My mother is sixty-seven. She lost my dad three years ago. She lives, by herself, in the small house in Tucson where I grew up — the one with the lemon tree out front and the screened porch where my parents used to drink coffee in the mornings.
She is not by herself, exactly. She has Pixie. Pixie is a Yorkshire Terrier of indeterminate age — somewhere between eight and twelve, the rescue had been vague — who came into my mother's life eighteen months after my father passed. Pixie weighs four and a half pounds and has more opinions per pound than any other living thing I have ever encountered. My mother adores her, in a way that I don't think she has adored anything since my dad.
I am writing this because I want to tell you what to send your mother for Mother's Day if your mother is anything like my mother. And what to send is not flowers.
Why I had been sending flowers in the first place
It was easy. That's the honest answer. I have a job. I have two teenagers. The flower delivery sites have my mom's address saved. Every May, I would click through, pick the 'premium' tier because I felt guilty about not visiting more, type a nice card message, and forget about it until she texted to thank me.
She always thanked me. She is a generous woman and a good thanker. But over the years I started to notice a pattern in her thanks. They were warm. They were grateful. They were short.
The year my dad died, I sent flowers and she sent back a paragraph. The next year I sent flowers and she sent back two sentences. By the third year I was sending flowers and she was sending back: 'They're beautiful, honey, thank you so much.'
Twelve words. Always twelve words. I was paying $120 a year for twelve words.
What changed my mind
Last March I was visiting my mother for her birthday. I was helping her clean out a closet — one of those projects that older parents start and adult children finish — and we found, in a box at the back, every greeting card she had ever received from my father. Forty-six years of cards. Birthdays, anniversaries, Mother's Days, just-because-I-love-you cards.
She had kept every one of them. The flowers he had sent had wilted. The chocolates had been eaten. The cards had stayed.
She did not say anything about this. She did not have to. I sat on the floor of her bedroom holding cards from the 1980s and looking at her handwriting on the envelopes and I thought: I have been sending the wrong thing.
Things that last. That was the lesson. My mother did not want a hundred dollars in roses. She wanted something that would still be in her life in November.
The idea that arrived
I sat with this for a few weeks. I did not want to send a candle, because she has fifteen candles. I did not want to send a journal, because she does not journal. I did not want to send another framed photo of the grandkids, because there are six of those already in her hallway and the youngest grandchild is now in college and the photos are hopelessly out of date.
Then it hit me. Pixie.
Pixie is the center of my mother's daily life. She is the reason my mother gets up in the morning. She is the reason my mother takes the long walk around the block twice a day. She is, in some practical sense, the reason my mother is okay.
I would send my mother a portrait of Pixie. A real one. Something that would still be on her wall when Pixie was no longer with us — and, eventually, something that would still be on her wall when my mother was no longer with us, and I had brought it home with me to my own house.
Where I ordered it
I had seen — like everyone has seen — a lot of cheap, fast pet portrait services on social media. I did not want one of those. I wanted something that would hold up. I asked around in a few group chats and the same name kept coming up: a small American studio called Fido & Frame.
What sold me on them, specifically, was that you got to see a free preview of the portrait before you paid. With my mother, the resemblance had to be exact. Pixie has very specific eyebrows — long, expressive, slightly judgmental — and if those eyebrows came back wrong, the whole gift would be wrong.
I uploaded a photo of Pixie. I picked the watercolor style. I picked the Gallery Canvas, vertical, 16x24. The list price was $169.
I was a first-time customer, so I qualified for their welcome discount of $30 off — the kind of clean, no-countdown-timer offer that I appreciate as someone who is exhausted by manufactured urgency. The site noted it was a limited-time first-customer offer, and I am the kind of person who acts on those before they expire, so I did.
Final price: $139. The preview came back two days later. Pixie's eyebrows were correct. I approved it. The canvas shipped.
The phone call I got from my mother
My mother got the package on the Friday before Mother's Day. She called me at 4:30 in the afternoon, which is unusual — she never calls during my workday.
She was crying.
Not a small cry. A full one. The kind of crying that took her a minute to be able to talk through. I sat down at my desk and waited.
When she could speak, she said: 'Oh, Rachel. Oh, Rachel. Oh, my goodness.'
She told me she had opened the package on her dining room table. She told me she had not known what it was until she pulled it out. She told me she had stood there for a long minute looking at Pixie on the canvas and then she had picked up Pixie — the actual Pixie, who had been napping on the couch — and held her up next to the painting and said, 'Look. Pix. That's you.'
She told me, and these are her exact words: 'This is the best thing anyone has given me since your father died.'
I sat at my desk and cried at work. My coworker brought me a tissue.
Where the portrait lives now
The watercolor of Pixie is on my mother's bedroom wall, above her dresser, where she sees it first thing every morning when she gets up.
She has, I am told by my sister, who visits more than I do, started showing it to everyone who comes into the house. The mailman has seen it. The plumber has seen it. The bridge group has seen it twice. My mother is not a bragger about gifts, but she has become, in a very specific way, a bragger about this one.
I am writing this in late April. Mother's Day is in three weeks.
If you are like I was — clicking through a flower site at the last minute, picking the premium tier because you feel guilty — please consider what I am about to say next.
What to do, if your mother has a pet she loves
Order the portrait now. Not next week. Now. The watercolor portraits ship in about ten to twelve days — it is tight for Mother's Day this year if you wait. The Gallery Canvas is, in my opinion, the right gift for a mother. Vertical orientation, 16x24, in a frame she will actually like.
Use the free preview to make sure the eyes are right and the markings are right and the breed is right. (My friend ordered one for her mom of a French Bulldog and the preview came back looking slightly Boston-Terrier-ish; she asked for a revision and the second preview was perfect. The point is: speak up at the preview stage. That is what it is for.)
If you are a first-time customer, the $30 welcome discount is, last I checked, still available. It applies automatically. There is no countdown timer trying to scare you.
Send it to your mother's house, not yours. Let her open it on her dining room table.
Then wait for the phone call.
