I’m still on that engagement high a few days later as I lounge with my writing group friends on my friend’s deck. We do a free writing activity.

My prompt: flowers. A flush of pride fills me and I think back to my son’s vort. But deeper down, a faint, almost imperceptible echo of some disappointment stirs within me, a memory I hadn’t consciously acknowledged in years.

I shove the memory down and write about my son’s kallah, then about my other lovely kallahs who came before her. I write about my idiosyncrasy of adding a hundred dollars to all their bouquets. None of the florists ever posted that sign I imagined: This mechuteneste paid an extra fee to infuse her incoming girls with the sweet scent of status.

Then, without my consciously thinking about it, my pen scribbles a sentence. It jolts me. Because no kallah should have grass for her most momentous moment.

My psyche does a quick flip. I stare at the words, blush.

When it’s my turn to share, I speed read that part, a little tremor in my voice I hope my friends don’t notice. Then I scurry home and stash this witness to my unspoken angst deep in the drawers of my mind.

But it had already made itself known.

On Shabbos, lilies wave from their silver vase and something stirs in me. Out comes the album from my own vort, and there it is. The arrangement my mother-in-law got for the occasion. No flowers. No soft petals, no delicate fragrance. Just unyielding leaves and strange fleshy blooms. Greenery with dark colors, an arrangement that would have looked more in place in a garden than at a simchah. My friends had questioned it:

“No flowers?… Oh!”

They’re… nice. Really.”

I run the photo by my husband, ask him to name each plant. My husband passes the test, garden enthusiast that he is, then looks at me. “It wasn’t what you wanted.”

It’s an understatement I let pass as we leaf through the rest of the album together. I twirl my diamond ring round and round my finger as we reminisce the joys. And the pieces click into place. My need to pay an extra hundred dollars for my son’s kallah’s vort flowers. The shame and embarrassment I’d felt as a young kallah, at a time when fitting in, when being just like everyone else, filled a crucial sense of belonging. I hadn’t realized those feelings had settled within me so deeply.

I blink myself back to the present as I slip into my shoes and walk my husband to shul.

“Your mother had lots of plants.”

“Oh, yeah!” He takes me on a memory tour of her gardens. Each leaf, every bloom devotedly handled with quiet joy. Indoors and outdoors. “It was her life.”

A profound realization envelope me. His mother had gifted me at my vort from the very same stock she watered and tended with such care. Not grass, but a piece of her passion, a living representation of her love for beauty and growth.

I twirl my ring, Ma’s gift to me, presented with her heart. I know she’d pored over stones with a loupe, nixing, setting aside, until she chose the most beautiful one there. The one that now graces my finger.

Ma loved jewelry.

Loved everything beautiful, within and without.

Including me.

Today, it hits me: Ma’s gifts were all signs of her deep love. She gifted me with what was precious to her — beauty — and today, now that she’s gone, I realize that the intention behind her gift is more meaningful than status.

It’s my next son’s turn to blush at his l’chayim. Later, I pore over the store’s photos of flower arrangements, seeking the bouquet that will infuse my beautiful kallah with my love, finally settling on sparkling white roses arranged on majestic pillars.

I pay the set price and don’t add even a dollar more.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 976)