Saturday, January 3, 2009

When enough is just enough!

Kailyn is spoiled. Very spoiled. I can blame it on anyone I want to, but the truth is, I did it. I buy her things all the time. She is so stinkin adorable, and I just love to dress her up and buy her things. There, I said it! I am ruining my wonderful daughter. Whew, what a relief.
I have known for a while it was getting bad, Kailyn would seem confused when we left a store and hadn't bought her anything. She would really wonder where her stuff was, because, evidently I had trained her to expect something from every store we go to. From GAP to Kroger, she got something. This is only part of where I went wrong.
Let's get to the good part though, the heartless mommy part (that's me.)
After Christmas I asked Kailyn to put her new things away, and finish picking up her room. This went on for days, I yelled a few times, threatened, whatever, but she just didn't seem to care. I had had enough. I calmly said, that is enough, I am doing it myself. Her eyes widened like she'd seen a ghost. She immediately started crying and wanted to call her Mamaw. I grabbed some trash bags and went to work. I decided she needed to know what it was like to only have what you need, and not everything you want. I guess she found my phone because next thing I knew my mom was on her way. Such a good Mamaw, but mean old me had to call off the calvary. I asked my mom to not come. She (being a mom of a messy daughter herself, me) knew what was up, and turned around and went home. Kailyn cried, she bawled, and huffed and sobbed. I kept working straight faced. I'm not really that mean though, I wanted to cry too. Actually I wanted to cry, take her to get some ice cream, and a toy, and a new outfit. I know! I'm sick! I kept up my work though. Then, I started the lecture, you know the one. There are kids in this world that only have the clothes on their backs, yadda yadda yadda. I then explained she only needed
1 mattress (no bed)
1 blanket
1 pillow
3 shirts
2 pairs of pants
1 pair of shoes (I'm pretty sure her heart stopped beating when I said this)
1 coat
After that, I got heartless and made her pick out what she wanted.
She had to pick out which she wanted, and say bye bye to the rest. I told her the TV was gone, DVD player, outta there, she wouldn't need her dresser anymore, and she didn't need her bunk bed either. None of it. I figured she could keep her room clean now. I then made her go get more trash bags for me. I told her I wasn't throwing it away, but I was going to give them to other children who didn't have as much.
That is when my heart melted. She stopped crying, went and got the bags, and began to help. She would pick up a toy and place it in the bag and say "I bet a little girl could really love this toy as much as I did. It would make her happy." she had different things to say about each toy or book, but it was like a dagger in my heart each time. Wow, I was too mean for my own good. So I made her a deal. She saw all of these bags filled up (13 to be exact) and there was still a mess in her room. I told her she could clean her own room. She could empty out these bags and pick what went into them, but I wanted all of these bags filled up when she was done. I then explained that even with these bags full, she still had a mess in her room, and her toy chest was still full. So she went to work. This has been going on for a few days, and she only has 7 bags filled up, but I'm making her finish it dangit! I can't loose credibility now, she's not even a teenager yet. Oh, and I bought her a new dress yesterday. :(

4 comments:

Cindi said...

yeah this is something that needs to be done to Clayton, he has no concept of how fortunate he is. loved the story. :)

Amy said...

oh yes, I love this story. I just had a simliar experience with Lydia today. We ended up with two big boxes of stuff. Im so sick of the stuff!Makes me want to send them to africa to see how the other half of the world lives!

Laura said...

So are you sending the extra stuff to needy kids or what?

smbwallace said...

LOL probably wasn't funny at the time but I'm almost crying laughing reading this story. Probably because we do this from time to time. The first time my kids were kind of horrified but quickly got in the groove and were so excited to help me separate the "trash," "give away," and "keep" piles/bags. Now they are happy to say I can take so-and-so to Goodwill or Freecycle it.

Mine get the "you're so fortunate" lecture probably every day. At least every other day. We don't have a lot of "things" but they have everything they need and parents who care about whether or not they have what they need. So blessed!