Are you a hoarder? I sure am. I collect bits and pieces of my life, such as totally useless stamps still on their torn bits of envelope... ticket stubs from some Holiday on Ice performance more than 10 years back... a fragment of an eraser I used in Primary school... a segmented wooden snake Dad gave me when I was a toddler... postcards he sent from overseas vacations. What to do, I'm just an emotional person.

Like all children, I loved my stuff toys. I named each of them and gave them personalities. For most of them, I cherished them because they were given to me by someone else, and it is this gesture that I value. For example my mum's best friend gave me an orange fox with a red-white striped cropped tee, which I 'creatively' named Foxy. There was also Fluffy, a white strange-looking creature with a shock of fluffy purple hair.

My all-time favourite stuff toy was Snuggy, another strange human-looking thing. I think he was a Christmas gift from Metro (lights up your christmas~). When his felt eyes dropped off, I drew them back on with Zebra markers. When I hugged and washed him so much that tears appeared on his thin beige skin, I sewed them back up. So in his last days he looked like Scarface (and arm and leg and back). The extent of damage was so bad that he literally disintegrated, with cotton dropping out from his holes, and I had to throw him away.

[Pic of Snuggy coming!]

I had never been so crazy about my toys before Snuggy. Flipped through some of my lower Secondary textbooks and found doodlings of him all over....and my friends even gave me farewell cards mentioning "Snuggy the Snuggles". Horrors! I didn't realise that even at that age I was still obsessing with a doll (when my peers were probably drooling over guys haha). Wonderful friends who tolerated my childishness.

It might have been a good thing Snuggy died a natural death, cutting me loose. My mum slowly got rid of my other stuff toys when I was busy growing up (and mugging), although sometimes I wish I still had them for memory. Today I have salvaged some, but many have passed quietly into the night and I have slowly forgotten them (and the people who gave them to me).

Why am I talking about this? Because someone's mum suddenly and flippantly gave away his entire closet of stuff toys (from young) while he was out, without even bothering to call and check with him. And she refuses to give him any more information, so he is stuck and cannot do anything to retrieve them. And he is understandably very upset and pissed.

I'm just wondering why a parent will do something like that, knowing fully well that those are what your child cherishes. This is not the first time, so why the repeat offence? And knowing she's in the wrong, yet refuses to discuss the matter any further, as if it's her call. Why?


And as the child, is there anything we can do about such incidents? We are really just helpless, and forced to belong in 'our place' in the parent-child relationship. We've got to weigh if the issue is important enough to be worth the strained relationshop brought forth by a forced confrontation. More often than not, we give in because we value our parents.

Yet parents don't realise that many of such incidents if swallowed, might build up into something irreversible. Either it explodes... or a bit of our heart, especially kept for you, dies.

Labels: Nostalgic Nut