Crying When a Dish Breaks

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This'll be somewhat of an unusual thread. It's about something I used to do while growing up, and want to find out how common it is among aspie kids. So whether your kids used to do this, still do this, or you simply have some insight, please share.

When I was a child, I always used to cry when a dish broke. It didn't have to be one of the dishes I usually eat out of. It could be from a special occasion set, or even an everyday set. Whenever a plate, a cup, or a glass broke, I'd always cry my eyes out. My parents would immediately scoop up the broken pieces and throw them out like garbage (as most NTs would). That's when I'd burst into tears. Yelling or spanking never stopped me. I'd be in deep depression for the rest of the day, and cry myself to sleep that night. And then I'd actually grieve over the broken dish for days, if not weeks. You know, go through the 5-stage grieving process, with the "depression" part being the longest. There was no "denial" to speak of, outward "anger" got me in trouble, and "bargaining" (to glue it back together) fell on deaf ears.

The worst instance happened when my parents hosted a dinner party. They owned a beautiful coffee service set; it had 12 coffee cup and saucers, each pair with their own pattern. One of the coffee cups tumbled off a tray while being carried, fell on the floor, and broke. All guests shouted "mazel tov!" My parents scooped up the broken pieces and threw them in the trash. I started crying my eyes out. And all the adults immediately started LAUGHING at me; in unison, no less! To add insult to the injury, I got in trouble with my parents for not laughing along with everybody else. That's when I started to view all adults as heartless bastards not to be trusted.

Then, when I was in college, it happened again; I lived at home with my parents back then. Contrary to their character, they were out really late (at a theatre play, I think), and I was at home studying for an exam. I was making a sandwich, when I accidentally elbowed a plate off a counter and broke it. So guess what I did! I took the pieces, and buried them in the backyard, in an area where my parents never dig. It's been some time since I moved out of their home, but the broken plate is still buried in their backyard somewhere. I can only imagine the archaeologists' reaction in year 3015.

To lighten the mood a little, the one time I laughed when something broke, was when a toilet broke. No, not stopped flushing; broke into pieces. I was at one of my parents' friends' home, and someone dropped a brick or some other heavy object into the toilet bowl. Everyone came running. Something about the sight of a broken toilet, looking all weird and unrecognizable, made me burst into uproarious laughter, enough for me get short of breath and make one person hand me a paper bag. My parents, who remembered the coffee cup incident, had no idea why my reactions were so different. (Although I kind of do; I had chronic constipation, so a toilet had an enemy-like status in my mind.)

But back to the serious note. Is it common among aspie children to cry when a dish breaks?

Is it just dishes? Or when anything breaks?
I think this kind of thing might be common. My son gets extremely, almost inconsolably, upset when something breaks beyond repair or gets lost, is ruined etc. It's really one of a small handful of things that really sets him off.

And my husband says he was the EXACT same way when he was a young kid too. He has explained it to me because I sometimes find it hard to understand and so frustrating when it happens. He said it was especially upsetting when it is something he had done as opposed to something that just happened or something someone else did. He just couldn't stand the fact that it was something he had done that couldn't be undone or fixed. For my son, it doesn't matter how it happened, it's just unbearable.

It's a frequent cause of extreme anxiety and stress not just for him but all of us in the family. Chalk cracks into two pieces- catastrophe. I think of it as two pieces of chalk now, but not my boy. Drawing a picture with markers and can't erase a mistake-the world is ending. (This is why he likes the chalk board) He is eating blueberries and one rolls away and cannot be found- disaster. He can't have anything in the backseat, because if he drops it and cannot retrieve it and I can't get it because I'm driving, things can get dangerous from the resulting freakout. When my son gets attached to something we go right back to the store and buy another one while they still have it just in case. It must be 10 times a day things like this occur.

We managed early on to clap and act happy whenever a balloon popped, also so he wouldn't be scared of the sound, and that seemed to work- now he doesn't usually freak out and actually likes to pop balloons. He still will sometimes gather the pieces and ask us to blow it up again. I mostly deal by trying to avoid situations that might bring this kind of thing about and toys that will break etc. It's hard.

I try to understand it best I can. It can drive me nuts when something is installed or hung crookedly. Big things that can't be fixed or would be expensive or extremely inconvenient to fix can get me down for a while. Those kind of things would mildly upset me whenever I noticed or thought of them. Or a big incident when I had made a mistake I couldn't undo, when I think about those things I can be upset. But not upset to the same degree experienced by my son or what my husband describes.

I think this is something some kids do, autistic or not. My NT daughter gets upset whenever anything gets broken, and tries to suggest all kinds of ways we might fix/reuse it. She also hates to throw things away or get rid of old toys. I have to secretly clean out her room when she's not around; the good news is that she's never once noticed anything is missing afterward. I also have to hide some kinds of trash under other trash, as she will sometimes take things out and tell me she wants to keep them (a broken balloon, her brother's school papers, etc.).
Sometimes I worry she'll be on an episode of Hoarders someday.

When I was a child I used to believe that every inanimate object possessed a soul and had feelings, so when something broke it didn't just break, it was INJURED and hurting! It wasn't just thrown away and forgotten, we sent it away TO LIVE IN THE DUMP! Where it would DIE! For this reason it felt like an actual tragedy.

Eventually I mostly got over this feeling, except for dolls and stuffed animals, which still make me feel this way because they have faces and eyes, and which I still refuse to have in my house because I can't stand to make them feel sad and abandoned.

It's specifically dishes, doesn't matter if it's special occasion or everyday. Small appliances, clocks, electronics, I don't care about. I can throw those away with no sadness whatsoever. Toys were their special case, and they were something I was willing to kill or die to protect. And you heard (read) about my reaction when a toilet got smashed with a brick. I thought the sight of a smashed toilet was the funniest thing in the world.

What made me despise all adults after the coffee cup incident was the laughter. I never felt as alone in the world as I did that moment. To add insult to the injury, I had no one to share the grieving with. I don't know what causes me to attach meanings like this to everyday dish sets, enough to actually bury a broken plate, and thinking it sacrilegious to throw it in the garbage. Also, when I found out about a stress relief clinic in Japan, where people pay money to throw dishes against a concrete wall, I had the same reaction to it that the Christian Right have to abortion clinics.

We all have unique triggers. This one is yours. Can you think back to the first time you remember a dish breaking? What else was happening? Understanding the cause helps dealing with it.

Could it be that it is because dishes generally belong in "sets"? For example, a dinner plate, salad plate, cup, and bowl? Maybe it is the realization the set will never be complete again?

I do not cry when dishes break, and I have thrown entire sets away before, but for some reason, I have a set that was given to me by my mother that she deemed useless. It has plates for those fancy little finger sandwiches that people make with matching cups, I suppose for tea. I would never use them. But for some reason, I can't throw them away and one of the cups has the broken handle carefully wrapped and resting in it. No idea why...but it does not feel "right" to throw them away.

My son personifies and names many of our things. He has trouble whenever almost anything is thrown out (old food is okay and product packaging is okay). He doesn't have a specific attachment to dishes. He has asked for more ceremonial buryings of ordinary items.

He's never been nearly as attached/upset as you though. It's always taken him one day or less to get over it.

I think it's more about your attachment to dishes and possibly the mug at the party incident that fully formed your stronghold to the proper care of dishes, when broken.

My son has a particular stuffed animal (though you may not call it a stuffed animal in his presence without witnessing a meltdown) that has been repaired multiple times that would leave a deep scar should something ever happen to it. For him, it's the attachment to the object that causes the response. I am imagining it's the same for dishes with you.

I used to cry when I broke things as a kid, it happened often since I am quite clumsy
I agree with the idea that it causes guilt, and the fact that things are part of a set :3
I still care about my stuffed animals and drawings
I also cannot allow a balloon to pop, because of the sound and also out of protection for the balloon :3
At least I have grown up with a strong sense of justice and care for people in need

P.S. You can borrow cute emojis from DeviantArt with a picture URL

Just wondering, how do you make a signature like most WP members have? :3

InThisTogether hit the nail on the head. It has to do with dishes belonging in sets.

You're a genius! Now that I thought about it, this is pretty much it. Especially with the coffee cup incident; it had 12 matching cup/saucer pairs, each with their own unique pattern vaguely resembling a Persian rug. Very beautiful. And after the breakage, one saucer no longer had a matching cup. But I still can't understand why all guests were laughing at me when I was crying my eyes out. It made me view all adults the same way I'd view a rabid pit bull mangling a kitten.
By contrast, when I break a souvenir beer glass I personally bought or won somewhere, I clean up the shards and throw them away with no problems. I still wonder how my parents would react if they find the buried plate.

The sound of a dish breaking can make me cry from sensory overload, but I don't feel any particular grief for the dish itself.

I think there are three possibilities when it comes to the laughter.

1) The adults were a-holes who were using laughter to comment on how weird you were. While this is a very common reaction in children, it is pretty uncommon in adults - I am guessing this wasn't the case here.

2) The adults were surprised, not sure how to react, and were attempting to diffuse potential embarrassment for your parents and you by laughing. For example, you lock your keys in your car and your friend kind of nudges you, laughs and cracks a joke in an attempt to diffuse your anger and help you find the humor in the situation. In this situation they would not be making fun OF you, but attempting to laugh WITH you, which can go horribly wrong if you aren't able to join in. I am guessing this is most likely.

3) The adults were connecting their own memories of situations where they had a temper tantrum with your situation, and that made them laugh, kind of in commiseration. Adults sometimes laugh when they are confronted with the change between adulthood and childhood - for instance, when an adult laughs at a child's phonetic misspelling, it's not to make fun of them but because they are charmed by the thought process it takes to learn to spell. If they were particularly kindly adults in other ways, this is likely.

Just my thoughts.

I'd say it's #1 all the way. I can't imagine how laughter is supposed to be "commiseration". If I learned nothing else from my young years, it's that people (read: NTs) use laughter as a way of showing superiority, and oftentimes, it's superiority over me. They were probably thinking: "He's a loser for crying over a broken coffee cup!". What clinched it is that some of them kept saying: "Aww, look at how he's crying."

Even now, at age 32, I think laughter is one of the most rotten things in the world, health benefits be damned. I almost never laugh at anything. (Unless I find a cat video on YouTube or get drunk on a cruise; then I laugh so hard, I'm rolling on the floor.) In fact, if I could legislate laughter out of existence, I would. Plus, it'll bring revenue to airlines, with people traveling to Canada and Mexico just to catch a laugh. Hey, people already do it for under-21 drinking and paid sex, due to law differences.

Obviously, I wasn't there, so you may well be right, but I would take the "aww, look at how he's crying" as an indicator they were NOT trying to make fun of you, but that they thought it was kind of sweet that you were upset about the cup, and were remembering how hard it was to be a little child when things don't make sense to you. That would be a phrase kids would use to bullly another kid and to make them feel like a loser.

Adults make huge allowances for the normal developmental gap that exists between them and a child - and they would expect judgement from other adults if they did not. Therefore, when adults do make fun of kids, they do so very pointedly - they would not use an ambiguous phrase and rely on tone of voice to get their meaning across, e.g. "If that were MY kid, I'd give him something to cry about." Google "Kids in adult restaurants" to get a broader idea.

Here's a verbaitm excerpt from a blog post that's a good example: this woman describes what she would like to say to a child and her grandmother “Ma’am, your little Kissylips Fairyface is actually not being the least little bit patient. In fact, if you had a big mixing bowl and added 1 cup of overindulged, 1 cup of coddled, 1 cup of impatient, and a handful of annoying, stirred it up, rolled it out, and put it in a pan, your little Honeybun Adora-belle would be the tasty nugget that popped right out of the pan, and you are doing her a huge disservice in teaching her that what is not at all patient is what you call “patience”. "

Like I said, I wasn't there - I don't know for certain that my interpretation is correct - but generally, the kind of adult who would make fun of a crying kid isn't softening their language at all.

Meh. If they thought it was "sweet" of me to grieve over a broken cup, they wouldn't have cooed over me or laughed at me. They'd help me glue the cup back together (which my parents refused to do), offer to help look for a replacement in stores, or at the minimum, keep their damn mouths shut. But they did none of that. Therefore, I lumped them into the "bully" category.

And of course it's hard being a little kid. "Miserable" was even my first big word.

Last edited by Aspie1 on 30 Jun 2015, 5:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I agree with Momsparky here. In fact, I am guilty myself sometimes and there is no way on God's green earth that I would ever condescend to my children or make fun of them. But sometimes when they get so upset over something that only kids would get so upset over, it's just so...stinking cute. And sometimes it makes me laugh or chuckle, which makes them very mad, but I can't help it. Like the time that my daughter got into a minor fight with her bestie. She was screaming "I will never EVER have another friends AS LONG AS I LIVE! NEVER! NEVER! It is OVER for me!" Of course, I felt bad about her pain, but the intensity of her feelings and the total abandon with which she threw herself into feeling them was...well....cute. And I chuckled. Not to tease or or because I thought her pain was funny or because I felt superior to her, but because I remembered when I was a kid and every little thing seemed like the end of the world. And because she was so cute. There is an innocence to things like that (crying over a broken cup, thinking your world has ended because you got into one fight) that strikes a chord with many adults. And I think when that chord is struck, especially when the reaction is an OVER reaction, it makes adults laugh. With no malevolence whatsoever.

I understand it was very upsetting to you. And I understand that you interpreted it the same way that my kids have interpreted it when it has happened to us. But perhaps you can now take on a different perspective because you have additional information that you did not have back then.