Taste

It's easy to be civil with strangers.  The real battle is family.

You know how there's the dark internet? I think my mom browses Dark Amazon, which is a place of nightmarish flashy toys scrawled in barely understandable Engrish and questionable graphics and self-published books with copyright infringement issues. My mother is an impulse shopper and her favorite target in the past year is my kid.

I'm trying very hard to be intentional about what sort of materials my children are exposed to. I'm strict on media consumption, even for myself.  I find a lot of comfort in the Montessori approach of exposing children to real materials and real things of beauty from a small age. I'm also uneasy with plastic -- I feel I have a moral obligation to dispose of it properly, and often children's toys are not made to last. These things have already sucked out so many resources for this world, caused so much pollution, and are not priced in a way that would make any of those problems real to those on the demand side of the product.

You know what doesn't mix well with spouting treatises on global economics? Pitting it against a grandmother whose love language is buying something on sale at Kohl's.

I am working on becoming a gracious gift receiver. I understand that some people are just delighted to buy small children toys, and small children are perfectly poised to always say yes to something new. But the amount of crap that's flowing into my house is getting me down. Would I have been more receptive if it was a ladybug scooter that showed up to my house this morning instead of a fresh-from-China plastic mobile (given for no reason other than "It was cute!") whose copy proclaims "Children can be arbitrary when his small drivers"? Probably, if I'm being honest.

However, this is a sticking point between me and my mother. Our tastes are different, to put it lightly. Mine stem from a bunch of values and beliefs that I've developed the past fourteen years living away from my family, and when I try to voice them, I find myself reverting to my status as youngest, whose point of view is often ignored because what do I know?

(An aside: all this wedding activity the past few weeks has me remembering my own.  Eloping, I should mention, did wonders for my parents taking me seriously.  When I got told "do what you want," in regards to our wedding and I replied "I want to get married at San Francisco City Hall," the answer came back "No, on second thought, do something else, and let us suggest many things you may not like, or even hate," the husband and I went and did it anyway. As the kids say these days, BOOM. Mic drop.)

My mother also takes inventory of the things she buys us, to the point where I hate accepting gifts from her because if there's a crowd, she will find a way to mention what of our attire or belongings she has purchased.

So, handful of people reading this thing, let me ask you: strategies for dealing with the overbuyer? Nice to ways to say "just because I got rid of it doesn't mean I don't love you"? I'm flailing here.