The Gifts You Keep - There are Gifts You Treasure Most, Especially as a Mother, and Especially on Mother's Day

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I saved every card. They're in a box under the bed that used to be my daughter Lauren's. I saved even the ones created when my children were so little that they couldn’t yet print and someone — a Sunday School teacher, their grandmother — traced their tiny hand onto a piece of construction paper, then colored it in. 

"Happy Mother’s Day," each child trilled, handing me this first work of art. It happened over a succession of years, three children, the first two born two years apart, the third five years later, all of them young for so long that I believed they would stay young forever.

They were always pleased with their accomplishments. See what I made? See how clever I am? — joy and pride and a kind of invincibility visible in their eyes.

"I LOVE YOU, MOMMY," my firstborn wrote in purple crayon on a Mother's Day card when he was in first grade. He signed it, "YOUR SON, ROBERT." I laughed at this later, when he couldn’t see. I laugh at it still. 

His cards were followed by macaroni necklaces and bracelets; a fake diamond ring he bought for 50 cents at a church fair; a lavender sachet bear he chose because he had a crush on the girl who sold it to him; and a June Cleaver-style dress he picked out when he was 15 because he had a crush that year on a girl who worked in a dress shop.

I made him take back the dress. (No problem — he got to see the girl again.) But I kept the sachet for 20 years and I still have the ring.

I look now at the cards and gifts my grandchildren make for their mothers and I yearn a little. Not because their handprints and drawings are so similar to what their parents made for me, but because my grandchildren are as soulful and earnest in their giving, and full of the same pride and love.

On Mother's Day two years ago, Adam and Charlotte gave their mother a jeweled stone that you put in a garden. It's cement and it's octagonal and Charlotte's tiny hand is imprinted on the left and Adam's 4-year-old hand is imprinted on the right. In the center, flanked by turquoise, pink, and blue stones, and stones shaped like stars and hearts, are these words: We love our mom. Adam and Charlotte, 2008.

"We did it all by ourselves," Adam said, my little Picasso, so proud of his creation.  

They gave me a garden stone too — not as ornate, but every bit as perfect.

Noodle necklaces. Handprints. I LOVE YOU in big script. I have cards I wrote to my mother. And she had cards she wrote to hers. All over the world, children write I LOVE YOU, MOM. It's been done and expressed a billion times before.

And yet, particularly on Mother's Day, it feels new every time.