Mother's Day Is Coming, and No, She Does Not Want Another Mug

Every May I get the same version of the same question, usually from a son who is standing in a store holding something he has already decided against. What do I get my mom? And the honest answer is that I have been on both ends of this transaction enough times now to have real data, not just opinions.

My mother is not a person who wants a thing. She wants a thing to do, or a thing that disappears, or a thing she can give away to somebody else. That last one matters more than people realize. The best gift I ever gave her was a big bag of freeze-dried strawberries, and she gave half of it to her neighbor. The neighbor mentioned it to me six months later. The strawberries did more social work than any object I could have wrapped.

So here is the short list I give people, in order, and I will stand behind all of it.

The Thing She Can Eat

Food is the answer for most mothers I know, and it is the answer for a reason that has nothing to do with being practical. It says I was thinking about you at a specific moment, and it goes away, which means it does not become another item on the shelf she has to feel guilty about. Freeze-dried fruit is good here because it is the one category where the gift feels like a treat and not like a health food lecture.

If you know what she likes, get that. If you do not, get the thing you like. That sounds like a cop-out and it is not. A gift you would eat yourself is a gift you picked, and she can tell the difference between picked and default.

The Thing She Can Do

The second category is an experience, and I want to be honest that this one has a failure mode. Do not buy her a class she has to drive to. Buy her something that happens to her. A market tour where somebody walks with her. A farm visit. The difference between those two is whether she has to organize it, and she has been organizing things for forty years and does not want one more.

The Thing That Disappears

The third category is the one nobody thinks of: something consumable that she did not have to buy. Coffee. Good chocolate. The fancy salt. The reason this works is that most mothers I know do not spend money on the small upgrades for themselves. They buy the normal thing and think about the nice thing, and never close the loop. You closing the loop for them is the actual gift.

What I Would Not Buy

I would not buy anything that plugs in, anything that needs assembling, or anything described as an organizer. I would not buy a mug, and I say that as a person who runs a coffee company and has strong feelings about mugs. The mug is the default answer and the default answer is never the right one.

The thing I would actually tell someone buying for their own mother is simpler than all of this. Ask her what she is out of. Not what she wants. What she is out of. The answer is always something small and specific, and it is always the thing she has been meaning to replace and has not.

That is the gift. It is not clever, it is not a surprise, and it is the one she will mention a year from now.

Stay curious. Stay crunchy. Stay cosmic.

— Sara Jane Shelvock, CEO, Torus Coffee Company LLC