When I tried to buy her designer clothes and jewelry she gently asked me to stop.

“I don’t need twenty years of luxury to make up for twenty years on the street, Mariana,” she said.

“I just want to have breakfast with you.”

That sentence rearranged something in me, because it exposed the assumption underneath my own generosity, which turned out to be the same rotten assumption I’d held about the poor all along.

I had thought that what my mother needed, after twenty years of deprivation, was things — that I could love her by buying, that the correct response to two decades of having nothing was to now give her everything.

And she gently showed me that I had it backwards.