Mar 29, 2019 4 min read

Here’s one of my new favorite things to do.

I meet my son at the mall, and we go shopping for him. The last time around it was December and he needed warm clothing for his work outdoors. As I stood outside the dressing room, he tried on pants and overalls and woolly underpinnings; he emerged with his arms loaded with enough garments to see him through until spring. On the way to the register he noticed a pair of work boots.

“If you need them, try them on,” I said. He turned the boot over to look at the price.

“No, that’s OK,” he said.

You gotta love that about him, and his sister. While both of them are always happy for a shopping trip with mom, they look at price tags. My daughter once returned a sweater to the rack, even though she liked how it looked on her. She declared it too expensive. It was $28.

With my son out on his own and busy working, and my daughter away at college, these shopping trips don’t happen more than once or twice a year, but I cherish them. I’ll take a few uninterrupted hours any way I can get them.

Paging through the department store racks, my son narrates the ways in which the jeans and sweatshirts would fit into his life. The dark-wash jeans? He needs something to wear when he photographs models at fashion shows. The sweaters? He’s learning how not to shrink wool in the dryer. I don’t get that kind of openness with a phone call or a text.

I suppose it would be easier if I gave him the cash or my credit card and let him go shopping by himself. But I would be missing out. The shopping trips allow me to reconnect with an earlier version of the mother-son dynamic – those sparkly, sweet days when he needed me. Now, I suspect the shopping is more about my needing a bit of him.

I’m reminded of a shopping trip when he was 2, and we’d just moved to a new town. We went to a children’s clothing boutique on main street. While my son played with the toys in the corner, I selected an outfit, paying more than I normally would have. It was a tan sweater with an anteater appliqué on it, and matching plaid baggy pants. It’s my favorite outfit of his, and it’s sealed in a box in the basement.

Ever the pathetic empty nester, I always come around to telling him that story at some point in our shopping trip. He smiles and shrugs it off. Perhaps the most simultaneously heartbreaking and uplifting realization of empty nesting is this: Children don’t really look backward as they’re flying away. That’s how it’s supposed to go.

Now that spring’s finally here, I’m looking forward to our next shopping trip. This time it will be sneakers and cargo shorts. We made a plan over breakfast this week – another of my favorite things to do.

Sitting across from me in the diner booth, my son was talking so excitedly about his life and his plans, he was neglecting to eat. Nor did he notice that I was grabbing forkfuls of blueberry pancake from his plate.

He was wearing the work boots I’d bought him that day. I like to imagine he thinks of our shopping trip when he puts them on, but probably not. That’s how it’s supposed to go.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.