A few years ago, on my birthday, one of my kids gave me a card and it was sh*t.
No, really, it was sh*t. I’m a big fan of home-made cards. I love them. And I don’t actually care about gifts.
That’s not my love language. Not from my husband, my friends or my kids.
But cards, I care about. Words, I care about, which is why Words of Affirmation is my primary love language (if you don’t know what I’m talking about this explains it).
And on this occasion, my child – who shall remain nameless but YOU KNOW WHICH ONE YOU ARE – just folded up a piece of A4 paper and scrawled Happy Birthday on it with a biro.
There might have been a heart drawn on it. Possibly a balloon. But basically it was sh*t.
And so I gave it back.
I was disappointed and hurt by their lack of effort and care and I told them so.
Are you judging me right now? If you are, I understand. Because once, I would have judged me, too, and in fact I did.
A few years before the Sh*t Card Incident, I read a terrific book called Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Mother by an Asian-American woman called Amy Chua. It was about the clash of her own upbringing and the hardline, Tiger-mum style she brought to parenting her own daughters who were very much American and not really down with the tiger.
As one journalist described it: “Amy Chua brought up her daughters with an extreme regime that banned TV, drilled academic learning and demanded hours of music practice daily. Then one daughter declared war …”
Top Comments
n,
The whole empty praise element... you created the paradigm in the first place, and in rejection to your own system of parenting, dismissed the card and then the cake. Perhaps your child felt safe enough in the moment to make you a small token of their love because you understand that to them, you’re their whole world. Instead you’ve reinforced that one has to make big phoney displays of affection.