on thoughtful gifts
A note on gifts, kitchen objects, and the quieter question of what remains in a child’s life after the first delight has passed.
I was cooking for my son’s third birthday party when both children came into the kitchen. The older one wanted to stir the pot. The younger one, not yet two, was reaching for the knives on the counter. Six children were arriving in an hour. The water was boiling. I needed them occupied and away from anything dangerous.
I opened a drawer and handed each of them a wooden spoon. Then I found a metal colander and gave that to the younger one. “Here,” I said. “You can cook too.” They took the spoons and the colander to the living room. I heard banging, then stirring sounds, then the older one narrating something about making soup. The younger one was wearing the colander as a hat.
I finished cooking. They stayed occupied.
The party that afternoon was the usual chaos. Children, cake, balloons. And gifts.
By evening there were gifts everywhere. Wrapped gifts, gifts with cards, gifts chosen by other parents who had clearly spent time shopping and choosing and wrapping. A police car with lights and sounds. A set of coloured markers. A book about trucks. A puzzle with many pieces. A stuffed elephant. A toy that required batteries we did not have.
My son tightly grasped each one. He wanted to open everything immediately, to see what each box contained, to try everything at once.
Three weeks later, the police car is in a drawer, pushed to the back behind other things. The batteries for the other toy were never purchased. The package sat on the counter for a while with a note beside it, then disappeared into the closet with other things we meant to explore and never did. The stuffed elephant lives on a shelf now. He carried it around for an hour, perhaps two. Then he set it down.
The markers are used sometimes. When his younger brother is napping and the house is quiet, he asks for them. He draws for ten minutes, maybe fifteen. Then they go back in their box. The puzzle pieces are mostly scattered. I find them under the couch, in the toy basket, mixed in with other things, and gather them back together when I can. The book about trucks gets read sometimes. Not often, but sometimes.
The wooden spoons are still in active rotation.
They have not returned to the kitchen. One is usually in the toy basket. Another turns up under the couch, beside the bed, outside in the dirt. This morning I found one near the patch of earth by our building. He had been using it to dig. Yesterday one was in the bathroom, part of some game I did not understand. The day before that one was a microphone.
The colander too. It moves from room to room. Sometimes it is a hat. Sometimes a drum. Sometimes a container for small things. At night it often ends up in the crib. In the morning I find it beside the pillow.
The gifts were chosen with care. Some were beautiful. Some delighted him at once. But most of them settled quickly into the background of the room. The spoons and the colander did not. They were not gifts. They were not special. They were taken from a kitchen drawer in a moment of desperation.
Perhaps that is what lasts. Not novelty. Not the force of first delight. Not even care, at least not in the form it arrives wrapped in. Something plainer than that. Something that leaves room.
The spoons are dirty now. They have been outside. They have been in imaginary pots and under cushions and in corners of the house where kitchen things do not belong. They are just spoons. But they have not finished becoming.
I notice this. I leave it there.