In a Modern Love column for the New York Times called “She Put Her Unspent Love in a Cardboard Box,” Genevieve Kingston writes that she shared a birthday with her mother, Kristina Mailliard (MBA 1981), who loved to arrange elaborate parties every February to celebrate: One year she crafted a school of paper origami fish to swim across the ceiling of the family dining room, Kingston writes.

“My mother, who put her business degree to use running a small nutritional beverage company with my father in Santa Rosa, Calif., while raising my older brother and me, was always prepared. By day she made marketing slogans, distribution strategies, five-year plans. By night: bubble baths, pillow forts, bedtime stories,” Kingston writes.

But when Kingston was 3, her mother was diagnosed with an advanced breast cancer and began transferring her energy to planning for the many milestones and birthdays that she would miss. She assembled two gift boxes, one for each of her two children. Inside Mailliard packed gifts and wrote letters for every birthday up to the age of 30, every graduation, driver’s license, college admission, engagements, weddings, and first babies. When the boxes were full, Kingston’s father carried them up to the children’s rooms. Kingston opened the first gift on her 12th birthday, 10 days after her mother’s death at the age of 48.

“When I was a child, opening the next package felt like a treasure hunt. As I grew older, it began to feel like something far more fundamental, like air or community, something like prayer,” Kingston writes. “Her messages met me like guideposts in a dark forest; if her words couldn’t point the way, at least they offered the comfort of knowing someone had been there before.”

Read the essay in its entirety here.

Post a Comment