Birthday Goal

One lazy summer day after my sophomore year of college I had the day off.  My mother was babysitting a couple of children of a woman whose husband was dying of cancer.  The woman’s husband was nearing the end and he was fearful of dying while she was gone so he wouldn’t let her out of his sight.  Their supplies of food had slowly dwindled, but she couldn’t make it out to go shopping without upsetting her husband.  After hearing this, my mother gathered up food supplies from our house and when the children were returned, so was a collection of food for the family to live off of for the next little while. 

A few hours later my little sisters arrived home from school.  There had been some snacks in the house that they wanted.  When they sought them and couldn’t find them they demanded them of my mother, who simply responded that the snacks were gone.  ‘Where did they go?’ My mother simply said that she gave them to the lady.  My sisters were mad, but my mother just kept on about her business with no explanation of why they were gone at all.

It was then that I realized that my mother had quietly been doing things like this my entire life and I, like my sisters that day, had had no idea. 

In subsequent years, between close family friends and discussions with my brothers and sisters, we’ve put together probably only a few of the incidents like this.  Our friend, Diana, once posed the question, wouldn’t you want to model this kind of giving to your children rather than just staying silent about it? 

I suppose.  But my mother modeled giving as well, and the only way to model silent giving is to give silently.  Everyone’s dirty secrets come out eventually, but so do the good ones.  You can only hide so long from the truth.

When I lived in Salt Lake my old roommate, Rachel, my friend, Danny, and I had a garden.  All three of us were terrible at keeping up with the watering.  We’d notice it was nearly dead and run out and water it every few days.  One day, we noticed something different - turgor pressure!  But none of us had watered the garden.  Someone was sneaking into our back yard and watering our pathetic little garden for us.  But who was this person?  Rachel and I would often muse over this while we ate dinner. 

The funny thing was that we became suspicious of everyone, but in the opposite way you feel after someone has broken into your car.  You start thinking that amazing person could be this person, and you are just a little nicer to everyone and thinking a little better of everyone in case it was them.  It could be one of our other roommates – they were all pretty amazing people after all.  It could be a friend stopping by – we loved them too.  Turns out it was one of the kids at our next door neighbors’ house. Their 14-year-old son was watering our plants when Rachel caught him one day. 

This morning an acquaintance of mine posted the statement that if you give expecting to get something back, you will find yourself disappointed, because other people’s hearts aren’t as big as yours.  I left a long response.  From my 2012 goal to do 1,000 acts of kindness, I found that people give back so abundantly no matter how much you try to make it clear that this wasn’t what you were seeking from giving.  Ironically, as I was typing out my response to him, I got a text from someone who I had given brownies to that year, letting me know there were brownies on my doorstep waiting for me.  While I was walking to court this morning, I was remembering that with my 2012 goal, I had realized that by doing all of my co-worker’s dishes after I washed mine it was a super easy way to fit a few more kind acts in for the day.  Then it would inevitably happen.  I’d start to notice that if I left my dishes for more than a few hours they would get washed by the kind act of a co-worker. Giving contributes to the culture around you and if it isn’t already there, it usually starts creeping in.

 (Brownies found on my doorstep this morning.)

I was thinking about all of this, the idea of giving with the idea of getting back, giving selflessly versus unselfishly, and it just clicked what this year’s birthday goal will be -   giving secretly - just like mom and the boy next door.  Please note that I do recognize that even writing a blog post about it is terribly contradictory.  This year there will be no mention of what was done, or to whom, or how much, but next year I will write what I learned from it.  I am convinced that it will be an amazing experience.