Giving till it hurts

My kids are old enough to understand Ramazan is not just about dietary restrictions but also of charitable expansion.

When I told my husband that I’d been asked to write a parenting column, he foolishly shortened the duration of our marriage by a decade by guffawing uncontrollably, stopping only on the condition that I would never proffer any parenting advice. So, caveat emptor.

My children are now old enough to understand that Ramazan is not just a month of dietary restrictions, but also one of charitable expansion. I come from a line of givers the likes of which modern times have not seen. A tradition of charity so indiscriminate that my parents would have given us away if we had actually been of any use. Failing that, they gave, not when things had run their course or were too tight, damaged or embarrassing, but when they were shiny and new and still cherished. Like the time my eight-year-old brother was made, not just to give away a beloved toy, but also to carry it to the offending child’s car. Our scars healed and I am old enough to see that my parent’s worldly largesse will serve them well now, in their final resting place, where the souvenir T-shirts read “You really can’t take it with you”. Generosity, it turns out however, is a regressive gene as exemplified by my children.

The dilemma with children is that their brief life translates into their accumulated holdings also being the sum total of their memories. The dog-eared book has always been theirs, so has the half-naked Barbie, the mottling crayons and the stuffed animals with questionable genealogy. And there you have a catalogue of things they brought to me when they were asked to choose what they wanted to give away to needy children. My fault, maybe I had failed to mention that what they choose should not have one foot in the grave and the other in a garbage can. At this new prerequisite, I encountered a mix of bewilderment and hostility that would have been touching if not for the future hoarders I saw dancing in their eyes. They finally saw this for what it was; not a mass expulsion of undesirables but the giving away of your precious daughter to an unworthy man. Had they been older and less apt to terrify themselves by applying every parable to their own lives literally, I would have told them the story of Kane and Abel and how Kane’s sacrifice was rejected because of this very niggardly attitude. Or was that Abel? Well, one of them.

Maybe giving is difficult because humans fear loss of any kind which in turn is why God tests us with it. Perhaps hard cash is easier to part with because it’s so difficult to let go of things that carry the slightest scent of a memory, even if it is now just an odour. You can live with a head of cabbage for a week and not want to throw its mouldy carcass out because you had plans for it. But unless you and George Clooney chose it together, this is just an unfulfilled plan for a chopped salad, not a fond memory. What to speak of clothes we wore to parties where we were fallen in love with, books that we’ve stayed up all night reading or even museum posters bought to mimic Metropolitan Museum tastes on a McDonald’s budget. Even when we have no use for our possessions, they still possess us in an inverse ownership role that benefits no one and does our immortal soul no favors.

With some cajoling and much threatening we settled on the kids donating four books each, decently dressed toys and cash from the college fund. We’ll take these to a hospital I volunteered at (wait till they find out about the Volunteering Gene) and I know that although I may walk in with Kane and Abel, I’ll walk out with two Abels or two Kanes... whichever was the good one.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 5^th, 2010.