Loaded Dice

My mother hates getting gifts. Naturally, my sister and I feel challenged by this — a great deal of guilt is involved in NOT getting your mother a token of affection on the big days, and a great deal of resentment is generated when she clearly dislikes what you get. And if you know my mother, you know she ain’t shy about sharing her displeasure.

So we’re reduced to taking a kamikaze approach — we blitz her with gifts on random days, spreading out the varied degrees of unhappiness rather than getting full flak on the actual day. One Christmas we took all the gifts we got her and waited, parceling them out over six months: a couple on New Year’s, some more on Martin Luther King Day, then Valentine’s & President’s Days… you get the picture. She laughed. Sort of. Then told us to stop wasting our money, she’s gonna die soon anyway.

Happy happy joy joy. (NO, not the dead part! Just a sarcastic reference to the general atmosphere.)

But my sister had a stroke of brilliance this year, and thank God, ’cuz this one’s the big 65. We married unique presentation with the one thing my mother actually likes — gambling — and created a four-foot high, all denominations, hanging mobile strung with 50 scratch-off lottery cards. It’s very, very colorful and the perfect gift for someone who can’t get around much anymore.

We gave it to her this morning, two days before her real birth date. Her eyes lit up like a winning slot machine.

Holy crap, we did something right!

Of course, next year we’ll either have to buy her a one-way ticket to rehab or take her to Vegas… but that’s a whole 367 days away.

"Jane looked down at her own pink skirt already wrinkling from her sweaty hands touching the material, seeing the clumsy, grubby little girl her mother saw. She would never measure up to Eve — didn’t even know what her mother wanted from her — and she wondered what point there was in trying when she knew she would never succeed. Nothing she did would ever make her mother happy.

"It was an almost idle thought, one that had run through her mind in various disguises for months, probably years, but in that moment she felt the primitive truth of it. Jane could scour the apartment top to bottom, take over all her mother’s responsibilities, even learn to keep her opinions to herself, and still Eve would not be satisfied. Tickling on the edge of this realization was the understanding that her mother’s discontent was not her fault, but she was too young to accept the release the truth implied. Ahead of her time as usual, no comfort came with this insight, only more sorrow for its reality." ~ The Long Black Veil, Chapter 37