The Pink Shoe Diaries

My mother suffers from CRS.

If you're wondering what CRS is, please allow me to elucidate. It is a condition that thousands of people suffer from, but it is not the people who HAVE the condition that do the actual suffering.

It is the people around them.

You see, CRS stands for Chronic Re-Gifting Syndrome.

In all fairness I should mention that my mother is a nurse, and deals with primarily older patients. Most of these patients are very grateful to my mother, and bestow upon her tokens of appreciation thats' thoughtfulness usually far outweighs its' usefulness. I am talking crocheted tissue box holders, small ceramic animals, fruitcakes, etc.

My mother is herself quite an accomplished gift giver. She has a great sense of style and an uncanny knack for giving people something that is precisely what they have always wanted but never realized. Usually I am blown away by her gift choices. So when I visit, and she says "Oh I forgot, I have a gift for you!" and hands me a porcelein frog...I know what's really going on. And I allow her to regift unto me because that's what daughters are there for, to relieve their mothers of gifts they cannot use (and sometimes ones they do use, if they are away on vacation and it is, say, a fabulous gold multi strand necklace).

Anyway, my mother recently went to Europe with some of her girlfriends and when she came back, she presented me my birthday gifts of a beautiful aquamarine ring, and a lovely pearl bracelet with a flower shaped clasp. I was grateful for the lovely gifts and have been wearing them both pretty much ever since.

This afternoon, my mother and her brother (my uncle Jack) went out for coffee and my mom regaled us with stories from her trip, gossip on family and friends overseas and so on. She told us a particularly interesting story about how she spent Valentine's day dining in a friends' restaurant in Brouge and it was SO nice and the food was SO delicious and the company was SO entertaning and the owners of said restaurant were SO cute and they gave every woman in the restaurant a little cheapy pearl bracelet with a tacky flower clasp as a Valentine's Day gesture.

Say what!? I looked down at my wrist and up at my mom. "You mean this cheapy, tacky pearl bracelet?".

She looked at it and instantly a look came across her face. An "Oh Shit!" look.

"Oh yeah...well you like that kind of stuff!"

Thanks mom! I like how she allowed me to carry on about how beautiful it was and how much I loved it when it was the equivalent of an after dinner mint!!

So I said "So was this ring something you got with your breakfast sandwich?"

In any case, I do still love my tacky, cheapy "pearl bracelet" and I can't really hold it against my mom. I mean she has CRS.

So it's not her fault. But she should not be surprised if for her birthday she gets a travel mug with my company's logo on it.