Pre-Ramble:  My kids are all over this Mother’s Day thing. They know just what I like – nothing too expensive or over the top, and preferably, something that they had a hand in making themselves.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I loved the rake I got last year, we needed one and it has come in really handy. I also love flowers, of course … Mother Nature’s perfect blend of beautiful colors, shapes and scents, gathered in a bundle to look at in the house. I love all of that.

But, try as they might to identify and present the perfect gift, children have no way of knowing that they are able to surpass the surface value of that effort by one-thousand-million times just by being. 

This year, knowing that I am constantly struggling to keep up with the times, particularly in light of my deficit in tech-skills, my girls presented me with a cardboard cut-out of an Apple iPhone and my very first iTunes gift card… !  They told me that I could practice buying songs from the iTunes store for my iPod (a hand-me-down from my husband that I use when I go running), and if I had mastered that by the time my birthday rolled around this summer, I could graduate to my very own iPhone… just in time for 3.0! (My girls each have an iPhone and I accost them regularly with requests to check the day’s weather forecast, find directions to somewhere, or check out some other neat new app.)

While their gift might seem self-serving (I don’t know how to use the iTunes store, or my iPod, for that matter), it is actually their way of sharing a piece of themselves and of their lives that I could never buy in any store.  In sharing their experience as a member of the generation into which they were born (thank you very much), they are in essence, nudging me out to the edge of the nest … welcoming me into a piece of their world, and teaching me the secret handshake.  They know that I want to know how all of this works, I just need a little help. (Ok, a lot of help.)

The Take-Away:  The greatest gift we can ever receive as parents is the knowledge that, while our children no longer necessarily need us to be a part of their lives, they want us there.  I am the luckiest mother in the world.

Post-Note: I forgot to mention that a CD of hand-picked songs to play in my car was also part of this year’s Mother’s Day package.  This is particularly significant and meaningful because, along with the CD, they were able to show me where the CD player was in my new car.  

Seriously — I have been driving that thing for several months now and, for the life of me, was not able to find the damn CD player.  (And it wasn’t just me — the boys down at the dealership couldn’t find it either. In their defense, it was a used car and maybe they just weren’t familiar with this make and model … )

My daughters ushered me into the garage to sit in the car, pushed some random button, and like a scene out of the Transformers, whole chunks of the dashboard morphed around to reveal the elusive slot.  I almost cried.

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