The Art of Gift Giving

March is a huge birthday month in our family with a total of 6 birthdays being celebrated before the month's end.  It makes sense, I suppose, that gift giving has been on my mind a lot lately.  I wrote this post over a year ago about some Christmas gifts I had received that made me wonder how the gift givers saw me.  Now, as the gift giver, I wonder how the gift recipients see me when they receive my gifts.

I like to think BIG when I think of gift wrapping.  I perused way too many issues of Martha Stewart living to be content to just throw on some paper, tape it up, and call it done.  I like to choose beautiful, unique paper, preferably from places like The Container Store or Ikea or the like that sell papers not necessarily seen everyday.  I like to add wired ribbon, perhaps some leaves, pinecones, or twigs from nature, maybe raffia...yeah...I feel a theme developing here!  I'll wrap all the gifts in plain brown paper that I'll stamp with leaves from a stamp I make myself by gathering the last few leaves left on the ground and then carving them into a potato to make my own stamp and then I'll gently clean those leaves and use them as a pattern to make felted leaves that I'll attach to the package with raffia that I have recycled from a wreath I made 5 years ago!

Needless to say, my gifts always arrive late.

Can you say "pressure?"  When you tear hand-stamped-with-a-carved-potato paper off a gift you are bound to be either a) disappointed that the giver spent more time thinking about the potato carving than the gift; or b) not even aware that the paper was stamped (though you do notice a slight potato-y smell...) and thinking that the giver sure spent a long time sticking junk from the yard on a package that just contains a gift card!

Did I mention that I am not an inspired gift giver?

My mom's birthday is tomorrow.  I haven't sent her a gift yet.  I haven't even purchased a gift for her yet.  I have thought about her gift.  I've thought about little else for the past week.  Last year's gift went over like a lead balloon.  It wasn't the gift my mom wanted.  What she really wanted was a gift card to Olive Garden.  I gave her what I wanted her to have, not what she wanted to receive.  This year my mom really just wants a gift card to JCPenney.  Why do I hesitate?  It's not hard to send a gift card!  I'll admit it feels a little meaningless to me but then again, I'm the giver, not the receiver.  It's not about me.  Do I make the potato-stamped paper for the gift recipient?  Or for myself?  Ahhh, narcissism and gift giving make strange bedfellows, yes?

I better go.  I have to get to JCPenney.  And then to the post office.

Do you have any gift giving/receiving stories to share?  I'd love to hear about the worst gifts you received or better yet, sent!

Letter to my Mom

Today is my mom's birthday. I am going to do the gift-giving a little differently this year: this year I am giving my mom the gifts of gratitude, acceptance, acknowledgement and love. I have held back on one or more of these gifts for the past 30 years, I think it's time. Here is the letter I sent to my mom:

Dear Mom,

This year for your birthday I am giving you four gifts: gratitude, acceptance, acknowledgement, and love. I hope they fit. I hope you like them. I hope you already have them. I hope you can always use more. I have spent plenty of time telling you the things you did wrong the last 39 years, now I want to tell you what you did right.

Gratitude

Thank you Mom for my childhood. Thank you for surprising me with a canopy bed and matching dresser. Thank you for attending all my band concerts and soccer games. Thank you for staying home with me during my 100+ bouts of strep throat. Thank you for taking me on emergency "Mom! I don't have anything to wear tomorrow!" shopping trips. Thank you for my adulthood. Thank you for buying my first set of dishes and towels. Thank you for buying my wedding dress. Thank you for attending my wedding and giving me away. Thank you for believing in me when I said I wanted to go to law school, medical school, be a computer programmer, a personal trainer, a teacher, and now a writer. Thank you for ooohing-and-aaaahhhing over my new house(s). Thank you for baking chocolate chip cookies for me when my daughter was born. Thank you for helping me leave the house in Cincinnati and move forward to Toledo. Thank you for not breaking down when I told you about the brain tumor. Thank you for staying up all night, every night, with me in the NICU after my brain surgery. Thank you for not looking away from my scarred, shaved head. Thank you for introducing me to Louise Hay and Wayne Dyer. Thank you for imbuing me with a deep spirituality that transcends Catholicism or any organized religion. Thank you for sharing your love of nature and Mother Earth. Thank you for introducing me to Karen Drukker's music. Thank you for giving me my first Janet Evanovich books. Thank you for understanding when we moved to Massachusetts. Thank you for being my mom.

Acceptance

I accept you Mom, exactly as you are. What ever relationships you have, with whomever you choose, for however long they last, they are fine by me. I accept your parenting. I accept your friendship. I accept your grandparenting. (I'll even accept your chocolate chip cookies, if you're offering them, though that is really another letter...).

Acknowledgement

Your parenting, your personality, your genes, and your spirituality have helped to shape me into the person I am today and will be tomorrow. It is from you that I inherited my spirituality, my love of laughter, my silliness, my ability to budget, my sense of responsibility and work ethic, and my appreciation for fine chocolate. (You also contributed to my unibrow, but again, that's another letter...).

Love

I love you Mom. Happy Birthday!

Reconnecting

Recently I reconnected with my best friend from high school and all through my young adulthood, Cathy. As Cathy and I caught up on each other's lives during the past decade, I felt great talking with someone who knew me when, but a lot uncomfortable when she was asking questions about my relationship with my mom. It was when Cathy said "you're still having problems with your mom?" that I realized how long it has been since Mom and I have been totally sanguine with each other.

Like many teens, I had issues with figuring out where my childhood ended and my adulthood began. After my parents divorced and my mom went back to school I took over much of the household duties for my younger two sibs. This "playing house" gave me a really inflated sense of myself as an adult. I justified that if I was taking on adult responsibilities (like cooking dinner and helping my younger sibs with homework), then I should be allowed adult privileges (like not having a curfew or wearing whatever I wanted). With my dad temporarily out of the picture, I resented any parenting by my mom as interference. Unfortunately, as I was only 16, my maturity hadn't caught up with my ego and I was still naive enough to believe that my mom knew everything that was going on in my life (especially with boys and dating) and that her silence was acceptance. By the time I matured enough to realize that my mom had been oblivious to much of my teen-hood due to her preoccupation with her own personal life, I was married and had a child. Add to the mix that no one in either of our families ever thought Steve and my marriage would last (18 years and counting) and that my mom has very little relationship with my daughter (20% geography, 40% her, 40% me) and you have the perfect recipe for a mother and daughter that really don't know each other very well.

I'm not entirely sure how to go about reconciling this situation, especially with an 800 mile distance between us, but I know that it is time. I think I'll start the way I started when I reconciled my relationship with my dad: with a letter. I sent Dad a letter thanking him for all the things he did right in my childhood. I'm going to think about that letter and I'll blog it tomorrow.

I am grateful for reconnecting with Cathy. She has brought more dimension to my life because she is able to look at the 15 -year -old me she once knew and see what's changed and what hasn't.

I've certainly grown older, it seems to me like it's time to grow up.