The love of a child is the best gift of all

The Boston Herald

She hasn't called me Mimi yet, but she's close. I can tell. I say, MiMiMiMi - I sing-song it, actually, and she furrows her little forehead and studies my pursed lips with Alexander Fleming-like concentration (Hmm. What's that in my petri dish?) And I know, I am positive, that she is silently practicing the words she soon will speak aloud: Mimi. My Mimi.

Her whole face lights up when I walk into her house, and she flaps her arms and kicks her legs, her body too small to contain all her joy. Some days I think she is going to take flight and whirl her way out of her bouncy seat right through the ceiling, straight into space. ``Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground.'' That's my little Lucy.

I've been a mother for 34 years but a grandmother for only 10 months. People told me, ``Wait. You'll see. It's the best.'' And I thought, they're wrong. Nothing could come close to being a mom. My son was 4 when I knew for certain that I had the best job in the world. He bought me a ``diamond'' ring at a church fair. It wasn't Mother's Day. It was just a regular Saturday in November. His grandmother had taken him to the fair and had, no doubt, given him a dollar or two to buy whatever he ate that day, because he told me that he had spent all of his nickels and dimes on a gift for me. His grandmother tried to talk him into saving the ring for Christmas. ``We'll get a nice box and wrap it up and tie it with a bow,'' she said.

But he couldn't wait. He raced into the house and thrust a thin paper bag at me, the kind they used to have at the 5-and-10. And he said, as serious as a suitor, ``Mom, I bought this for you.''

I have that ring still. I put it on sometimes. It's big on my finger. It always was. I used to put tape on the back so it wouldn't slip off. I can see my son as he was that day, so serious and surer than he would ever be about anything again. His eyes told me he thought I was perfect. And that he had found for the perfect mom the perfect ring.

No, being a Mimi could never compare with this.

And then Lucy was born. And then, last month, came Adam. Children give gifts. Flowers picked from a neighbor's yard. The shape of their hands in plaster. Cards signed in crayon. Toast in bed. Bugs in a jar. A ring from a church fair. But the biggest gift is the love that they're born with that spills out of them and onto and into whoever is near them.

Why did it take me so long to learn this? I was certain that part of my life was over. The holding and burping and singing to and rocking. The carrying and cuddling. Pushing a carriage and stopping every few steps to point at and name things: tree, rock, flower, bird. Pushing a carriage and stopping every few steps simply to stare at the child inside. Who knew this could happen again?

All you have to do is love a child and the child loves back. It's that simple. The first thing Lucy ever did - even before she smiled on a regular basis - was pat us, all of us who held her. Because all of us who held her had been soothing and patting her for months. You don't have to be a mother or a grandmother to do this, to love and be loved by a child. Lucy squeals when she sees me not because I'm her Mimi. What's a Mimi but a name she doesn't quite understand, that she can't say yet ( but she's getting close!) She squeals because I love her and she knows it. Love is like this. It imitates. It spreads. And it grows.