Help Me Understand This Strange Conversation

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Now, this happened way back when I was 9, and I'm now 28. So it might be silly to suddenly remember this and post about it on WP, but it was a conversation weird enough to make it memorable nearly 20 years later. Here goes. Post your thoughts after reading.

I went on what was basically a 2-day overnight history excursion through school, to a city near where I lived back then. It was actually a nice trip, and even bullies who enjoyed picking on me at school left me alone for the most part. Sleeping arrangements were in cabins; boys in one, girls in another. When I came home, I found a shelf in the living room, that usually had a large number of my toys, completely empty . So I ran into the kitchen, where my parents were sitting, and the following conversation ensued.

Aspie1: Hey, what happened to my toys?
Parents: What toys?
Aspie1: The ones you cleaned up! *
Parents: Don't question us like that! Tell us what toys you're talking about.
Aspie1: The ones that were sitting on the shelf before I left for the trip; now the shelf is empty.
Parents: We don't know what toys you're referring to. Get out of here or you're getting spanked!
Aspie1: You're pretending not to know what I'm talking about. (starts to cry and leaves)
Parents: (sitting there with calm facial expressions that could unsettle a soldier)
(* When I was little, I used to say "cleaned up" to mean "moved to an unknown place or threw away", and my parents understood it. The etymology behind it is that my parent would say they cleaned up my desk when they threw away my drawings and little trinkets.)

I went back to the living room without getting an answer. Next day, after digging in every nook and cranny I could think of, I found my toys moved into a storage compartment inside an ottoman. (My parents had an ottoman where the top lifted up, to reveal empty space inside.) I was hesitant to go on any school excursion more than one day long ever since.
Now, my questions are:
1. What motivated my parents to move my toys just like that, especially while I'm gone?
2. Did they really not know what toys I was talking about or were they pretending?
3. If they really did not know, how is that even possible, if they moved the toys?
4. If they were pretending, why would they deny moving my toys around?
5. If my parents had no responsibility in the toys' disappearance, what could have happened?

Of course, there is a 0.01% chance that they hired a cleaning worker, who might have moved the toys around while cleaning, but since my family was quite poor at the time, it's just not plausible.

Last edited by Aspie1 on 19 Feb 2012, 2:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It seems clear to me that your parents didn't want your toys cluttering up the living room when you were not actually playing with them, so they found a convenient place to store them when not in use. They didn't want you giving them a hard time about it or putting them back on the shelf, so they ducked your questions about the toys. They should not have done that. They should simply have told you that from that point on, you would have to store your toys in the ottoman or somewhere else less public than the shelf, when you were not playing with them.

Most people like to keep their living rooms looking fairly "company ready". Having toys in plain view when not being played with interferes with that.

Yes, your parents made a mistake in not telling you right out where the toys were, and why, but it happened a long time ago, and I think I have been able to explain the mystery, so let it go now. There is no further need to stress over it. There are plenty of current stresses to deal with without digging up a dead one from the far past. If you are really into digging up dead stuff from the past, watch a zombie movie.

I'd agree with questor, in general. Why your parents insisted that there were no toys at all, that's another question. There are a couple possibilities I can think of:

1. They hoped their response would get you to go away and stop bothering them, and figure it out on your own.
2. They had honestly forgotten they moved the toys at all.
3. They had told you, either prior to your trip or afterward, that they moved your toys to the storage ottoman, you didn't hear or process the information. When you asked about the toys, they must have assumed (since they were assuming you knew the toys in question were in the ottoman) that you were talking about different toys, and genuinely didn't know what you were talking about.

While I'm sure this situation bothered you terribly at the time, and I can't blame you posting here for more information (I have a couple such incidents that pop up in my mind from my childhood, and I'm nearly twice your age.) Unfortunately, we're missing the key piece: what your parents know about it.

To be honest, I think your parents may have been going through a similar experience to my husband and I. My daughter won't let us take anything to the charity shop and I mean absolutely nothing is allowed to go. Every few months, my husband takes a day off work and we go through her toys, putting things she hasn't played with in a while into bags and storing them out of sight. If she doesn't mention them for a few months, they get taken to the charity shop. Were your parents trying to get shot of them, sneakily, like we do? I swear, we're not the only ones driven to this. We are quite desperate at times and sometimes if she mentions any missing toys, we will falsely claim we don't know where they are, in the hope that she'll forget again. She was distraught a few weeks ago when she realised a stuffed toy elephant had gone. She had hardly played with it at all, since she had received it as a baby, and we thought this was a safe one.

We would never get rid of stuff that's clearly still in view and being played with from time to time. So, if that's the case with the toys you're talking about, sorry I don't have an answer.

I am going to say something. I like video games. And generally will play one video game over and over again, until I beat it and have nothing else to do with it. I may move unto another new video game, but would get pretty much upset if someone decided it was okay to sell or "take away" my video game because I haven't played with it in a few months. I'm a collector. I may not use it, but I like to collect because they have fond memories. And even still, even if I don't play a video game in a few months, maybe after my new obsession is over I may go back to the other one. I don't really think it's fair for you to decide what she is done with and what she isn't done with.

We do the exact same thing with our daughter, her worst thing is teddy bears, she must have about 600 of them dotted about. She has around 150 or so on her bed, 50ish in her playhouse outside, another 150ish at her uncle's and the rest spread out between grandparents houses. We have a system in which I put any toys or bears I'm thinking of getting rid of into her wardrobe after 4 months it goes to her uncle's house in the wardrobe in his spare room after 6 months or so there we either get rid completely or send it on to the next stage which is my mum's house 300 miles away, so if she hasn't asked after it for about a year we can finally get rid of it. We still however have the odd incident in which she remembers a long gone toy, a few months back she asked about her Elmer elephant that we had gotten rid of about 2 years prior which she had barely played with.

Aspie1 - it sounds like your parents tidied the toys away and then completely forgot about doing it. The toys held no importance to them and so a vague description of "my toys" would not have triggered a memory. My husband sometimes puts my daughters toys in the wrong place and she will ask where X is and he won't remember where he put it, wheras I know where everything is, whenever she can't find something she will ask me and I can tell her exactly where it is because 90% of the time it's me who tidies her room(major clear up/clear out not day to day tidying).

Example she was looking for her maths workbook and din't know where it was, she asked me I said 2nd row of the small bookshelf on the left about 4 books in. An example with my husband is that he tidied some of her monster high toys away and when she couldn't find them he wasn't sure where in her room he'd put them as he couldn't recall moving them. So me and my logical brain went through a process of elimination and we found them (why he didn't put them in the designated monster high storage draw I don't know).

I think it's perfectly fair, I don't know about mummy of peanut but we have limited space in our house so if we never ever got rid of any toys or bears we would not be able to move. Again I don't know about MOP but I don't just go into my daughter's room and think "hmmm too many toys, lets see this doll I don't think she's played with it for a while I'll throw that out" as I explained above we have a process, sometimes I'm confident enough to get rid of it when it's been hidden away in her wardrobe for 4 months, sometimes I just throw them out straightaway but that's for silly little things like toys from macdonalds. I know my daughter very well and I've become very good at guessing whether or not she will go back to a toy. She's recently decided (after an almost 4 year obsession) she hates hello kitty and took all of her hello kitty toys and bears put them in a bag and told me to throw them away, but I know her and I know this is probably just a phase so they are being stored away until either she likes hello kitty again or I'm 100% sure she does not want the toys anymore.

OK, so I'll just come to you for the cash to pay for an extension on our home, to store all the junk. Our daughter would keep absolutely everything she has ever been in possession of and I mean snail shells, twigs, stones, scraps of paper, even bills she was supposed to be helping her Daddy shred. When we have discussed with her what she wants to give to charity or throw out, she has selected nothing whatsoever.

That's exactly how it is for us. However, I was absolutely certain about Mr Potato Head and I'm sure she would never have gone back to him. Unfortunately, the very first topic at school was Toy Story. So, she suddenly remembered about him and asked where he was. If must sound cruel to someone who has a tendency to hoard or collect, but there's no alternative at the moment. We don't buy books at all, just now. She has to select some for charity before she's allowed any new ones. The only books that have gone out so far are the picture board ones she had when she was a baby.

It is very difficult when you have a lot of people living in the same house; you have to make decisions about space and how it's going to be used. Kids also grow out of toys - and, sadly, Aspie kids especially have a really hard time letting go of things without understanding the limits of space.

Many parents go through their little kids' toys and get rid of the broken or little-used ones with the intention of making room for more. I get the impression that most kids don't care, and don't even know it happened; having them choose actually makes it more difficult, not less. Not all kids have a mental inventory of every single thing they own, down to the last kids' meal toy, or scrap of paper, like my son does.

We figured out early on that we had to handle this differently - the first time I tried the typical way, when DS was very small, he had a meltdown. From that point on, I have used the explanation that if he wants presents on his birthday or Christmas, he has to get rid of the same number of old toys, and I let him choose which ones. When he was little, we'd donate the toys to a playroom he sometimes went to, so he could "visit" them.

Having a collection is one thing: having 50 collections going at once is hoarding, and we have several sad examples in our town of the catastrophic effect hoarding can have. DS needs to learn the skill of managing his own space, even though it is a very unpleasant lesson for him.

I pretty much agree.

However, I will say that I go through similar stuff with my husband nowadays. He has bipolar and anxiety, and I think that he has a little OCD going on, too, like his mom and one of our sons.

When he gets stressed out, he gets in a mood to "declutter." He will just stick stuff in containers without labeling the containers, and I have to question him about where my stuff is. (If I'm lucky, he can remember.)

A couple of time, he erased massive amounts of my work off of shared computers because he was trying to "declutter" the computer desktops. He didn't do it on purpose; he was just trying to move my work into a folder so that it wouldn't clutter up the computer screen.

Another time, he spent hours reorganizing the pots and pans under the kitchen sink (neither of us cooks much, by the way), when there were dishes in the sink and the floor needed to be mopped.

There was also a point where he wanted to have a garage sale every weekend--sit out in front of our house and try to sell things that we supposedly didn't need in order to remove clutter from our house. Again, the house needed to be cleaned and other stuff needed to be done. However, I had to force him to stop having these garage sales. (Any thing that we had that we have that we want to get rid of can be gotten rid of during one morning; there was no need to try to sell stuff every week. After the first week, it was just the same small collection of stuff of little value that belonged in the garbage can.)

It seems like this thread got sidetracked into the topic of hoarding. I was more of a collector than a hoarder. I had about eight toys that was truly willing to sacrifice my life for if they ran a risk of being taken away from me, either by parents or by bullies. The rest were "just toys", but even then, I fought tooth and nail to prevent my parents from taking them away. I also never took anything out of my home, unless it was consumable, like candy, or disposable, like a newspaper.

On a small side note, when my kindergarten class had a show and tell for a favorite toy, I panicked so much, that my parents bought a key chain flashlight at a dollar store just for that purpose. I then came up with a fake story about how it made me feel safe at night (in reality, I never had a fear of the dark), and got compliments from kids in class. My parents gave it to my older sister a few days later, when she asked if she could have it; I didn't object.

Incidents with forced toy removals happened only a few times, but they were so traumatizing, that I remembered them vividly years later. The toys would be given away to charity, taken to a storage facility, or moved to a place too high for me to reach (all these were equally bad in my eyes), rather than just hidden in the ottoman. By the time I became a teenager, I trained myself not to get attached to any of my possessions, since my parents had the power to take them away from me at random. To add insult to the injury, they just made a clean sweep of my toys, with stone-faced expressions that could intimidate a US Marine, completely ignoring the fact that I was crying my eyes out.

As a result, it wasn't until my 20's that I stopped associating charity with losing my possessions. Don't get me wrong: I wasn't a stingy kid by any means. Quite the opposite, I was very generous with consumable things, such as candy or snacks, and disposable things, like newspapers and plastic flatware. Anything with a trace of permanence, including small trinkets (maybe even especially small trinkets), I was willing to protect with my life.

Last edited by Aspie1 on 20 Feb 2012, 11:36 am, edited 1 time in total.

My parents recently "cleaned the house up", meaning that most of my things either got thrown away or given away. According to them, they enjoyed a sense of achievement when they saw how empty the house seemed after cleaning up, so um, maybe your parents thought like my parents too when they kept your toys. If they only kept a toy or two, they might have genuinely forgotten where they had kept the toys, but since you mentioned that a large number of toys got kept away, they probably pretended not to understand you. They might be worried that if you went to retrieve the toys, then their efforts would have been in vain.

Yes, I've had to do the same thing. I used to wait until my daughter was gone for a day somewhere and go through her room. Understand please that her room was not well kept, and she doesn't like throwing away. We often had to deal with problems because of her "collecting" things....like mice. I don't know if there's a "hoarding" element that goes along with having aspergers (or if it's just more part of her disorganization combined with independence) , but I've wondered that sometimes. My daughter is very posessive of her mess. She's also at an age where she doesn't want me cleaning/managing her room, and I don't. But it's still a struggle for her to manage, and whenever a box goes into the storage closet, I will go through it and throw away/donate, because basically, she doesn't even know what all she has in given places.

I would suggest the same as the other parents on here that it's a strategy the parents of disorganized people (probably not limited to those on the spectrum either) use to keep a moderate amount of order around the house. I have the opposite issue of hating to have a lot of things. To me having so much feels clausterphobic, so I'm always trying to pair down...

I think it's hard to say what your parents thought, Aspie1. I wish I could give you some clarity: I, also, have a hard time distinguishing between when my parents were deliberately cruel or vindictive, and when they were just being thoughtless.

The cause isn't as important as the effect. This was something that happened that upset you and you weren't able to resolve in the normal way, by asking questions and getting an answer. That would be upsetting to anyone.

Momsparky, I remember seeing your responses to my other threads, and they're all very sympathetic, since it sounds like you had the same experiences growing up. Are you sure we're not related? Anyway, the conversation could have easily gone like this.
Aspie1: Hey, what happened to my toys?
Parents: They're in the ottoman.
Aspie1: The one with the ferns? *
Parents: Yes.
Aspie1: OK. (runs off to play)
(* The upholstery pattern was really just bumpy lines, but they kind of looked like ferns due to how they branched. I described it as "ferns" when I was very little, and the name stuck.)

But it didn't! Honestly, I wouldn't have cared if my toys got moved. By age 9, I came to accept my complete powerlessness in the family, despite deeply resenting it. This included knowing that my possessions will be moved around without notice or warning. But as long as I could still locate them after the move, I could tolerate it. In the scenario that started this thread, not only were my toys hidden away, the people who I knew hid them were denying all responsibility. And there was absolutely no way for me to get to the truth because I was just a powerless kid faced off against two all-powerful parents.

So, please take note. I'm sure no parent who cares about their child living a happy life instead of just utmost obedience, would want them sitting on their IMAX 3D smartphones, writing bitter, angry posts on WrongPlanet, twenty years from now.