In the first week of January, I receive a package in the mail. It’s from my mother, and my stomach twists when I pick up the hand-sized bubble parcel.
As is our custom, I video call her to open it. She is visibly nervous, which only confirms my suspicions about the belated Christmas gift.
I’ve always had a problem wearing jewelry. That is, I don’t wear it. Any piece, even if I bought it myself, fully enamored with it and filled with ambitions to change my ways, only lasts a few weeks at most before it’s finally set down and forgotten or relegated to the “special occasions” box.
As with anything about me, this isn’t entirely true. I have seven piercings, each with a semi-permanent, plain, black or steel installation. But when it comes to other common adornment locations—my neck, wrists, fingers, even ankles—they’re unoccupied more often than not. That hasn’t stopped my mother; the piercings give her hope.
I pull the palm-sized box out of the mailer, and she immediately launches into her explanation. It’s more or less the same explanation as always.
About every other year since I moved out at 17, I’ve gotten something like this: girly necklaces, elegant rings, and delicate anklets, all in bids for me to keep something sentimental on my body. She’s desperate to have this connection with me—something matching, something meaningful. I refused to get a matching tattoo of a stock image raven with her.
This year, she says again that she knows I don’t really wear jewelry, but she thinks this one is more my style. I suppose she’s right. It’s more androgynous and rugged than the last attempt, being a thin, braided black rope with an unassuming brushed silver and glass pendant. When I slide it on next to my watch, a thing I don’t really like to wear either, but need for practical reasons, it doesn’t look a bit out of place. In the pendant is a tiny photo; If I look through it just right (“or use your phone’s camera!” encourages the tiny card in the box), I can see a tiny picture of her and me inside. Well-practiced at it by now, I hold back a grimace. I don’t like that picture of us, and I don’t like the bracelet.
I do what I do every year this happens. Before we hang up, I thank her and I tell her I’ll wear it. Maybe this time I mean it. I’m 1,500 miles and an ocean away and she hasn’t managed to get past her anxiety onto a plane since I was in high school. I know where the desperation for connection is coming from.
Safe from the camera, I look at the shipping price printed by the post office larger than my address on the package. I’m back in school and unemployed. The shipping alone could have covered a week of groceries. Three months ago, everyone asked me what I wanted as a gift. I told her the same as I told everyone else: I just need cash right now. The grandmother I still talk to sent me money and wool socks. Even my father, notorious for insisting on unwanted gifts that demonstrate no understanding of his kids’ actual interests, sent me what I’d asked for along with my favorite candy. But my mother? My mother sent me the same gift I’ve never wanted any of the times she’s tried, no matter what it looked like.
In some squirmy part of my brain, someone points out that it’s a little different this year. For the first time, she can’t get in the car and stubbornly drive herself and her dog hundreds of miles to come see me on holidays. In some sharp, irritated part of my mind, something points out that this should make it easier not to wear her familiar present. She’d never be able to know.
Despite that logic, I wear it. I’ve been wearing it. The stupid, expensive thing. I hope it breaks. I hope I lose it in the frigid sea. I hope it snaps on a summer hike when I’m arm-deep in a berry bush. If she’s lucky, it’ll break but I won’t lose it and I’ll throw it in the keepsake box. If she’s not, it’ll be another piece of sentimental litter somewhere. Either way, she’ll buy me another one, and then I won’t want to wear that one. But maybe, by then, I’ll have a new excuse not to.
R.R. Blackwood isn’t sure they exist in the real world, and they’re not sure they know how to write anything but research papers. That doesn’t keep them from trying, in desperate defiance of the STEM-centric world they’ve ended up in. Their personal writing was published once, when some adults were impressed by the poetic capacity of a child, but hadn’t dared to try again until they’d grown some skin that could take a few rejections without breaking out in hives. They have a potted plant collection, a caffeine addiction, and a hard-won, white-knuckle optimism about the future.
Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.
Recommended reading about possessions:
“The Photo That Changed Me” by Melissa Tripp
“In case of fire, pack a life.” by Tiffany Han
“Please Pick Up, We Found Your Scathing Letter” by MaryJane, My Sandwich, My Choice
“I was one vintage Alfa Romeo away from being a completely different person” by Borderline Obsessing
“Why You Still Have Nothing To Wear.” by Jade Fox, Consider This
“How many different places have you called home?” by Jen Doll, Settling
“I found a stranger’s journal. Its contents changed me.” by Liz McCaffery, The Boston Globe
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Thank you so much for including my backpack story in your list of recommendations! I also had a complicated relationship with my mother and her gift-giving. She once made me a “dancing dress“ that was so far from anything I would ever have worn that I refused to even try it on. I saw how much that hurt her. It’s kind of you to wear the bracelet.
Isn't it strange how some people may ask what we'd like for Christmas, a birthday, ignore our response, then offer something we don't want, like, or need?
One Christmas my mother gave me towels! I was incensed, which of course, masked the deep hurt I felt. It seems so unfair that our own mothers don't attempt to know us better.....