When Parents Want to Pass Down Furniture You Hate: An Awkward True Story

The Battle of the Secretary started in the spring of 1991 when I was in my 20s.

My mother began the offensive.

“Would you like to have my secretary?” she asked.

She was referring to a desk—a mahogany behemoth that stood for many years in the living room of the house where I grew up. It was 8 feet tall and almost 4 feet wide, and pretty much loomed over our normal-size center-hall brick colonial. In its cubbyholes she kept birthday cards, a mysterious key—my mother loved secret compartments—and an envelope full of our baby teeth. (“The tooth fairy pays me rent to store them,” she claimed.)

I had nothing but good memories of the desk.

“No, thank you,” I said sharply.

Why are parents always trying to foist their old furniture on you? And why are ungrateful children always saying no?

I think it’s because the stuff you own is not just stuff. It tells a story about who you are and what you care about in the world. So of course you don’t want it to end up in a landfill after you die. Or in my mother’s case, when you move to a house on a golf course in Arizona where a fussy, reproduction-Chippendale desk would look out of place.

Another Skirmish, Still No Casualties

Over the years, she broached the subject again. One time, she pointed out (while brandishing a measuring tape) that the desk would fit just fine in my living room.

I shook my head no.

“But it’s a Baker!” she said. Which, in her mind, sealed the deal. After all, the Baker Furniture company, once headquartered in Grand Rapids, Mich., was well known in its 20th-century heyday for meticulously crafted reproductions of historic furniture styles.

“People wanted to fill their homes with things reminiscent of centuries past, and reproductions were respected,” said Jennifer Wcisel, a curator at the Grand Rapids Art Museum, “but at some point, that changed.”

Perhaps the shift occurred in the late 1990s when, genes being destiny, I decided to buy my own massive secretary. At an antiques shop on Long Island I bought a 19th-century Eastlake version, its angular silhouette softened by an authentically bohemian touch: simple carvings of vines and flowers.

Gracious in Defeat

I remember her standing bemused in my living room some months later, assessing the 8-foot-tall mahogany masterpiece: It had scuffed cubbyholes and a cylinder roll-top that tended to get stuck halfway open. Nobody could reach the high bookshelves without a stepstool.

“It’s on wooden casters so you can move it when you vacuum,” I said defensively. As if that thing could ever be shifted so much as an inch without the aid of at least two professional furniture movers.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if you found a secret compartment someday,” she said graciously.

After my mother died, one of my brothers took her desk. I snapped a picture of it because that was easier to store and I didn’t want to forget it. Which is not so weird, I guess. “Children often take photos of parents’ possessions, and keep the digital collections to remember their stories without cluttering their homes with the actual objects,” said Elizabeth Stewart, an appraiser in Santa Barbara, Calif., and author of “No Thanks Mom: The Top Ten Objects Your Children Do Not Want.”

In the end, who won the Battle of the Secretary?

She did, of course. One day I found the same piece she’d wanted to bequeath me online. It was selling for $3,995—more than twice as much as one like mine.