No one talks about the sadness of gifts. I’m not talking about the childhood awkwardness and disappointment of getting a toy you’ve long outgrown from relatives who see you only once every year or two, or yet another polar-bear-themed item because you had a thing for polar bears when you were 9. I’m thinking of the adult, multilayered and tangled sadness of failed efforts to please you from people who love you, and whom you love.
These gifts lay embarrassingly bare the dissonance between the giver’s outdated or delusional perception of you and the regrettable reality of you. They make you feel resentful, and ashamed of feeling resentful. You’re afflicted with a terrible pity for these unwanted objects and end up either keeping them in a closet or drawer for decades, or else guiltily returning or re-gifting them, like leaving a newborn on a doorstep.
Parental presents are especially fraught. Most painful of all, for me, were the sweaters. For years my mother bought me perfectly nice sweaters of a kind that I never wear: sweaters with patterns, “Cosby Show” sweaters, suburban dad sweaters. I felt she was attempting to dress me as a big sexless teddy bear rather than a man living in New York City and still hoping, in middle age, to attract a mate.
The most memorable of these was a bright red, with a gold crest on its breast, like the sigil of the kind of hoity-toity prep school I did not attend, and drooped so hugely on me I looked like a small boy dressed in his father’s clothes. My girlfriend charitably suggested that I “loomed large” in my mother’s mind.
For a time, this problem escalated to the status of a minor crisis in my life. My mother was regularly sending me packages of khaki slacks, white briefs and athletic tube socks with colored bands at the top — items of clothing I’d also last worn circa 1984. When I visited my mother a few days after receiving another of these shipments, she told me, offhandedly, “If they don’t fit, or you don’t want them, you can just give them away to bums.”
“Mom,” I told her, in the condescending tone adult children affect with their parents, “I am not going to ‘give them away to bums.’” I had taken them to the local homeless shelter earlier that same day.
Well-meaning friends asked me why I didn’t simply tell my mother what kinds of clothes I liked. I just looked at them as if they’d suggested I simply change aspects of my personality. When Mom mentioned that Dad (always a dapper dresser) had forbidden her to buy clothes for him because she never got him the right kind, I knew I could never bring myself to correct her sartorial vision for me: If she were to buy me an angora sweater or little yachtsman’s cap or purple booties with upcurled toes, I was doomed to wear them for her.
My friend Boyd and I have an aphorism: All mothers live in palaces built of lies. When Mom gave me a gray-and-white snowflake-pattern sweater one Christmas, I took it across the country with me to Seattle, where I staged photographs of myself wearing it with friends, one of whom then posted the photos to her Facebook page and tagged me so that Mom would be sure to see them. Later that same afternoon we returned the sweater to Macy’s. I often thought the sweater must have wondered what that was all about.
A few years ago, I finally wore a sweater that Mom had given me 10 years earlier to visit her in the memory care unit at her retirement home. Although she no longer remembered the sweater, she did go out of her way to admire it, and I got to tell her that it was from her.
It’s not like I’m some genius empath among gift-givers. Items of clothing I have bought for girlfriends include: a plaid flat wool cap, such as an Irish cabby would wear; a black jacket with tails like a stage magician’s; and a pair of mink earmuffs. Now I mostly stick to books.
Buying clothes for someone is intimate, and parents are in an awkward position, being on formerly intimate terms with us: They’ve nursed us, bathed us, wiped our noses and bottoms. But part of growing up is establishing your physical autonomy and boundaries, insisting on privacy, yelling at them to at least have the courtesy to knock before barging into your bedroom. It must feel a little like a breakup to them, being suddenly cut off from a body you used to be so fondly, matter-of-factly familiar with. Giving clothes is perhaps a kind of proxy for this lost physical intimacy, a way of touching your child through the transitive property.
But to choose clothes or accessories for someone that they’ll actually like, you need to know them — not just their size and shape, complexion and coloration, but their aesthetic sense, their idiosyncratic style. You have to get them. The resentment or embarrassment you feel at receiving clothes that seem custom-tailored for someone who isn’t you, at least not anymore, is the anger and sadness of not being seen. Which is, of course, partly your own fault for having hidden yourself from them so successfully.
Sometimes gifts are evidence of misplaced hopes or ambitions for you. At a time when I was employed drawing cartoons for a local alternative paper for $15 a week, my parents bought me a very fine soft leather briefcase, with a lot of complicated pockets and folders. Since I had no important documents to convey anywhere, I tended to use it as an overnight bag. At the time it was stolen from the trunk of Boyd’s car, while we were drinking in Fells Point, Baltimore, the contents of the briefcase were one (1) pair of Batman underwear.
My father also gave me several increasingly nice watches over the years, all of which I drunkenly lost or smashed more or less immediately. This felt particularly damning of my competence and maturity, since a watch is, or used to be, a symbol of adult responsibility: It’s the accessory that men who have to dress identically for work use to signal their relative wealth and status, the sign of a man with places to be at very precise times, who cannot afford to be late.
But not only had watches largely been made redundant by cellphones by my adulthood, it also turned out I never really needed to be anywhere. I tried to make my watchless wrist into a symbol of freedom and independence in my own mind, as if I were too wild to be yoked or branded, man. To this day I don’t wear a watch, less because I don’t need one than because, on some level, I don’t think I deserve to.
I started to write this essay a decade ago, in the thick of the socks and khakis crisis, but I knew I would have to wait until my mother died before I could publish it, lest she learn I returned the sweaters and did give all the underwear to bums. It did not occur to me then that once I was free to publish it, it would become a different essay. I can’t pretend I wish I had worn all the sweaters Mom gave me now that she’s gone; I still have one in a drawer that I’ll continue not wearing until I die. These objects haunt us; there’s no returning them, not really.
Before his death my father, evidently undaunted by all the timepieces I’d squandered over the years, with an ineradicable faith that I would someday have a place for it in my life, dictated that the antique grandfather clock that stood in our house for 30 years should be bequeathed to me, his prodigal son.
Funny that we’re all so unerring in our cruelty — we know exactly how, and where, to hurt the people we know and love best — and so clueless and flailing in our attempts to pleasantly surprise each other. If I were to pass along any lesson or moral for this holiest day of the Capitalist year, it might be to be more forgiving of our hapless, bungling attempts to love one another. You don’t get to choose how other people see you, or to determine what garish or misguided form their love takes.
Perhaps it’s worth gently repeating that standard parental prompt we all heard as children — you can probably still hear it, in your own mother’s voice — when we got something we didn’t want, or didn’t know we needed: What do you say?
Tim Kreider is an essayist and cartoonist. He is the author of, most recently, the essay collection “I Wrote This Book Because I Love You.”
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