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When it comes to giving a gift to your mother, kids get a pass for a long time.  But when your mother has a milestone birthday like sixty, a macaroni necklace will not do.

It was time for me to get my mother a grown-up gift.

This is not to say that I haven’t gotten her nice things in the past, but this year I wanted it to be really special.  Maybe because I know that my mom is single, I wanted to get her a gift as nice as a husband would get. 

Not one of her husbands—a really good husband.

I got in my head that it had to be jewelry.

They say you don’t really know a person until you travel together, but is that true if the person is your mother? 

I asked myself this on our recent trip to Arizona, our first mother-daughter vacation in almost ten years.  We had an amazing time and got along great, but I noticed some new quirks, beginning as soon as our first flight. 

“Can you open the window?” she asked.

“Sure.”  I slid the shade up and squinted into the light.  “Wow, you can see—”

“Nm-mm,” my mother grunted, and I noticed she was shielding her eyes.

“Sorry, too bright?”

“No, I don’t want to see how high we are, it scares me.”

Now I squinted at her.  “You asked me to open it.”

“Yes, but I don’t want to see!”