given (take two)

Finding a present

for Wal  was difficult. I’d get hung up in what I wanted to give him  – I am crippled with good taste.  I couldn’t afford it, I’d check with him  and that wouldn’t work either because he wanted  a surprise.  Then, breakthrough  …  I set a limit, went to a good TK Maxx, selected carefully  and bought him all sorts of unguents and cosmetic  nonsense – sometimes for content, sometimes for aspiration, sometimes for amusing names or even packaging.  Success.

What we give people, tangibly and  otherwise – the intended not the inferred – can be very difficult.  A friend’s birthday tomorrow is best not marked with a card – short term memory impairment – doesn’t remember.  And what could I give  Elizabeth  (not her name) ?

She had a  horrible, emotionally exploitative childhood hooked to  respectable Catholicism  on the one hand and abuse of everything that taught on the other. She  has  made sense of it, and of most of her life – we all falter somewhere along the line.  She has picked up and rescued her husband ,equally compromised, down the years, this made more complicated by a personality that doesn’t care.

For years she has bailed him out in every way and he has just had the second wanton accident (in contravention of earlier medical advice) and expects her – without acknowledgement or discussion – to take him home and rehabilitate him.  Again.  She has taken legal advice, told the hospital and her estranged son (estranged from them both but still expecting her to pick up the pieces) and the aforementioned  husband  that she won’t be doing it. 

Not this time.

When her son jibbed at it, she said  quietly “Why don’t I put him on the plane and you take care of him ?”   She is  coping remarkably well  – discovering  mess in the house, unpaid bills, presumably  being alone has a down as well as an up (doesn’t it always ?)  And yesterday I was wandering round when I saw a book on the shelves of the local British Heart Foundation shop. I looked at the  cover, I recognised the author whom I met and interviewed,  and the photographer, and I bought it for the price of little more than a card.

I wrote her a note which said  “think of this as a card ….” And yes, I know, it will be pricey to send but we learn over and over again that you get as much from  giving as the recipient gets from the gift.   

When at  the end of one of those weeks when  you think nothing else can go wrong, I lost my credit card, I had just found a pair of  competitively priced  solid winter shoes 

not quite – but you know the kind of thing

which I didn’t want to lose.  I explained to my son , would he  buy them and I would  pay him on receipt ?  He said yes and did it, but when I raised the subject – he wrote and said  “If I can have a moody holiday, you can have shoes  – you don’t owe me anything.   Shush mum, there’s a good girl … “   So I gulped, and wrote to say – I thought the holiday was well deserved, thank you for my Christmas present,  I hold myself free to retaliate !

No matter your background, you  chose to act out of it or against it and many of us do a bit of both.  Occasionally I hear my fierce little mother issue from my lips, complete with intonation.    One of the saddest things about abuse is that abusers were  often abused in their turn.  And  then I’ve just read about the chief scout Dwayne Fields who without the  personal charisma and commitment of his grandmother and his aunt when he was very young, had the kind of background where you wind up in prison, dead or addicted.    Clearly not him .

I had a bad time at primary school – wrong face, wrong voice – until my father lifted  me on to the kitchen table so I was closer to his big height, my mother to the side – and told me “Do whatever you have to do – your mother and I will back you. 200 per cent.”   My mother nodded emphatically.  And I fought back.  I  loved the generosity of the 200 per cent.  Gift for life.