Gifts from the Heart

 

 I look at my grandchildren (and if I am honest, my own children when I look back) and see that they are inundated with presents for their birthdays and Christmas. As kids, our birthdays were marked by a home-made cake and only ever one small gift, almost always either a book or clothes, and a minimum of fuss.  Christmas was full of expectation and gratitude for the small pillow-case of gifts from Santa. I don’t remember too many of them but can recall the year I got a celluloid doll, dressed in exactly the same outfit as the new one Mum had just made for me. I thought Santa was so clever. I also got a little dustpan and brush, a book and a couple of balloons. I thought all my Christmases had come at once.

As an adult, I don’t expect gifts. The arrangement with my family is that we make the children the focus of events and exchange only token presents among the adults. So, when there is a gift with a special meaning, it resonates deeply. Three stand out for me. One was what I’d consider a physical gift. I had always loved chiming clocks. My parents had one and my grandparents’ grandfather clock was a favourite childhood memory. For one Christmas my three children gave me a beautiful clock which hangs in my bedroom – with the pendulum detached because it ticks too loudly!

While I was still married, I studied under very difficult circumstances with a husband who made it as hard as possible. Somehow, he always had accounts for me to send out urgently just when I had exams and he came home for lunch when I was busy with an assignment. Eventually I got into the habit of getting up to study when he went to sleep at night – partly leading to my life-long poor sleeping habits! I didn’t attend my graduation ceremony and, when my degree certificate arrived in the mail, I tossed it unopened onto the top of the fridge. For my 50^th birthday, my kids had it framed, along with another couple of certificates I had earned along the way. Unexpected and so valued!

Most recently I received a gift that I will cherish forever – a birth certificate. My second child, a daughter called Margaret, was stillborn. As was the custom in those days, she was taken away from me as soon as she was born. I didn’t get to nurse her or even look at her. I know she was baptised because a nurse asked if I wanted that. My husband was all business. Even before she was born, he had arranged for her burial. It was probably his way of coping, but it was yet another wedge between us. I didn’t see his grief as I was consumed by my own for years. I had never sought out where she was buried and had never got a copy of her birth and death certificate. I don’t know if he did. Every time I travelled to Western Australia, I intended to follow up but I never did. For Mother’s Day this year, my daughter Krista sent away for her sister’s birth certificate in the year she would have turned 50. It is framed and hanging where she belongs in my bedroom among photos of my children and grandchildren.