The Year I Finally Got My Mom Right

I spent about twelve years giving my mom gifts she smiled at and then quietly put away somewhere.

She is kind. She said thank you every time. But I knew the difference between a real smile and a polite one and I was getting a lot of polite ones.

The problem, I eventually realized, was that I was shopping for the category mom and not for her specifically. I knew what moms were supposed to want. Candles. Nice lotion. Things with flowers on them. I was buying for a concept.

The year I got it right, I stopped thinking about what to get and started thinking about her.

She grew up in a small town in Ohio that she left at eighteen and never went back to, except in stories. She told the same ones over and over. The diner on the corner. The way the high school smelled in the fall. Her best friend whose family had a pool, which was a big deal in that town in that era. She talked about it the way people talk about a place they loved before they knew they were supposed to be paying attention.

I ordered a framed aerial photograph of that town from the year she graduated high school. It took a little digging. The photo was grainy in that way old aerial photos are, which made it feel more real somehow. You could see the diner. You could see the school.

She stared at it for a long time.

Then she pointed to a street and said that is where my grandmother lived.

We talked about her grandmother for an hour. A woman I had heard of but never really known. A woman my mom had not talked about in years. That photograph opened something.

That is what a great gift does sometimes. It does not just say I was thinking of you. It gives you something to sit with together.