This thread speaks to my soul!
My mom is a mild hoarder. Her house is stacked with giant plastic containers, filled with random things. She has a whole closet of clothing in pristine condition that she hasn't worn since the 80s. There are things in heaps on the floor that I remember from 15 years ago, sitting in exactly the same heaps.
Christmas has been miserable since I was in college. My mom takes the holiday as an opportunity to pass junk along to me, in the hopes that I will carry it out of her house. In this manner she can declutter without actually having to throw anything away.
For a while I tried not to be super blunt about it. I would tell her I didn't really want these things, but I would relent and bring at least some of the stuff back with me. (And sometimes she would hide unwanted things in my suitcase for me to discover upon arriving home.) Gradually all these books I never wanted to read and jewelry I never wanted to wear and tchotchkes I had no interest in started to accumulate and junk up our small apartment.
One Christmas a few years back I just broke. She had piled tons of wrapped gifts around the tree, to the point where the gifts almost filled the room. The visual impression was of bounty and generosity. But then we started opening the gifts and it was clear that each object was some random, broken-down thing from the house that she didn't want anymore. Or something she had ordered off of eBay and then regretted when it turned out to be of poor quality. Used slippers in her size... cheapo trinket jewelry... stained table cloths... I think my husband weirdly got some of my brother's old toys?
Because there were SO MANY gifts, this just went on forever. I feel like we were sitting there for hours just unwrapping each gift and trying to pretend to be at least okay with each one. It became grueling.
I finally offered my view that these gifts represented the opposite of true generosity or caring. They were clearly just things she had and didn't want anymore. Each one represented a burden for us to have to deal with, and none of them showed any kind of care or relevance to our lives or interests. Instead of bringing joy, the gifts seemed thoughtless, and the sheer quantity of them was exhausting and destroying the Christmas spirit.
I begged my mom not to give me any more gifts. Not for Christmas. Not for my birthday (when huge boxes of junk would show up at our door). I told her that anything she gave me would go directly into the trash or donation bin. And I would never take these things home with me.
Since then, two things have happened:
(1) We have successfully started transitioning to "experience" gifts! Over Christmas we'll go to see a concert or take a day trip to an interesting place in the area. This is actually fun and enjoyable.
Mom still tries to give us a few gifts, but she accepts that we will just leave them in her house. In a weird way, she's leaned in to the "horrible gift giving" concept to the point where we can all find it humorous, a bit like a White Elephant gift exchange.
(2) My mom has realized that I have a weak spot... gifts with some sort of connection to family history. So she'll send me some lace doilies, saying, "I think your great-grandmother might have made these... but I'm not sure, these might have been the ones I picked up at a yard sale." It creates a real quandary for me, as I treasure heirloom mementos but have this sad sense that everything is getting mixed up and confused.
In the past I've given seemingly random gifts away only to get a phone call years later along the lines of: "Remember that pencil case I gave you seven years ago? Well I think that might have been the one handmade by grandpa before the war." Breaks my heart.
I've been begging her to keep better track of what is what and to avoid accumulating new junk since we already have so much old junk.
To restate where I'm coming from as far as my advice/commentary in this thread: I grew up in a hoarder house. As bad, if not worse than any you've ever seen on those television shows. Both parents (divorced, so I got the fun of being shuffled from one horrible house to the other horrible apartment/house, which just got worse as I got older). I am not talking "they're just a packrat" or "there's piles of stuff on some surfaces or clutter in every room" level - dad's house required a crime scene cleaner, many GIANT dumpsters and hazmat suits to deal with the level of filth/hoarding. Mother's house likely similar (maybe no hazmat) when it comes to that. I am a reformed packrat, who does deal with the echoes of pain/anguish getting rid of "family" items or stuff that that are no longer wanted/useful. I usually cry after driving away from the donation centers, but once it's done, I have little regret and I'm thankful for the years of counseling and self-exploration to deal with this horrible mental aberration.
marble_faun, I'd advise you to stop associating
any items with possible family heirloom as "valuable" since you couldn't recognize them as such one way or another, and your mother is using this weakness to try to make you keep things you otherwise would not want at all. Why does it matter anyway? They are gone. The object should be judged/kept based off of whether you want to use it as intended or it gives you great pleasure in seeing/using said object. Period, full stop.
My own mother is unable to let things go at all unless she knows they will be used/valued, or can be sold for money. She is stuck in the sunk cost fallacy of hoarding, where she will not allow herself to process how messed up her life/house is and has been for all these years so she has to justify the hoarding as "saving valuable objects" or else she won't let them go until someone values them and promises they won't be thrown out, or gives her proof that she was being smart (by paying her money).
She justifies quite a bit of her current hoard in outbuildings as things she will sell in a garage sale, but she has never held a garage sale in her life, her house location is unsuitable for doing so, and she can't even stand on her feet long due to health issues so she can't organize anything anyway enough to price and set up. It is a fantasy she tells herself to justify the hoarding.
It sounds like your mother also has a bit of this mindset as she gifts things to others so she won't feel so stupid wasting her time/money/space having hoarded/saved the objects. Broken, stained or ill fitting objects - give to the daughter as she might fix/repurpose them and I have Done A Good Thing by not throwing them in the trash! See, I was really smart as I get to give them as gifts, I saved these objects and daughter will value them because they came from ME! Win/win situation in her mind...
Now that you've told her you won't accept general objects, she's switched tactics to tell you that these things might be "family heirlooms" so you will take the items and
not dispose of them... therefore reinforcing in her mind that she wasn't being stupid holding the items herself because you will value them and become the custodian of her collection.
So a big thing to ask yourself: why the fact a long dead relative may have made/bought/touched said item makes it more important to you? You've already stated you got rid of things without any known association at the time (pencil case). So why would you need to keep the pencil case or doilies at all just because of family associations? You obviously weren't going to use or display the pencil case since you got rid of it already. Unless you really love and will use said items for what they actually are, you're leaving yourself open to becoming a hoarder as well. The tendency can run in families.
My father used to use gifting as an excuse to amass even more garbage/junk. He would pick up pictures or old books or anything that reminded him of me or things I liked (even if it was things I used to like when I was like 7 years old and no longer collected or even looked at) and then "save" them for gifts to give me. I lived 4 states away, flew in and had little suitcase space and he refused to pay for postage on even a card, let alone a package... and yet would try to give me large framed prints, comforters/bed-in-a-bag sets, dishes, etc... to take home, on a plane.
I told him finally to stop using me as an excuse to shop for junk. I couldn't take things anyway, and since I didn't need or want any of that stuff, anything he gave me would be donated, and it would be a more meaningful gesture for him to donate the money directly through his church or local charities. He got pretty mad about it (total denial about how terrible the house was, as in his mind he was never "that bad" and would get super angry when confronted), but finally stopped trying to gift me stuff.
The true goal here is start trying to wrap your mind around the idea of just letting them go.
Family IS important - their THINGS are not.
I'd suggest doing some reading on hoarders to help figure out the mindset and recognize the cliffs that you may be facing.
I got these at the library, but there are some great websites as well (
http://childrenofhoarders.com/wordpress/ for instance is a great resource for other sites and info):
https://www.amazon.com/Stuff-Compulsive-Hoarding-Meaning-Things/dp/0547422555https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Clean-Kimberly-Rae-Miller/dp/0544320816^this one struck a nerve with me