The Gifts We Give to Our Children

I am so happy that my husband and I were able to help our daughter get a nice car — today!  She will be graduated from university very soon and will head off across country on her own.  I’m not a 1 percenter, no where close, not even in the same universe.  So the car is not brand new.  But it is a nice car, an import, has all the bells and whistles, is a couple years old, and as a certified used vehicle has a two year or 25,000 miles warranty.  We were able to give her a sizable down payment so that she could afford payments on a car that will last through grad school and beyond with any fortune at all.

The gift is more than we can afford, but that is okay.  The Hubby and I are both products of totally dysfunctional families that did as much to hurt us as to help us.  I swore when I married and had a baby that I would raise my daughter to know that she is loved and that she would never doubt that she is entitled to have her needs met.  We’ve done better than our parents did in raising children, but we were far, far, far from perfect parents.  But we’ve always tried to meet her needs and prepare her to launch herself from our nest into an independent life from the best footing possible. 

So if I am posting a response to the Day 2 NaBloPoMo prompt: “What was the most disappointing gift you received as a child?”  and I am not sure that the above stuff relates, but anyway… I guess that the most disappointing gift I received was during third grade when my Christmas gifts were an ugly hat, a Bible, and some bath salts.  I was really sad that I didn’t get anything fun.  But now that I’m older, this does not seem as bad as it did then.  We were very poor.  I still have the Bible.  The gift I was most disappointed by was the most precious gift a parent can give to a child, it was what I wasn’t given as a child.  That was the gift of self esteem and self-worth that comes from knowledge of unconditional love.

We gave my daughter a gift today that helped her get a car, but the most important thing we’ve given her isn’t related to physical objects or money and while that is good, it isn’t good that we understand this from getting not so good things in childhood.  It can and does get better though with acceptance and understanding that healing takes place not only within individuals but over generations.