Despatches from a mother who started late (and is running to catch up)

Family Ties

A friend said: "Read this book. It'll make you cry." She handed me a copy of it then wandered off to look at something else. On the cover was a young mother with lots of curly dark hair holding up a surprised-looking baby, dressed in a stripey baby-gro, against the background of a blue, blue sky.  I stood there in the bookshop and started leafing through Someday and sure enough, in seconds I was blubbing, tears were spurting out my eyes at the story of a mother who dreams of what the future might hold for her beloved daughter. "Va-vay, could you lend me your handkerchief?" I asked. "No," he said. The hankie was already dirty, he explained. I didn't care. Insisted he hand it over. He capitulated.

I didn't cry because the little girl had a particularly grim future in store, just because it made me aware of the fragile hopes and dreams we mothers have for our children, that we project far into the future, many of them unspoken or unacknowledged. "I didn't think you'd cry that much," said my friend in astonishment, when she returned from teenage fiction. "I know," I said apologetically. "I'm sorry, it's just, I find this sort of thing very, well, emotional."

After I bought my copy, (well, I felt I had to after my snotty-nosed outburst) and returned home, I read Someday again a couple of times (it's a quick read, which is just as well, given its effect on me). And cried again both times.

The mother in the book dreams of how her daughter might live her life to the full, leaving home for the first time ('Someday you will look at this house and wonder how something that feels so big can look so small'), diving into a lake, running and singing, experiencing joy and sorrow, herself becoming first a mother, ('Someday I will watch you brushing your child's hair') then in time a grandmother. It closes with the mother looking far into the future, imagining her daughter in old age. In this imagined future, the daughter (whom we first saw as a baby) now has silver hair and we come full circle back to the present, when we see, sitting on a table in her home, a picture of her as a baby in the arms of her mother, who is narrating the story. It's how I felt on becoming a mother, as if I'd at last taken my place in the chain that links one generation of women to the next and to the one after that and the one after that, an invisible thread of love connecting all of us to each other, the thread sometimes taut with pressure, at other times slack. No longer a reproductive full stop. But part of a circle. As if I'd handed on the baton by having my own child. The perfect ending.

Posted 26 November 2007 16:49

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