A Pink Hair Bow

Perhaps one day when she is visiting, she will see it, though that is doubtful, as my dresser top is high above her eye level. Perhaps one morning in the future, if she should clamber into my bed when she is visiting, as my children used to do with their grandparents, she might see it then. Or perhaps she will not venture into my bedroom, and it might go unnoticed. Still, I imagine that one day, when she is tall enough, it will still be there, and she might see it and ask, “Why do you have one of my hairbows, Grandma?” Or if, by then, she is too old for this kind of hairbow, she might ask, “Grandma, why do you have this hairbow on your dresser?” with no awareness of her connection to it.

I don’t know if such an occasion will come about. But if she should ask, then I will tell her the story of how it came to be there. I will tell her what she told me the day she pinned it into my hair and patted my head, satisfied that it looked “boot-uh-full.”

“It was the day after Thanksgiving, the year you were three,” I will say. “We were sitting on the sofa, reading one of your books. And you decided that you wanted to put a bow in my hair.

“I thought it was a temporary kind of giving,” I will say. “I did not expect you to give it to me to keep.

“But you did. You insisted that it was a gift. You explained that you were giving it to me because, if I were to keep the bow, and take it home with me, then you would be with me even when we weren’t together.”

And perhaps, I imagine, our eyes will meet, and we will smile. Or perhaps she will say something else just as sweet and precious.

These days, her little hairbow is her way of being with me. I wish I could remember her exact words. But, alas, they are tucked away somewhere inside the treasured memory of her little fingers on my head, the smell of her skin, and the warmth of her touch, her little body standing next to me on the sofa as she focused on the task at hand. I remember that upon hearing her saying those words, the idea sounded so mature, that even though I was hearing the words from her lips, I was convinced that she must have first heard them from someone else.

But I was wrong. When I asked her, she did not attribute the idea to anyone else, not her mom or dad or her daycare teacher, as I expected she would. The idea was her own. The moment became even more precious to me as I received the gift she was offering me, the gift from her heart and the gift of her heart. For in her sweet way, in the guise of a pink felt hairbow glued to a metal clip, she was bestowing on me a part of herself.

Despite how silly a little girl’s hair bow might have looked on my grown-up head of brown hair beginning to gray, I did not take it off. I wore it for the rest of the day, until bedtime.  

It occurs to me now, as this gift-giving time of the year is upon us, that this is one of the reasons we exchange gifts. It is not because we want to give things to each other, but because the gift we give is our way of being with our loved ones and being alive for them even in our absence.

These days, I do not wear the bow, but each morning, as I brush my hair, and each evening when I take off my watch and set it on the dresser top, I see it. And I am reminded of that special moment when love took on the shape of a little girl’s pink hairbow. And I smile and remember. And Anastasia is with me.

In this holiday season when so many of us are being challenged to be creative in satisfying our  longing to be with families, is gift-giving taking on a new meaning for you?

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