All of us seek the company of people who will understand our essence and still love us.  We walk in varying degrees of fear that anyone seeing the truth about us will laugh in derision or hurl in disgust.  I am no different.

For Christmas last year, my son heckled me until I gave him a list of an assortment of gifts that  I really wanted.  A small knife, curved, light-weight, perfectly suited for my spastic hands.  A pair of soft bedroom slippers such as he used to purchase for me in his boyhood. I forget what else; a list of five or six came tripping off my tongue.   You know the type of things:  We won’t purchase them for ourselves.  When they wear out, when we cannot use them any longer because they have broken or stand in tatters, we secretly hope that someone will walk through the living room, notice the problem, and silently replace them.

Here no one walks through the living room; here no one sees.  My son came to Kansas City a few days ahead of Christmas and asked, What do you want for Christmas?  I shrugged.  I demurred.  But he insisted, so finally I told him.

It’s not that I cannot afford to buy a paring knife or bedroom slippers.  Of course I can.  Even if I have frantically put myself on a budget for a week or two, I could acquire those objects.  But who buys things for themselves without feeling guilty?  Someone might but not me.  Besides, what’s the point?  So i can open the package and squeal, You shouldn’t have, into the empty air of a loveless living room?  No, better to go without than have the stark reminder that without asking, without that out-of-town, grown son arriving on my threshold, no one would think of these small requirements.

So I padded around the house in an old pair of socks until that happy chance, and now, six months later, I still slip my feet into the lovely pair which Patrick gave me.    The exact kind I wanted, in a color which perhaps quite by coincidence, matches my favorite robe.

And someone got them for me, someone who wanted to do something sweet and nice, and who knew that it doesn’t have to be a large thing, or a life-long boon, or a grand gesture.  Just the perfect exact thing, and done not for any personal gain but just because I will be pleased.

Pleased:  Despite my deficiencies, despite my failures, despite my struggles, despite my grumpiness and my days on end of being physically incapable of speaking due to overwhelming sadness.  Despite the fact that I gave so little to my son during his childhood that I cannot understand why he does not resent me.  We have no wealth. He grew up without his cousins, without a father, with a mother who got sick all the time and never managed to earn to her potential.  How can he even want to do anything but run away from me?  And yet he does.  Not only does he continue to honor me as his mother, but he strives to find the  kindnesses which make me happy and do them at every chance.

Isn’t that what it’s all about, in the end?  Just this:  Human beings doing for other human beings; and getting it right.  Not buying an expensive gift to make the giver look generous, but searching  for the  ten dollar pair of bedroom slippers from Target, because the recipient wants them.

Our sons, our daughters, our wives, our husbands, our lovers, our boyfriends, our girlfriends, our mothers, our fathers.  Each of them waits in a state of eternal imperfection, for the moment when you reach out and do the one simple act which will calm their fears and ease their eternal fear of inadequacy and abandonment.  That’s all it takes.  Just that.  Nothing more.

It’s the third day of the thirty-first month of My [Never-ending] Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.