Shopping for Understanding

Last year I adopted a new rule about shopping: When I find something that touches me so deeply it makes me cry right there in the store, I have to buy it without hesitation.

The day after Thanksgiving, a week after Ian turned six, I went shopping by myself. I had not been out on that craziest of shopping days since before parenthood, and I needed some alone time. Unfortunately, I wasn’t enjoying myself like I had hoped. I just couldn’t get into the holiday spirit.

After several hours of purchasing Christmas gifts, I went into a unique store that had decorative items for the home, nothing essential, all very frivolous and fun. At the back of the store was a display of small stone plaques with sweet sayings on them. One of them hit my heart like an arrow. “A mother understands what a child does not say.” As I read it, tears dripped off my cheeks and landed on the stone, turning it a shiny, dark, marbled mauve.

All these years, that is what I had been doing, trying desperately to read what my son wanted to say but was unable to put into words, helping him understand that my love for him was genuine, deep, and unconditional. He let me know a few weeks earlier that he had reached a good place inside, when he quietly hugged me and whispered in my ear, “Mom, I’m happy now.”

I keep that plaque in my bathroom next to the sink. It is the first thing I look at in the morning, and it reminds me to keep listening to my children, even when they are not talking, or when they are babbling incessantly but not making sense, because there is much more to them that words cannot express.