Love is what counts on Mother's Day

You can always tell in my neighborhood when Mother's Day is coming. By Friday all the little kids coming off the school bus will be clutching little gifts that patient and thoughtful teachers, God bless their souls, led 24 of them through making. You can see the pride in their faces when they come running for home, holding aloft their tiny little flowerpots with the pipe cleaner-stemmed tulips made from their own handprints. I can tell which ones made a ceramic mug that year because they walk slowly, holding their treasures out in front of them like a fragile bomb, terrified of their own clumsiness. One year my son brought home from elementary school one of those glazed coiled clay pots. I loved it, like I loved every piece of art my children made me, and thanked him, lavishly praising its beauty and functionality. This is a perfect place for my paper clips, I told him. "I'm so glad you like it," he said. "I didn't make it." "What?" "When the bell rang and we had to go, the teacher couldn't find mine and she picked up this one and it had my initials on the bottom, see? Except that's another kid with the same initials. I told her that wasn't mine but she said just take this one because the bus was here," he said, shrugging. "It's pretty though." So many times over the years as I've glanced at that little white pot with the yellow polka dots I've wondered about that mother, and what she got for Mother's Day that year. What did her child go bounding off the bus carrying? My daughter was much more meticulous about her gift-giving. She would have been devastated to have worked on a project for me, keeping it secret, and then have some organizational screw-up in the classroom derail her plans. Luckily, that never happened and I have a mini-gallery of some of her whimsical works, from a trinket box shaped like a stack of pancakes to a tiny coffee cup that looks just like our old beagle. My son, on the other hand, one year just phoned it in and gave me the old "coupon book" gift. Now don't get me wrong. I always told my kids I don't need gifts, hugs and kisses were great. And I'm not disparaging the idea of coupon books, wherein the giver promises acts of service, redeemable upon receipt. They're sweet gifts, I've given them myself, and they're particularly touching coming from a child who may not have the means or ability to give you anything else. I fully appreciated his effort, but what made this particular gift so memorable was that he didn't even promise to do them himself. My son, about 10 at the time, had contracted out the jobs. He wrote: Happy Mother's Day! I promise you a back massage from Miley. I promise you a foot rub from Miley. Miley was his friend, a few years younger. I asked her if she knew about this arrangement. Suffice to say she did not. Seems like I remember he also "couponed" his sister doing a few chores around here as well: I promise you she will sweep the kitchen. I promise you she will take out the trash, whenever you say. Love you! I thought maybe if I gave more specific guidance and asked for something small it would help with the gift-giving, if for nothing else to stave off the accidental indenturing of others. I have three window boxes on the front of my house and it became the annual Mother's Day tradition for the kids to gift me flowers to plant there. This was a fool's game, all around. I have never been able to keep a plant alive, either through unintentional neglect because I forget about it or because I feel so guilty about killing the last one I lavish the next one with so much love I drown it by watering it to death. After a while, I swear the little begonias or petunias or whatever they were would grimace when we'd pull up to the house and they'd see the window boxes. It was like they knew they were going to their final resting places and they had it better off back at the garden center. I'd whisper to them while I planted them. "It'll be different this time," I'd say. "I'm not that person any more." They'd hang their heads. They didn't believe me. I didn't believe me. To be fair, I had a whole other force working against me, too. The boxes were situated under low windows just a few feet from the ground and my cats had discovered the soft flowers and the afternoon sun made fine perches. We'd find fat dozing cats curled up outside the panes, squashing everything flat. Soon enough they'd wake, stretch languidly up on their back feet and beat at the window until someone came to open the front door. My Mother's Day flowers never made it past June. I should check those old coupons. Maybe I could just find one for chocolate. Contact Chronicle-Telegram columnist Rini Jeffers at rinijeffers@gmail.com.