Last week, my roommate went out and bought a large assortment of Mother’s Day cards for various women in her life. I read all of them; it was painful. Some were excruciatingly sentimental with poorly rhymed poems; others were supposed to be funny but weren’t.

All of them were a waste of paper.

If I didn’t have prior experience with the world of store-bought cards, I would have thought my roommate had bad literary taste. However, I know for a fact that the pile of cards she brought home was an accurate sampling of what is available. The choices are limited, and even the cream of the crop are not worth the ridiculous amount of money customers pay for the garish mass-marketed pieces of cardstock.

Whenever I gave a gift to my mom that was lacking, she would tell me that it was the “thought that counts.” I know we are poor college students in a struggling economy, but giving a store-bought card to your mom for Mother’s Day shows a distinct lack of thought. It’s like saying, “I thought of you enough to remember to buy you something, but I didn’t actually take time to put thought into a gift that was in any way meaningful.” Our mothers, or other important women in our lives, deserve something better than a fancy form letter to which we just sign our names.

If you’re like me, then money is tight, but I want to stress the fact that putting thought into something is not the same as putting a lot of money into something. In fact, when money is scarce, people are often forced to put more thought into a gift because they have to find a creative way to make the gift meaningful.

To that end, try making something for your mom this Mother’s Day.

There is not much time left until Sunday, so you might want to hold off on any grand schemes to erect monuments in her honor, but there is still plenty of time to make her something small — something like a card.

So grab your crayons and paper and draw her a picture or write her a note that tells her how you really feel. Even if you’re not an artist or poet, at least what you write will be genuine and meant for her, not “Mother Dearest.”

Reach columnist Jenessa Markland at opinion@dailyuw.com.