251. The Gift Giver - Beth Kephart
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My mother believed in birthdays.
My mother believed in birthdays. One cake, two cakes, three—some cakes tall and some cakes square, some cakes with wax paper-covered coins slipped between the layers. She believed in balloons and ribbon curl, and for a while, when her three children were small, she believed in accompanying the big day with something stuffy and homemade, something she’d crafted at who knows what hour on her trusted Singer.
My stuffed Humpty Dumpty sat (legend has it) atop the cake (was I three? was I four?), though there must have been a bit of saran wrap or foil between his egg-shaped behind and the frosting, for there, in that one place, are no telltale stains. The stains, the dirt, the years, are everywhere else—watermarks and split seams, a smile that has lost a stretch of lip, a lost ankle ribbon. Today this tattered Humpty takes its vaunted place in an old wooden cart carried forward from my husband’s Salvadoran youth. Humpty is going nowhere in its cart.
As the years passed, I tried to equal my mother’s gift—to find, in keepsake shops, Humpties intricate and interesting enough to surprise her, I do mean please her. I found, over the course of decades, just four ingeniously crafted Humpties, which I bought and wrapped and gave to her—it never mattered when or in which season. After she passed away, I brought her Humpties home.
My mother has been gone for seventeen years. Photographs don’t return her to me as vividly as this minor collection of Humpties—these eggs in various stages of tumult. Lately, missing my mother, working through all the complications that defined our relationship, I’ve been pondering Humpty, this humble nursery rhyme character who, fallible and shattered, could not be pieced together again. Not by the king’s horses. Not by the king’s men.
I think of how my mother must have spent hours stitching her Humpty for me. I think of the hours I spent searching for Humpties for her. I think of how everything shatters in the end, but how love’s first wish is to make what is broken whole again.
- Beth Kephart
