trailers. Mom received a cute teddy bear and placed it in the nursery. But judging by the ominous music, the audience knows something the mother doesn’t. Soon, her home would be filled with stuff. They multiply like viruses. There was nothing she could do to stop this.
I adore my mother-in-law. After each of our daughters was born, she came to stay with us for five days. Instead of committing common mother-in-law sins like hogging the baby or judging my motherhood, she went out of her way to clean our house from top to bottom, cook four meals a night, and beautify our yard. When she arrived at our house, my husband helped her unload numerous Walmart bags from the truck. “We don’t need any of this, Mom,” he said, rolling his eyes. She smiled knowingly, “Oh, you will.” She took out another toy from one of the bags.
Fast forward nine years, and each of my daughters is sleeping with at least 10 toys. The big basket I bought to hold them didn’t actually hold them. We had snake toys with long butts that took up the entire basket. My 7 year old daughter told me we couldn’t donate it because she didn’t want it hanging around the baby’s neck. Some of the giant gummy pumpkins had nowhere to put them, so they were used as pillows on my daughter’s bed. There is a life-size unicorn doll from my sister-in-law. “I apologize in advance for the gift,” she texted me. Is she? The unicorns now live in our guest room, and whenever I suggest we get rid of them, my girls say, “But we love riding them down the stairs!”
Every time we visited, my mother-in-law would send us home with at least four new toys and two Beanie Babies that she believed would one day make her rich. Each time, my husband would tell her, “We have no room in the suitcase.” “No problem!” she said. “I’ll send them to you!”
So you can see why I’m convinced that my mother-in-law is entirely responsible for our “problems.” But it wasn’t until one day at a gas station when my daughter asked me for a dusty, googly-eyed TY Cat Corn thing that I realized I was part of the problem. We had a long drive ahead of us and I couldn’t distract her with my phone because the battery was dying. And, who doesn’t want a toy that’s dusty and smells like gas station air freshener? Of course I let her have it!
As I drove home, my girls in the back seat, gleefully cajoling me into buying just one more toy, I was so happy that I realized I had easily bought more polyester fill than my mother-in-law. . I bought the gray bunny, which was the first toy to decorate our home, and it’s been a downward spiral ever since. When my daughter asked if she could buy a Costco-sized bag of Easter Pumpkin Gummies (so cute!), I said yes. I bribed my daughters with prizes to get flu shots and strep tests, but the results were always boring. “Don’t you want some Red 40 and corn syrup candy?” I begged. No such luck.
Last strep test, we brought home a toy dog wearing a reindeer headband that danced in circles to a deafening rendition of “Jingle Bells.” (Worst of all, I convinced my daughter to buy it because I thought it was fun.) On road trips, when our legs are stiff and we only have a few hours left, we inevitably end up at Cracker Barrel stops to leave behind pancake-induced intestinal rot and stuffed animals. One Christmas, I bought my daughter a giant rabbit toy that was larger than a human. It also lives in the guest room with the unicorn.
This is part of the article and I should wrap it up and tell you something like, “These things symbolize the stage of life we are in. Because it also includes dimpled hands, sweet hugs, and missing teeth, I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Instead, I call bullshit the stuff I create. In therapy, I get it. Lots to learn about my blind spots, even though my therapist never picked up on it, and it turns out that buying toys is one of them. Is this self-sabotage, probably, though I’m not a mental health expert. We learned that denial is the most effective (short-term) coping mechanism.
Obviously, I would continue to blame my mother-in-law and forget that I had ever reflected on this.
Laura Onstott When she quit her career as a research nurse to become a stay-at-home mom, she started writing to stay sane. Unfortunately, she realized that writing would only expose her madness. She is not modest at all and thinks what she writes is very interesting. She forces her friends to read everything she writes because praise is her drug of choice. You can find more of her work at: Laura Onstott website.
