the perfect gift
Mid-morning and they wander out to me, rested and fresh from sleep, blanket lines on their high-boned cheeks. Riley’s brassy hair swings out from her shoulders, lifted by the breeze, as she settles into the chair across from me, carrying her breakfast. “Happy birthday, Mom Jones,” she says, while Zoe gently drops a present on the table in front of me. The paper is buttery and iridescent, the gentle colors of a coastal sky at the end of the day. I saw the package waiting for me inside, but I waited, knowing Zoe would want to watch me open the gift. When she sits in the chair to my left, I reach over to touch her warm face with my fingers. My girls have deepened, and it seems like a surprise to notice in them the height and breadth of such maturing awareness; to realize suddenly that I’m sitting with two young women. I look at Kevin sitting on my other side, and he looks up from a book and smiles, hearing me, though I’ve not spoken. We’ve been sitting this way since breakfast, Kevin and me, drifting in and out of pages, sometimes reading snatches of things to each other out loud, sometimes looking up to watch birds hop at the feeder. Now, with the girls awake and here and Adam wandering to anchor at the door from time to time, it’s become a feast. This is my cake and ice cream, sticky on my chin, melting on my tongue. Side-by-side is my happy, vibrant like the cut blooms on our scarred table; fat and drifting like softly stretched balloons with ribbon tails. Now that my kids have grown into teens, time together has become something we gather and hoard. We feel half-starved, our backs protectively bowed against the scarcity.
Zoe has attached a card to the top of the gift, neatly addressed to me in orchid-purple pen. In place of her own name, she’s written a nickname, something I called her when her face was as round as her stormy eyes; when missing-tooth spaces gaped her smile; when next to me was her favorite. Sometimes, I still use that name, hoping it reminds her how long I’ve loved her. I say it softly, always with a smile. So instead of the nickname, now I read I know, like an open-window phrase as confident as the wind flying wildly over our hands, lifting Riley’s hair, turning the pages of my book. The flap on the envelope slips from my fingers.
May your birthday bloom with sweet surprises, the card says, and I realize that it already has, because I’m sitting here with my people and there’s no hurry, no wish for something more than just to be together. I open Zoe’s letter carefully, imagining my tears splashing over the writing, blurring the neat lines. Doesn’t she know yet that this is really the gift? She’s covered every blank space in her careful hand–what she loves about me, even better, what she knows and trusts about my love for her. I can see her bent over the paper with the pen in her hand, silken hair falling down to hide her eyes. I have memorized the way she tucks her feet under her chair; that expression on her face when she’s thinking, when she’s brave about love. This card, it’s my celebration.
Zoe has spent her own money on a present for me. I slide the card back in the envelope, thinking that love always makes sacrifices. For a moment, I let myself just notice my family—the glint of silver in Kevin’s hair, the comfortable way Riley rests her elbow on the table, the pink bloom in the apples of Zoe’s cheeks. They’ve sacrificed the day for me, setting aside plans and tasks and pressing things just to sit here and love me apart from the rush. It’s not something I asked of them, but it’s a gift I won’t forget, and one that means infinitely more than a table full of packages. And even so, here I sit with a package in my lap, sliding my fingers underneath the creased paper at the end. I lift out a few sweet treasures Zoe has carefully swaddled in tissue: an eye shadow palette and a bag of extra dark chocolate truffles. Immediately she begins to apologize that the palette isn’t bigger, that the truffles didn’t turn out to be as dark a chocolate as she expected. She explains how she thought of me, how she ended up with these specific things, and I smile. Love does that, compels us to want to make the perfect offering. And yet, because of Love and by love, Love forevermore makes us just perfect. Her gifts to me are perfect.
I reach for her to say thank you, to tell her how it’s exactly right–the day, the time, the letter, the gift. And suddenly I can’t help but think of God, what He went through just to be with us. Side-by-side seems to be his happy too. So could it be that His greatest delight in us comes when we set aside pressing things just to be with Him, when it’s not too much to give Him our time? Because I think maybe now, sitting here so plump with joy, I understand something God tried to tell Cain about His favor, that our perfect gifts are the ones compelled not by obligation but by love–love that sacrifices and deliberately serves; love that desperately wants to offer the best; love that knows, and thereby lives, just how long and wide and high He’s loved us.
Word says that those who are victorious will one day receive a stone bearing a name known only to them and God (Revelation 2:17). Thinking of this, I touch Zoe’s card on the table in front of me, sliding my thumb over the orchid letters. Maybe that name is a nickname God says softly, with a smile–a new name that fills every blank space with the history of our love for each other.
