A Fitting Gift for Mom

We’ve all heard that saying, life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans. And this very truth finds me right now.

I am over 40. I have one remaining parent, my mommy. I love her she is a bestie. It is a relationship that has grown over all of these years and I can really say I appreciate it.

She is an immigrant. I was born on the west coast. With my dad gone mom moved back to the east coast in 2007. It took me years to really feel the distance.

It is not like we were seeing each other every day or that I needed that. But it is something to not be able to go raid mom’s refrigerator or pantry lol.

It is of course not all about the gain of food. I miss hugging her and whatever else. We talk on the phone often but she hasn’t been back and although my daughter and my brother had been to visit, I was the hold out.

Finally, in 2017 early in the year she suggested I come for the holiday season, this giving me time to save up some cash and book the plane ticket.

I had not been on vacation in years, not left the state in about that long etc.

What an adventure I thought. And I had never gone on vacation all alone. I took my daughter to Arizona to stay with a friend for a week in 2005. I’ve been all across the country and what not but usually with family. Now it was just me.

When you go cross-country the worst thing is to not be able to enjoy an extended stay. I pulled up the discount flight calendars and looked at the cheap fly days for holiday season 2017. I settled on a 15-day excursion that included Thanksgiving and went into December.

Now that is a vacation. As a bonus my grown daughter who had been traveling the country for work was able to join us. My mother was doubly blessed. My daughter arrived for two weeks starting the week before Thanksgiving. I arrived the week of and stayed the week after.

It was glorious to relax at mom’s house, eat her cooking, meet all her friends, replenish from all that I had been dealing with in my day to day, enjoy three generations and a holiday in weather that was a lot like what the weather is like where I am from.

My love language is quality time. What is yours?

The thing about love languages though is that since there are more than one most of us need to learn to speak at least more than one. Life really requires them all. They are:

Quality Time

Words of Affirmation

Physical touch

Acts of Service

Gift Giving

Which brings me upto date. Over the years I have struggled to get gifts for my mother, holidays, her birthday. What do you get people who are older than you and doing okay when they do not need anything? I like to bake desserts. When she lived close by, we would share meal cooking for gatherings and events but that is not possible now.

I want to send her Edible Arrangements because she is allergic to flowers but still something was missing. I was better able in the scheme of things to shop for my father in his life time.

One year I bought a themed gift that remains as a part of the decor.

The idea of what I should add to my mother’s life in the form of a gift to express my love and appreciation of who she is sort of developed over time.

In the past few years, I have fallen in love with going to the movies. I mean as in once to three or more times in a week at the theater. Mom was telling me she gave up cable and sometimes her alternative options stop working which hampers her entertainment choicing.

What do people do when there is nothing on that they want to watch? Of course, there are plenty of other things to do but one of the options at that point is to watch a movie via DVD.

That is what my mother is missing: a movie collection. She has a laptop and pays for Wi-Fi but she is not into using it the way many people would watch movies instead of adding to what is typically a growing group of physical movies bought.

Movies were never really a focus for our family so I know she has less than 3 dozen or maybe only about a dozen. With all the movies I have been watching in recent years there are plenty I think she would love to enjoy and even have at home to re-watch and dive into the way you can with DVD’s seeing deleted scenes and behind the scenes content.

A good movie collection can reach into the hundreds. That can be expensive. Most of us just end up with a collection over time. That is the plan. To deliver a collection of one hundred or so movies that I think are fitting over the next year to year and a half a few at a time so that they can be watched, one a week.