tell me about the time you threw away all your children's toys

photo: jetheriot

WHEN I WAS A KID I loved toys. I played with action figures until I was in the ninth grade. I loved moving their arms and their legs around and coming up with all these stories. In my mind, they all had personalities. And they all had their place in the hierarchy of my toy box. I took really good care of them, knowing that I’d give them to my own kids one day: vintage Matchbox cars from the 60s, action figures, cool stuff like that.
     After my brain injury I went way overboard. I was always buying toys for my kids. My son loved dinosaurs, and I’d buy him these really nice plastic dinosaurs, maybe ten or twelve dollars a piece. He probably had a couple hundred. He loved them. He had bins and bins of dinosaurs, and he played with them all the time.

     One day I got bent out of shape over who knows what. Maybe it was because they’d left toys everywhere again. Maybe it was because they kept fighting over the toys. Something like that. And I just got fed up. I went off. I grabbed a garbage bag and put all these beautiful dinosaurs, all my old toys and anything I could find in it. I emptied the shelves and put all the toys in the garbage bag.

     Then I put the garbage bag in the garbage can and took it outside. I even made sure to do it just as the garbage man was coming so that my oldest son wouldn’t have a chance to get them out of the trash. It was so screwed up. When the garbage truck came and took the trash away, I was so satisfied that they’d never have those toys again.

     Looking back, I can't believe I would do such a thing. Boy, do I regret it now. I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.