Love in the Clearance Bin
From the beginning, my mother showed love through things. Gifts, to be more precise. The recognition of this only became clear to me in my thirties. It’s not as though, at age 4 or 10 or even 21, I recognized that I could gauge just how much my mother loved me based on what it was that I unwrapped.
Now, really, overall my mom is a good mother. She worked a lot when I was a kid, as a classroom teacher and a Sunday school teacher, and she also went to school herself in the evenings to get her Ph.D. So, sure, she was certainly busy. My dad often traveled for work, so most weeknights it was just my mom, my younger sister, and me.
Our weeks were hectic, filled with school, daycare, religious ed classes, homework, part-time jobs and time with friends. On evenings when my mom wasn’t working or going to school, she would watch three to four hours of recorded ABC soap operas, often dozing off as “General Hospital” glowed before her.
Our family was middle-class. We had a nice house, nice clothes, ate take-out food most nights, and went to camp in the summer. We really didn’t lack anything. Gifts from our parents were given to my sister and me on Chanukah — quite generously, one to two gifts on each of the eight nights. A mix of socks, Barbie doll accessories, calligraphy sets, and hair decorations were the typical fare. It all seemed normal at the time. I had no reason to think there were any ulterior motives.
That is, until I had my own children and my mother became a grandmother.
In the arena of “grandmothering”, my mother excelled at spending money, but often fell short when it came to spending time.
Shortly after my first child was born in 2002, my mother retired from teaching. Not one to cease working completely, she began supervising student teachers for a university. This part-time position, along with occasional substitute teaching gigs, kept her busy, but she still had more free time than she had ever had in her life. Thus, she began to fill the empty hours, and I suspect an emptiness within her, with shopping. Shopping in stores. Shopping online. So. Much. Shopping.
My parents would often come for dinner on Sundays, to see their grandkids (and my husband and me, I suppose). I can’t recall a time when my mother didn’t come through our front door holding plastic shopping bags, a cardboard box, a container of some sort, all of which held goodies and gifts for the children. Clothing, toys, sweets, and more. Most of it purchased on sale, all of it unnecessary.
My children’s birthdays were celebrated with multiple gifts — toys, clothing, books and more. For my son’s first birthday (along with several other gifts), he was presented with a shiny, black Harley-Davidson tricycle, complete with leather trim and a tiny license plate bearing his name. The child had not even begun to walk, yet my mother felt that this monstrous riding toy was the crown jewel among his toys. “He’ll grow into it,” she assured me.
Chanukah was beyond any measure of sane gift-giving; the children, already being swallowed up by shredded gift wrap, were given gift after gift after gift, their capacity for gratitude lost among their clamor for more, more, more. It seemed endless. Halloween and Valentine’s Day brought candy and toys, and as the kids got older, envelopes bearing cash. To this day, although all the kids are now teenagers, my mother never arrives to visit them without candy (“I know they like it!”), sets of books purchased on eBay (“I so enjoyed these when I was their age!”) and various other items (“They were so cheap, how could I NOT buy them?”). It reached a point where the minute one of the children sensed they “needed” (ahem, wanted) something, their first instinct was to “ask Grandma”.
Certainly, my mother was very generous with my children. I often wished that she and my father would take the kids to the zoo or to a museum — anywhere so that they would give the kids the gift of time spent together, instead of more “stuff”. My parents would have the kids for sleepovers here and there, or my mom would come to stay with the kids so that my husband and I could have a weekend getaway. More often than not, though, we would inevitably get a phone call during the trip or a dissertation following the sleepover, informing us of something that hadn’t gone well. It eventually became easier to not go away and I settled uneasily into accepting that my mother preferred showering the children with things, rather than time.
Now, allow me to put a pin in this gifting bonanza for just a moment, so that I can explain another piece of this story.
My sister, six years younger than me, had a fairly normal (and really, a very permissive) upbringing. Around the time she went to college, she changed from generally happy and social to an angry, anxious, withdrawn person. She dropped out of college after just a couple of months and came to live at home with my parents, while attending a local junior college. Her social circle shrank immensely, until she was really only hanging out with parents and one of our aunts. Upon graduating from the junior college with her Associate’s degree, she quickly determined that she hated everything she had studied and was not going to work in the field in which she had spent the past two years studying.
This shocking announcement was met with understanding and coddling from my parents, who had been supporting my sister during her time at junior college, walking on eggshells around her the whole time. She then took a series of temp jobs as she attempted to sort herself out, none of these jobs providing anything but a paycheck. She was miserable, and my parents couldn’t bear that. They continued letting her live at their house, buying everything she needed, and often taking her out for dinner. My sister eventually found a job at a friend’s business and set the goal of getting her degree in business and moving out of my parents’ home.
In a nutshell, she got her business degree, got her own apartment, and worked steadily, but my sister was never happy. She hated her boss, hated the job, hated her neighbors, hated life. She quit the job at the friend’s business and switched to a new job, full of hope that THIS would be the thing to make her happy. It wasn’t, of course. Sure, at first things were good. She moved into a new apartment, met new people at this job, had a great relationship with her boss — until, as usual, she resorted to her default of hating all of it.
It is here where I began to see a disparity in my mother’s gifting. It is here that I began to feel the sting of jealousy and the heaviness of loss. It is here that I began to observe my mother’s constant giving and gifting to my children and to my sister, but not to me.
At first, I let it go; my mom was so generous with my kids that I didn’t feel I had room to ask for anything for myself. After a few years of holidays and birthdays where I watched the mountains of gifts that my children were surrounded with begin to encircle my sister as well, I began to silently wonder if I had done something to upset my mom. I watched as my sister was often taken out to dinner by my parents, taken on vacations by my parents, and finally, watched incredulously as my parents financially supported my sister for almost nine months because she had quit her job in a fit of rage.
In one odd episode that occurred on Mother’s Day, my mom presented both my sister and me with gift boxes. I was unclear as to why she was giving me, the daughter, a gift — but at least I was a mother. My sister was unmarried and had no children. Why on Earth was my mother giving her a Mother’s Day gift? We opened the boxes to find some sort of ceramic tchotchkes, identical in every way, until my sister removed the top of her gift and revealed a wad of cash stuffed inside. My tchotchke was empty.
To be clear, I didn’t need any of the things my mom was gifting to my sister and not to me. I am very fortunate to be able to buy just about everything I need and most of what I want. It was what those gifts meant that I was craving. My mother was unable (or unwilling) to give me her time and that left me searching for any sense that she cared for me as much as my sister or my kids — the recipients of her many things of love. I just couldn’t understand how she could bestow all of this “love” on my sister and not so much on me.
I finally worked up the courage to ask my mom why she gave so much to my sister, but not the same, or even close to the same, to me. She told me that she gave so much to my children, so she didn’t feel she needed to give much to me. She also told me that I had a husband to give me gifts, while my sister had no one.
I suppose that is a logical answer, but it certainly didn’t make me feel any better. I’m pretty sure my mother was not even conscious of how her overly generous gestures toward my sister left me feeling. I had been the steady, smart one, the one who married and had a family, the one who had stayed in school, worked hard just like my mom, the one who was nice to my mom, the one who craved from her what she would only give to my sister.
About a year ago, with the help of a therapist, I was able to reach a quasi-peaceful acceptance of the gifting situation. I am able to see that my mother is hurting and seeks to assuage her pain by shopping. It’s interesting to me that her constant seeking and procurement of things fills the holes inside her, much as I had hoped things from her would fill the holes in me. It still feels slightly hurtful when I hear about something that my mom has sent to my sister, but generally she has also sent that same something to my kids, so at least we are on her radar.
I’ve realized that at her age, she’s not going to change. She’s not able to recognize what I need from her. She’s not able to provide it, really. I make sure to thank her for the gifts she does give to me and to let her know how much it meant that she took the time to shop for me.
Her choice of gifts and the commentary she provides along with them have been getting odder as she gets older. She has started buying me odd kitchen gadgets and grill accessories and trinkets made from old horse shoes, reminding me of the eccentric purchases of sweet old ladies everywhere. Recently, she gifted me with a silk pillowcase. When I thanked her, she told me it was for my wrinkles. I don’t know what to make of that comment. I suppose, whatever her reason for buying me these things, I take comfort in knowing that at least she is thinking of me and, perhaps, she just might even love me.
