A Mother's Gift

I held the brown, letter-sized envelope in my hand and wondered…

What did she send this time?

Curiosity impatiently urged me to open the dang package and find out—so did my husband. Yet, lived experience quietly warned caution. Though a much smaller envelope than this one, the last one contained a surprise gift from my mother in the form of the dried-up piece of umbilical cord from my birth decades before.

Mind you, I am a mother and a grandmother. So, I’m not ordinarily squeamish about umbilical cords—dried or otherwise. However, a key point one must understand is that these little gifts from my mother just show up in the mail.

No announcement.

No heads up.

No note.

Just arrive.

And the day that envelope arrived, my curiosity was hollering at me, just like it is now. Only then, I gave in to it and ignored the voice of caution, ripping open the envelope and eagerly dumping the contents into my hand. Only to realize a split second later a dried-up piece of umbilical cord lay in the center of my palm like a petrified insect.

To make it clear, I do not go in for insects—alive or dead—making skin contact!

Not one teeny, tiny bit.

I cannot begin to tell you how long my mother laughed when I called her about that one. It was almost as long and hard as when I called about the multi-colored strands of paste beads that showed up in my mailbox, leaving me wondering if I had missed some secret Mardi Gras or St. Patrick’s Day celebration somewhere. Come to find out, the beads had belonged to my maternal grandmother. My memory refreshed by my mother’s laughing tale, I recall my grandmother sporting these beads around her neck, an accouterment I remember her adding when she went shopping. Of course, I remember more clearly the moon pies she kept on hand just for me, and always had at the ready when I came knocking.

Not every mailbox surprise resulted in laughter, though. Some carried a deep well of sorrow and grief, like the small, half-empty album with a few stray, wallet-sized, elementary school pictures along with a couple of photos of my dad in Vietnam. Or the old family bible with my childish scrawl the only entries of remembered ancestry in it. Or the pictures of my deceased grandmother in her casket.

Yes, this was a thing.

I received pictures of my grandfather too.

Fortunately, these arrivals were rather self-explantory.

Sometimes her little gifts touched deep wounds of anger and resentment. Like the journal I’d gifted her one Christmas what seemed like eons ago—the pages fully populated with her entries—returned to me. No note. No explanation. Only the words on the pages. Thoughts. Concerns. Expressions I didn’t want to read.

Then there were the gifts that simply left me shaking my head, like the 1960’s-style tie-dyed t-shirt. Yes, that was another thing—when I was a pre-pubescent child. Trust me. It was no longer a thing at the age my mother decided to gift me with one. But I do get a warm feeling and a good chuckle out of the memory of it.  Expecially the look on my husband’s face when he asked me if I really intended to wear “that thing”.

Cautiously, I turned the envelope over in my hand one more time, squeezing and feeling along the edges of the brown paper. I felt something hard, like the spine of a thin book. A seemingly harmless object, yet I wasn’t sure it was still safe to open. Sometimes it isn’t about whether the object itself is safe to touch—like the petrified umbilical cord—rather, it’s a question of the cord the object touches within.

Bravely, I tore into the paper and pulled out a thin, spiral bound booklet—and promptly scowled at it. I recognized the face on the cover. This wasn’t any ordinary booklet. This was a book about family.

My family.

Written and narrated by my mother.

My interest caught by a particular story of an ancestor jumping off a cliff into a tree to escape death—go figure, right?—I carried the booklet into the kitchen and laid it on the counter where my husband’s twitching fingers couldn’t grab it away. Carefully, I backtracked to the beginning and read.  Every line of every story she’d written.

To the very last word.

Looking back on that experience and the subsequent booklets given as holiday gifts, I can honestly say my reaction to those surprises was complicated. On the outside, my behavior painted one picture. On the inside, it was  . . . Well, chaos. It didn’t really make much sense at the time, as it was just stories of my ancestors. I’d read through plenty of such stories and enjoyed them as well as the pictures. Yet, these particular gifts generated a friction like none other. It was like rubbing salt in an open wound.

Why?

The answer to that question is just as complicated now as was my reaction then. And that’s a story—many stories—for another day. What I can and will say now is that connection is at the heart of it. Or rather, disconnection—mentally, emotionally, spiritually. Trauma does that. And it is a road well traveled in my family.

It’s been years since my mother tucked her little gifts into the mail, hoping to revive the connection between us. No matter what life experiences sit in judgment of the nature or quality of that relationship, that bond exists. It is real. Even when it is buried beneath a mountain of old hurts, misunderstandings—or even downright awful childhood experiences.

Thankfully, I was able to reconnect with my mother in the last years of her life. No, everything wasn’t suddenly perfect. But let’s be honest, at ninety-plus years old, how much changing do you expect a mother to do?

The truth is, she didn’t need to.

I had changed.

Years of healing had slowly untangled knots inside me that I hadn’t even realized I was carrying. My perspective shifted. The stories I told myself about my past shifted. The little girl who had once viewed every surprise package through the lens of old wounds had become a woman capable of seeing something else. I finally understood what my mother had been trying to send me. Not beads. Not old photographs. Not journals. Not genealogy books. Not even a petrified umbilical cord.

She was sending herself.

Each package was a quiet attempt to say, “I’m thinking of you. Remember this. Remember us. Stay connected.”

When I was younger I judged the objects. I judged her. Now I see the love that wrapped them. And it’s a beautiful gift I am grateful to receive.

Over the last year, some of our conversations included plans to write more of our family stories together once she felt stronger. We never had that opportunity.

Instead, life handed me a different gift.

The opportunity to tell one final story about her.

Ironically, it isn’t about genealogy, even though that’s where I thought this story was going. It’s about connection. One of the greatest stories she ever told.

Not with words.

But through action.

My mother spent her life seeking ways to connect—with family, with faith, with nature, with beauty, and with the generations that came before and after her. Sometimes she found that connection through dancing. Sometimes through painting. Sometimes through travel. Sometimes through stories. And sometimes through the most unexpected little packages that would quietly arrive in the mailbox with no note, no explanation, and no warning.

Looking back, I think those envelopes contained more than I realized. Within each was a piece of her—a piece of her life. Perhaps that’s what a meaningful story really is.

Not simply words arranged on a page. But one human heart reaching toward another, hoping to be known, hoping to be remembered, hoping to remind us that we are never as separate as sometimes we believe.

Humanity has remained connected through stories for thousands of years. Sometimes those stories are told through paint. Sometimes through photographs. Sometimes through music or dance. Sometimes they are preserved in weathered family Bibles or spiral-bound genealogy books.

And sometimes . . .

Sometimes they arrive in an ordinary envelope carrying nothing more than a petrified umbilical cord—and all the love a mother didn’t quite know how to express.

In loving memory of my mother, Ovie Freeman Reynolds Hunsaker,

October 30, 1934 - July 31, 2026