My daughter, Qiu Yiran, turned twenty‑four this year.

She now wears tailored blazers, has meetings at 8 a.m., orders oat‑milk matcha lattes, and calls me between subway transfers in downtown Chicago.

She sounds so grown up that sometimes I forget she was once a little girl who collected rabbit stickers and insisted on wearing mismatched shoes to kindergarten because “color symmetry is boring.”

For her birthday, I spent weeks thinking about a present.

A luxury handbag?
An Apple Watch?
A fancy skincare set?

All reasonable choices for a young professional.
All completely lacking in heart.

Then, while cleaning the garage, I found a dusty shoebox filled with small notes - little messages I used to slip into her lunchbox from first to fifth grade.

Some had doodles.
Some had jokes.
Some simply said, “Mama believes in you.”

Suddenly, something tugged inside my chest.

These weren’t just notes. They were pieces of her childhood. Pieces I had forgotten existed.

On impulse, I spread them out on the dining table. There were notes for spelling tests, piano recitals, field trips, and rainy Mondays when she didn’t want to go to school.

I gathered them into a scrapbook.

On the first page I wrote:

“Even when you’re far away, you are always loved in small ways.”

But the night before mailing it, I hesitated.

Would she think it was childish?
Out of touch?
Too sentimental?

I almost replaced it with a gift card.

But in the end, I mailed the scrapbook anyway.

A week later she called with voice trembling.

“Mom… this is the best gift I’ve ever received.”

I heard her sniff on the other end.
She told me she keeps the scrapbook on her work desk.
That she opens it when she feels lonely in a new city.
That the notes remind her she came from a home where she was deeply loved.

Her next words stayed with me:

“Mom, I didn’t know how much I needed this.”

After the call, I realized something about adult children:

They stop asking for tenderness,
not because they don’t need it,
but because they think they’re supposed to outgrow it.

But love doesn’t have an expiration date.

Now, every year, I write her one new note, and add it to the scrapbook that continues to grow.

Nothing expensive.
Nothing flashy.

Just handwriting,
paper,
and a mother’s voice saying:

“No matter where you go, you carry a home inside you.”