Originally published in June 2022.
Picture it: Hanukkah, 1987. The children are opening presents in the living room and someone hands me a box and says, “Shani this one’s for you, open it!” This information will become extremely relevant in one moment’s time. I open the box and find a bathing suit, I hold it up to me. It’s about four sizes too small. Someone in my family says, “Oh, that’s for Jody!” The room erupts in laughter, I turn bright red, and experience the first of many lessons in receiving gifts: receiving gifts is embarrassing. Better to receive nothing than receive something from someone else. You avoid the shame that way.
Jody is my younger cousin. I adore her. So in front of my entire family, I was made to feel like the greedy child who tried to steal one of her beloved cousin’s presents. Bearing in mind of course that the box was handed to me in the first place by a grown adult who could read gift labels when I couldn’t. I was five.
Years later, also at at Hanukkah, I was gifted a fake Dooney & Bourke purse in a style I’d never seen before and instantly hated. I knew it was fake because the fabric wasn’t so much leather as plastic. The only thing I’d asked for that year was a Dooney & Bourke purse, in a very specific style, because all the girls at school had them and I didn’t even have a purse in general yet. At the time I put on my dutiful grateful face because for a single mom even a fake purse is a big deal to buy. But as an adult I’ve come to the realization that if she’d just not bought be all the other things I didn’t want and didn’t ask for and put all that money toward the one item I was desperate for, this memory wouldn’t exist in my pattern. It’s a harsh thing to grow up and realize all the shit you wanted wasn’t actually as expensive as the grown ups made it sound. But I couldn’t say anything. You can’t complain about someone gifting you what they wanted to give you instead of what you actually wanted. That makes you ungrateful, spoiled, cruel—that makes you someone who doesn’t care how hard their mother works. And if you express any of these things, your family won’t love you as much, and you won’t feel as safe. That’s what you learn as a kid. So instead you hold back the disappointed tears of a 13-year-old who knows that her “big present” is something she can’t even use in public for fear of shame and say thank you and smile and write about it on the internet 27 years later.
I never carried the fake purse because girls with fake purses was mercilessly bullied at school and I was already being bullied for other reasons. I bought myself a real Dooney & Bourke purse in my early 30s. It cost me $112. And don’t get me started on the American Girl doll. I wanted a doll, I got the books. The doll was deemed a waste of money by my excessively frugal grandmother, so my developing brain learned that my happiness was a waste of money. And I spent years spending as little as possible ignoring things like comfort and happiness because I didn’t believe I deserved them. In my mid 30s I bought myself an American Girl doll, too. On eBay. $250.
So where do the lovers come in? Here, in adulthood, after the childhood learnings were poured into the blender and growing up whirred everything into soup. The things I learned about gifts as a child became the patterns that repeated themselves. I learned, through shame-soaked experiences around…not just actual gifts, but around the thought processes of those giving them to me, that my expectations never need rise above sea level. So what follows are 100% factual gifts given to me by former partners and lovers, and this is, unfortunately, the complete list.
4. A Record Player
Sounds great, right? I love music, I love records, at the time I was going through a vintage phase, it was perfect. My boyfriend at the time was SO excited because he had the PERFECT gift, and he couldn’t wait to give it to me. He made me hide in my room while he got it out of the car, he brought it into the living room, walked me out by the hand with eyes closed and, tah-dah! A record player!
Only it was his record player, that he’d had for years. He just brought it over to my apartment. Because he’d moved in with me. This wasn’t a gift for me, this was him moving in his shit. It worked perfectly, I’ll give it that, but it was an eyesore, one of those things meant to look like a 1930s radio. I sat it on a Brooklyn curb many years later and even though I’ve never owned another working record player despite years of trying to find one I don’t regret a fucking thing.
3. A DVD Rack
This same partner, for our one year anniversary, gave me a DVD rack. This was 2007, and we collected DVDs together, we loved movies. They were starting to take over the living room so (I guess?) he though he’d be sweet and buy me a DVD rack to organize them for our one year anniversary. I think what really happened was he’d bought it anyway and had it in the backseat of his car and brought it in after I’d made a special dinner and gifted him a vintage banjo because he really wanted one. A fucking DVD rack.
2. A Bathrobe
Different partner, years earlier. I was in college and my partner was much older than me. (Yes, a 30 year old dating a 20 year old who was still in college sounds insane to me today, at the time what the actual fuck did I know. Maybe he could have known a bit better.). For my 21st birthday, when we’d been dating almost a year, he gave me a bathrobe. Not a silk, luxurious robe for lounging around the house, but a three-sizes too large, pepto pink, fuzzy bathrobe with huge flowers on it. The sort of thing you’d see on a grandmother with rollers in her hair as she yelled out her screen door at neighborhood youths. I wish I’d had the life experience I have now to tell him that the gift was disappointing if not insulting after sharing my life with him for a year and honestly was this all the effort I was fucking worth, but back then I still thought you always had to be grateful, no matter what. Now I know that was just a trick taught to me by people who wanted me to be easier to deal with no matter how they chose to treat me in the moment. I exchanged the robe (don’t you love it when you have to put effort into your own gifts) for a gray lounge robe made of t-shirt fabric that actually fit.
A Rock
Not an official boyfriend but still someone I was allowing to see me naked on a regular basis. He’d gone on a trip with friends hiking someplace and brought me back a fucking rock. He tried to give it some feigned meaning but at the end of the day if all you have brought back for the woman you’re sleeping with is a rock the size of a silver dollar I strongly suggest you simply don’t give her a gift. There was no real reason for a gift here, but he saw fit to insert a rock into the equation. An actual rock.
The theme of all of them? Embarrassment. I was embarrassed by the gifts themselves, and I was embarrassed that people I’d made a priority in my life hadn’t made me a priority in theirs. I have never told anyone about any of these gifts until now. I was too ashamed that this was all the men I’d chosen thought I was worth.
Only after a significant amount of inner child work and a thorough evaluation of memories that led to patterns that led to toxic feelings and behaviors can one connect the dots between what we learned as kids and what we kept repeating as adults. It wasn’t manners that kept me saying thank you for embarrassingly bad gifts. It was low self worth. The world was showing me what I was worth, and I didn’t know questioning things was even allowed. I was living on scraps of “it’s the thought that counts” completely ignoring that the thought wasn’t even there to begin with. The first time someone I love gave me a gift that showed they cared enough to know me and then do something loving in response to that knowing was when I was in my early 30s and my stepfather gifted me a year’s subscription to the Sundance Documentary Archives. He had seen how much fun I was having learning about subculture and history through documentaries and thought, “Hey, Shani loves documentaries — I’m going to give her literally all of them.” I used the hell out of that subscription.
It isn’t about getting gifts. It’s about the actions people take to show you how you factor into their lives. Now, a shitty gift doesn’t say anything about me. It says everything about the person who gave it to me. It says volumes about the place they deserve in my life because they’ve just revealed the place I have in theirs. People really do provide you with all the information you need, but if you haven’t taken stock of your self worth and drilled down to the things that have influenced it, and whether or not they were telling the truth or simply serving other people, you can’t understand what it’s saying. Your worthiness will always be inherent, and there’s nothing anyone outside of you can do that can actually, factually, take it away. Once you start reflecting inherent worth out into the world, I’m not saying you’ll get better presents, but you’ll know you deserve them, and that’s much more important.
I turn 40 in two weeks. I bought myself a trip to Paris.