The Domestic Archaeologist by Stephen Ilott

Author:Stephen Ilott [Ilott, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771802345
Publisher: Iguana Books
Published: 2017-10-21T16:00:00+00:00

Stuffed Toys

One such ongoing habit expressed itself in the form of cuddly stuffed toys that fulfilled one woman’s desire to add a little character to outings with her daughter. It had been a harmless enough habit at first, but I could see it had blossomed into an expectation on the part of the child that I feared would rear its head in later life.

It was a cute little game: when my client and her daughter went out shopping together, they also had to find and buy the girl a stuffed toy. All good and well until this resulted in an overpopulated basement that looked like the stuffed toys had, like rabbits left to their own devices, taken over. There was also the issue of the child’s feeling of resentment when an outing did not result in the opportunity for a toy. The mother had made the mistake of asking the child’s permission to delete possessions to free up some space. Clearly this strategy hadn’t worked. I pointed out to her that perhaps, just maybe, she was conditioning her daughter to subconsciously need to purchase something every time she went out in the future. This was a later-life-problem-in-the-making if I ever saw one, the kind where you go out for a carton of milk and come home with another Louis Vuitton handbag instead.

As with the shoe lady, the act of buying can come from the need to have attention paid or from a feeling of guilt or inadequacy. Fear and guilt are the tough culprits. People beat themselves up over all manner of perceived shortcomings. Without deeper introspection, it is almost impossible to discern motivations. One thing for sure — this mother hadn’t considered that in order to fix the problem, it may have been necessary for her to tweak her own habits. So instead of changing habits and deleting ritual buying, she opted to add shelves. At least this offered the chance to create a rotating toy archive and discretely eliminate a few items over time. Using vertical spaces was a short-term solution, but I reasoned that sooner or later “out of sight” could mean that a few of the fuzzy blighters could be snuck out the door.

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