When All Your Good Intentions are a Bust

I hear them talking, but I don’t pay much attention.

“If you’re going to do it, do it right,” Noah says. “Let me get the scissors.”

It’s only when I see them sitting on Rowan’s bedroom floor with the plastic Batman castle between them that I realize what’s going on. They’ve decided they don’t want the toy castle anymore, so they are destroying it, clipping the strings of the drawbridge and cracking apart the plastic pieces on the hardwood floor while they giggle.

I stop short in the hallway between the bathroom and the bedroom. “What are you doing?” I pause. “Please don’t tell me you are intentionally destroying that toy.”

My voice rises. “Seriously. What are you doing?”

Noah freezes with the scissors still in his hand. “Well, we decided it was babyish,” he says, gesturing to the castle. “We don’t want the castle anymore, so we’re…” His voice trails.

“So you’re destroying it? Your solution because you don’t want it anymore is to ruin it?” I am yelling now, hands on hips. Flames jet from my eyeballs. Smoke billows from my nostrils.

“Did it ever cross your mind that another kid might like it? That another kid who has nothing might want the castle? Did it ever occur to you, ever?”

Noah and Rowan howl as I pack up not only the castle, but the Nerf gun, the Hot Wheels Shark Bite Bay play set and the Bakugan Maxus Dragonoid. I haul the toys down the stairs, open the back of the minivan and shove them inside.

“What are you doing? No, no, we weren’t destroying everything, just the castle!” the boys protest. But I can’t help it. I’ve completely lost control. I am so angry, so disgusted by the rampant ingratitude and disrespect, I simply can’t stop raving.

With each trip downstairs – and I make several, a toy in hand each time – I rant louder: “What’s wrong with you people? Haven’t you learned anything?” And this, I remember, just days after I write about cultivating gratitude over at my friend Jamie’s place. The irony kills me. "What a bunch of baloney." I think to myself. "I am a total failure, a complete hypocrite."

In the end, Brad comes home from work to find me maniacal and the kids bawling upstairs. He talks quietly to the boys while I deep-breathe face-down on my bed. Later I apologize to the boys for my over-the-top reaction, and Brad has each of them count out $7 from their savings. They will purchase a toy with their own money and donate it to a charity in town.

They seem contrite.

I retrieve some of the toys from the mini-van and haul them back upstairs to their bedrooms. But deep down I am still mad. Or perhaps just simply sad.


Does it feel sometimes like cultivating gratitude in your family is two steps forward, one step back? How do you handle what seems like a giant step back?