When the kids are little, we know them. We wipe them, top and bottom, and hold them when they hurt. But they grow up and grow away. We know it. We try to know them as they know themselves, but it’s not really possible to stop seeing them through our parent eyes, hard as we try. Still we try, and too often, fall short. Perhaps the most concrete measure of our inability to see them as they see themselves are the gifts we get them.

These gifts lay embarrassingly bare the dissonance between the giver’s outdated or delusional perception of you and the regrettable reality of you. They make you feel resentful, and ashamed of feeling resentful. You’re afflicted with a terrible pity for these unwanted objects and end up either keeping them in a closet or drawer for decades, or else guiltily returning or regifting them, like leaving a newborn on a doorstep.

Parental presents are especially fraught. Most painful of all, for me, were the sweaters. For years my mother bought me perfectly nice sweaters of a kind that I never wear: sweaters with patterns, “Cosby Show” sweaters, suburban dad sweaters. I felt she was attempting to dress me as a big sexless teddy bear rather than a man living in New York City and still hoping, in middle age, to attract a mate.

To be fair, buying anyone “Cosby Show” sweaters is inexcusable and has nothing to do with not knowing your child. They were horrible at the time, which was part of the joke, and inflicting such sartorial splendor on a child is about as passive aggressive as it gets. Maybe mom has dementia? When it comes to sweaters, it’s not hard to ask, or at least pay attention to what they buy for themselves and try to mirror the general concept.

Chances are pretty good you will still fall short, missing the nuance of style that they see in their choices, buttons instead of a zipper or tight weave instead of cable, but at least it won’t be an affront to their lingering hope that they will someday marry, when men and women decide to stop trying to overcome their sense of worthlessness by being snarky online and become friends and open to love again. When that day comes, there will be a new, unworn sweater in the dresser to wear.

But mom would have been thrilled if you just told her what you want. She wants to make you happy, provided it doesn’t involve a nose ring or Satan, and would be thrilled to get some guidance.

Well-meaning friends asked me why I didn’t simply tell my mother what kinds of clothes I liked. I just looked at them as if they’d suggested I simply change aspects of my personality. When Mom mentioned that Dad (always a dapper dresser) had forbidden her to buy clothes for him because she never got him the right kind, I knew I could never bring myself to correct her sartorial vision for me: If she were to buy me an angora sweater or little yachtsman’s cap or purple bootees with upcurled toes, I was doomed to wear them for her.

My friend Boyd and I have an aphorism: All mothers live in palaces built of lies.

Fathers too.

My father also gave me several increasingly nice watches over the years, all of which I drunkenly lost or smashed more or less immediately. This felt particularly damning of my competence and maturity, since a watch is, or used to be, a symbol of adult responsibility: It’s the accessory that men who have to dress identically for work use to signal their relative wealth and status, the sign of a man with places to be at very precise times, who cannot afford to be late.

But not only had watches largely been made redundant by cellphones by my adulthood; it also turned out I never really needed to be anywhere. I tried to make my watchless wrist into a symbol of freedom and independence in my own mind, as if I were too wild to be yoked or branded, man. To this day I don’t wear a watch, less because I don’t need one than because, on some level, I don’t think I deserve to.

A watch can be a sign of something your father values, appreciates for what it reflects and represents. It may be that dad knows you’re not a watch guy like he is, but he believes that you understand, maybe even appreciate, that what he gives isn’t to mark time but love. He is giving you something he cares about in the hope that you will realize that it means he cares about you.

And it’s not as if you have much of anything you value that will last, has the potential to be with you forever as you live in a disposable world where nothing doesn’t break, get tired, and thrown away to be replaced by the next cool disposable doodad. And dad thinks you deserve it, even if you don’t believe that you do.

When you were little, we were your world. Our hugs made your problems better. Our care made your world safe and warm. But now that you’re grown, independent, we barely have a place. We know it. We applaud your independence, your growth. We’re proud of who you are, the struggles you’ve fought and overcome, the accomplishments you made. But you are still our children. You will always be our children.

We’re sorry if you don’t like the gifts we’ve chosen for you. We understand that we’re substituting our values for yours, our tastes for yours, and we don’t really know who you are in your head anymore. We know that we’re flawed mortals, not the perfect parents you thought we were, that we tried to be, when you were young. We try, but we fall short so often.

But know we love you, ugly sweater or unwanted watch notwithstanding. And we will love you until the day we die, even if we never nail the perfect gift.