Little Gifts

I was raised by two hard-working parents but it was more my mother who formed the way I work on the home front (and yes, Dad, I do know that you make a good stew). It was not unusual for my Mum to shift a load of topsoil or stack a cord of wood in a day and then head inside to sew some curtains, for example. She is not one to sit down for any length of time. Growing up, if my Dad asked, “Where’s your mother?” one of us might answer, “She’s outside painting the grass.”

I was taught from the start that “there’s a place for everything,” that I should “never go empty-handed,” and – most importantly - if I was going to do a job, I should “do it right.” I might have gone the other way, but Mum’s brand of happy diligence was contagious. To keep up with my  whirlwind of a mother, I learned to whirl too. So now I need to paint my own grass. And then I need to clean up after myself.

I occasionally struggle with this obsessive streak. I know that my need for order can get in the way of more important ways to spend my time. I know this and so I struggle. I struggle to let the house be messy so I can lie on the floor with my boys and build a track. True, it sometimes feels like I have built so many tracks and played with so many trains and raced whole fleets of cars and built entire subdivisions of Lego houses that I would just rather clean the windows. Mostly, though, I am hard-wired to be linearly organized: first this must get done so that I can do that. First, the work must get done so that I can play. But there’s always work. And, yes, I do know that the play is more important.

In the midst of one day last week – when I was repainting an old desk in lieu of the grass – Grayson came downstairs and handed me a Lego car he had built. He said, “I made this for you” and there was something in the way he looked at me that made me stop and put the paintbrush down.

My boy is six now. I would like to press pause just to hold him here for a little while. He doesn’t let me leave the house without making sure I hear him say “I love you” and he couldn’t care less who is listening. He will climb up on my lap and cuddle me for minutes on end, his long legs dangling over mine. He reads but likes it better when I read to him. He knows everything and proves it by adding one hundred plus one hundred plus one hundred. He laughs until he’s nearly sick and he tries hard to be good. But he wants to be big and he’s getting there too quickly. I get a shock when I rest my hand on his head and feel how tall he is.

So when Grayson handed me that car, I sat down on our basement floor and took it in both hands. I commented on the colours he used and the little details – a cup in a cup holder, a trunk, a tiny steering wheel – but I wasn’t really looking that closely at this latest Lego creation. I was watching him. He wanted to be sure that I saw the car, that I saw how long it took him to get those details just right, that I was proud of him for building it, that I understood why he had given it to me. This child, with no money of his own and no adult concept of what constitutes a present, was showing me – in the midst of an otherwise ordinary day – that he loves me enough to build me his favourite thing.

How I love these tiny presents from my boys – these gifts that have the capacity to stop this whirling mother with a sudden breath-taking moment of utter gratitude.
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