Everyday Randomness

Invasion Of My Privacy

Sometimes I really don’t understand my mother and why she does certain things.  Tonight she really pissed me off.  Actually she really hurt me more than making me angry, yet she just can’t understand why.

When I was younger I decorated a shoe box and called it my memory box.  When my friends wrote me letters that I wanted to keep, I wrote a story, a poem, pictures of me with my friends on a special occasion or anything I wanted to keep I would put it in that box.  It was the box of stuff I knew I wanted to keep to look back on in the future.  It was kind of like my version of a diary with little pieces of my life thrown inside.

I started the box when I was 12, and I added to it all the time.  I added the final piece on my 18th birthday, the birthday card my at the time boyfriend gave me.  I kept the box under my bed, and not once did I consider anyone disrespecting me by invading my privacy.  I thought my box was my one little private corner of my life.  I didn’t have anything in it that I needed to hide anyway.  The juicy stuff was hidden elsewhere, and everyone knew where I kept my memory box.

Apparently my mom didn’t see it that way.

When I moved out I hadn’t looked in the box in about 2 years.   While packing up my things I noticed my box was missing.  I searched high and low for it, but I never found it.  It upset me pretty badly even though I was 20 when it disappeared.

Tonight my mom called me and told me she found my memory box.

Actually she called me and said “Oh, I found something of yours today.  You remember that old box you used to hide your notes in?  I forgot I’d stashed it in the back of my closet.  I thought I had shredded all your old letters, but I guess not, so I read them, and then I shredded what was left.  You’re married now.  You don’t need that old stuff from your old boyfriends.”

WHAT!??

Not only did she find my box that meant so much to me, but she’d actually hidden it from me.   Then she had the nerve to read everything that was in it and destroy it.  Seriously, what the hell was she thinking?

I tried to explain to her that it was wrong on sooo many levels.  It would be one thing to snoop around my room when I was a teenager, but I was a good kid.  I was always as open with her as was possible, but my mom wasn’t always easy to talk to.  She made my life as difficult as possible…she was extremely overprotective (but that’s a story for another day).

I think everyone needs a certain extent of privacy no matter how old you are,  and that box was all I asked for.  If she’d read my letters when I was still considered a child I would have been pissed, but I would have gotten over it.  Waiting until I’m 26 years old, admitting she STOLE my box, and then telling me she read all my private letters is just unacceptable to me.

I could have probably gotten over that, too, but what really hurt me was the fact that she took it upon herself to destroy my memories because she thinks it’s unacceptable to keep them because I’m married!  That’s total bs!

Frankly I don’t think it was any of her business what was in that box, and the right thing to do would have been to tell me she found it and wanted to give it to me.  Then I could have made the decision to do what I chose with it.  I am a full blown adult, and it was my personal property, after all.  No the right thing to do would have been to never take it in the first place.  She didn’t steal it because she had an out of control daughter and needed to find out what I was doing anyway she could.  I was 20 years old when she took my box.

It’s not like my box was full of steamy letters from past loves.  Any letters or items from old boyfriends were sweet little sentiments, a song a guy wrote for me when I was 15, birthday cards, stuff like that…teenage memories…a part of my life I wanted to remember.  There was nothing in that box that would “destroy my marriage”, and even if there had been it should have been MY decision to do with it as I pleased.

I told Hubby about it, and I think it upset him even more than it upset me because he saw how much it hurt me.  He has his own little personal box of stuff.  I’ve never invaded his privacy by reading his personal stuff without his concent, but he has shared most of it with me, but only because he wanted to.  We both agree those memories are a part of our past, and we were just kids then.  Who the hell cares what we chose to keep except for us?  And who the hell gave her the right to destroy MY stuff?

Her point of view?  She still doesn’t see what she did wrong.  She says she was “protecting” me.  How?  By completely destroying things that meant something to me?  I really don’t even know what to say to her at this point.  What she did was completely wrong.