The Month I Learned to Actually Look at the People I Love

The airtime voucher years

For most of my life I was the worst gift giver in my family, and everybody knew it. My speciality, if you can call it that, was the panic buy. Birthday morning would arrive, I would remember around ten o'clock that I had planned nothing, and I would end up at the petrol station on Cape Road buying a slab of chocolate that had been sitting under a heat lamp since the previous winter. Once, for my mother, I bought airtime. An airtime voucher. I printed the little slip, folded it into a card, and handed it over like it was a diamond. She smiled the way mothers smile when they have decided not to say the thing they are thinking.

I was twenty-four and had been getting away with this for years. The chocolate, the airtime, the last minute flowers from the garage with the price sticker still half peeled off. I told myself I was just not a gift person, as if that were a personality type and not simply a nice way of saying I never bothered to pay attention.

Then this year happened, and two things landed in the same month. My mother was turning sixty. My older sister, Nandi, was graduating with her honours degree, the first in our family to get that far. Both of these, within three weeks of each other, in May, when the Gqeberha wind comes off the sea cold enough to make your ears ache.

And for the first time I had my own money. Real money. I had started my first proper job in February, at a logistics firm near the harbour, and three or four pay cheques had actually cleared into my account. For the first time in my life I could afford to do something that meant something. The problem was I had no idea how.

Standing in the shop feeling stupid

My first instinct, naturally, was to repeat old habits with a bigger budget. I thought I would just buy something expensive and let the price do the talking. I spent one Saturday wandering through Baywest mall with that exact plan, and it went nowhere. I stood in front of a display of perfume I could not pronounce and realised I did not know which one my mother wore. I had smelled it my whole life. I could have told you it was warm and a little sweet and that it lived in a glass bottle on her dressing table next to her reading glasses. But the name? Nothing.

That was the moment it hit me, standing there like an idiot holding a tester strip. The reason I was bad at this was not that I lacked money or taste. It was that I had never once properly looked at the people I was buying for. I had spent twenty four years being loved by these two women and I could not have told you what either of them actually wanted.

I did a bit of searching online that night, half hoping the internet would just solve it for me, scrolling through pages of birthday gifts ideas while the kettle boiled. But the lists all blurred together, because a list cannot tell you about your own mother. No website knows that she keeps every birthday card in a biscuit tin, or that she still hums while she hangs washing. I closed the laptop. The answer was not going to come from a screen. It was going to come from shutting up and watching.

Learning to listen on purpose

So that is what I did for the next two weeks. I became a spy in my own home. I went over for Sunday lunch, which I did most weeks anyway, but this time I actually listened instead of waiting for my turn to talk.

My mother, it turned out, talked about her hands a lot. She is a seamstress, has been since before I was born, and lately her hands get sore in the cold. She mentioned, not as a complaint, just in passing while stirring the pot, that the hand cream she liked had run out and she kept forgetting to replace it. She said it and moved straight on to something else. The old me would not have even registered it. The new me wrote it down in my phone the second I got to my car.

Nandi was harder. My sister is private in a way I am not. But I noticed she had started keeping a proper notebook, a nice one, for her new job interviews, and that the cheap one she used was falling apart at the spine, pages escaping everywhere. I noticed she kept rubbing her wrists where her old watch strap had cracked and pinched her. Small things. Things she would never ask for because she is the kind of person who buys everyone else presents and forgets herself.

I cannot describe how strange it felt to walk around knowing these little facts. It was like someone had turned the volume up on my own family. I had always loved them. I had just never studied them.

The small terror of getting it wrong

Here is the part nobody warns you about. Once you actually care about getting it right, the fear gets much worse. When I was buying airtime I felt nothing, because I had no stake in it. Now I lay awake the night before my mother's birthday genuinely worried. What if I had misread the whole thing? What if the hand cream was the wrong one and she smiled that polite smile again and I was back to being the son who could not be bothered?

I had tracked down the exact cream she used, which took three shops and one slightly embarrassing phone call to my aunt. I wrapped it myself, badly, and I added a smaller thing, a soft pair of gloves for the cold mornings when her hands ache at the washing line. I remember my hands were actually sweating when I handed the parcel over.

She opened it slowly, the way she opens everything. And when she saw what it was, she went quiet. Not the polite quiet. A different one. She looked at me and said, "You remembered." That was all. Two words. But I understood then that I had never given her anything she had to remember before.

Getting it right, just once

For Nandi's graduation I had found a good notebook, leather, the kind that will last her years, and I had a watch put aside at a little shop in Walmer with a strap that would not pinch. I had spent a couple of quiet evenings comparing options among the gifts for her I kept bookmarking, but in the end the choice was easy because I already knew what she needed. That is the whole trick, I think. The knowing comes first. The buying is just the last and smallest step.

She cried a little at the graduation, mostly about the degree, but when she unwrapped the watch afterwards she went still in exactly the way my mother had. "How did you even know," she said, turning it over. I did not tell her about the cracked strap or the two weeks of spying. I just shrugged and felt, for the first time in my life, like I had done something properly.

I have thought a lot since then about why it took me so long. I used to believe that good gifts were about having money, which is why I waited until I had some. But my first pay cheques did not make me a better son. Paying attention did. The money just meant I could act on what I finally saw.

These days I keep a running note in my phone. When my mother mentions something in passing, when Nandi rubs her wrist or sighs at a broken thing, I write it down. Not for the next birthday. Just because I have decided, at twenty-four, that the people who raised me and grew up beside me deserve to be looked at properly. The presents are the easy part now. It is the looking that changed me, and I think it changed me for good.