Stuff

I recently
read a Modern Love essay about a woman learning to accept her husband’s
collection of junk. I can relate to this. I too, am married to a man with a
fatal attraction to useless objects. He came home the other day bearing several
blank videocassette tapes that he’d found in the park (“just to see what’s
on them”), and he may be the only person I’ve every met who goes out of their
way to veer towards the people
passing out fliers on the street. Nevertheless, as I read the Modern Love
essay, I couldn’t help but think about how the detritus that follows my husband
home is a drop in the bucket compared to the utter crap that my children have
brought into my life.

Don’t get me
wrong, I love my kids. I just don’t love most of their stuff. Before Nico was born, I assumed that his belongings would consist of a few wooden toys
that were both aesthetically pleasing and educational. As for his clothing, he
would dress tastefully with nary a sign of weapon wielding panda bears, sponges
who wear pants, or bilingual girl-explorers who ask way too many rhetorical
questions. Needless to say there were a few things I didn’t take into
consideration.

Chief
amongst these factors is my mother-in-law, a lovely woman really, but one with
a seemingly fatal attraction to over-sized stuffed animals, Disney characters
and tiny plastic doo-dads. This means that each Christmas and birthday, we are
showered with a veritable mountain of all of the above. She is also a sucker
for clothing bargains and will snatch up anything on sale, seemingly blinded to
both the age and gender that the item is intended for. Therefore, a typical
holiday gift for Nico might include a sack full of minuscule plastic toys that
are often unidentifiable in both form and function, a humongous stuffed
armadillo and perhaps a pair of skin tight flared sailor pants with rhinestone
detailing. And while on principle, I have no objection to my son dressing like
a combination of Fred Astaire and Barbie, I’m not sure that his schoolmates
would be quite so kind.

The plastic
crap is what bugs me the most. Like most preschoolers, when surrounded by a
heap of little plastic toys, Nico is as happy as a 12-year old girl basking in a
vat of shimmery lip gloss. Tiny plastic cats wearing sparkly necklaces, plastic
cars with missing wheels, plastic weapons that once belonged to plastic superheroes
who are now missing plastic limbs. I could go on but you get the picture. For
years, my mother-in-law has both driven me nuts and perplexed me, by giving
Nico copious amounts of plastic toys that are clearly from fast food restaurant
children’s meals. I couldn’t figure it out. Was she secretly dining on Happy
Meals every night and saving the prizes or did she have some kind of black
market connection to purveyors of fast food toys? Turns out to be the latter.

Yes indeed,
you may be surprised to hear that somewhere in the depths of the Upper-East Side
in New York City, there exists a small savvy gang of children who make a
healthy profit on the street, not by selling drugs, phony Gucci handbags or $5
sunglasses, but rather by hawking toys; the majority of which once made their
homes in a cardboard box next to a cheeseburger. Unfortunately for me, my
mother-in-law has discovered their whereabouts and is in the habit of taking
full advantage of their covert services. Sadly, I am not pulling your leg on
this.

So what can
I do? Yes, I have been known to “disappear” things that haven’t been played
with for a while and just the other day I gave the little girl down the street
a tee-shirt
with a sparkly butterfly and the words “American Cutie” on the front (part of
the latest installment of gifts), but in general, it’s an uphill battle. The
giant stuffed animals are particularly challenging because while a two-inch
tall plastic Madagascar figurine which has been lurking at the bottom of the
toy box for months is unlikely to be missed, the same cannot be said for an
enormous florescent green dragon with sparkly purple wings which takes up a
third of my Nico’s bed. Any suggestions?