galerija/zgodba-gift-for-a-new-mum.jpg
My daughter had a daughter in March, and for about a week afterwards I could not work out what I was feeling, because it was not only joy. It was recognition. I kept seeing myself at twenty seven, holding her, in exactly the same chair.
So I ordered a picture that runs from the day I became a mother to the day she did.
It is one picture and it holds thirty one years. On the left is my kitchen from 1995, the yellow one, with the pram in the doorway and the radio that I listened to at four in the morning because it was the only thing awake apart from us. On the right is her flat now, which is brighter than mine ever was and has a coffee machine I do not understand.
In the middle is the chair. It is the same chair. It went from my mother to me and now it is in her living room with a muslin cloth over the arm, and it has fed three generations of us at three in the morning.
My mother's ring is on the picture, small, on a chain, because that is how my daughter wears it now. Her first pair of shoes are there, and my first pair are there beside them, and they are almost the same size, which I did not expect to find so moving.
The blanket is the one my mother crocheted, which has been repaired twice and is going to need repairing again.
There are three dates on the truck. Mine, hers, and the baby's. They are written in the same handwriting, in the same size, in a line.
And there are the hands. Three pairs, drawn at the front, because that is the thing that carried down. My mother had those hands, I have them, my daughter has them, and now there is a very small pair that has not decided yet.
She put it in the nursery, at adult eye level, so she can look at it while she is standing there at three in the morning doing what we both did.