Non fiction

Mixed Memories

I had keys, but in the years since leaving home I had taken to ringing the bell so my mother could again compose her flustered face. This time though my father answered the door and in his usual glacial tone said, ‘She is in the conservatory getting all… emotional.’ It was both a hello and an instruction to go and look after her. I brushed down the corridor  filled with pictures from my childhood, all positioned carefully by my mother, who had selected photos in which my unruly hair had been moulded, against the forces of nature, into something visually clean and controlled.

I had never known anyone to make an emotionally unstable wreck look so elegant. She was stretched out on the floor, surrounded by a fortress of photo albums, arm gently resting on the coffee table. She sobbed only occasionally, dabbing the streams of tears so as not to ruin her immaculate make-up. The much awaited photograph set she had ordered from my graduation ceremony had finally arrived.

She was holding a picture from my first ballet exam. Only seven years old. A gap-toothed child, still all the wrong shape, smiling at the camera. ‘You were such a beautiful child, I was so proud that day. You were such a star even back then, the most beautiful little child, and how I loved getting you ready for all your dance recitals.’

My memory of that day is quite different. My mother, always the image of perfection amongst her peers, was a winning pie maker and flower arranger who had married the perfect man who in turn had given her three wonderful boys. But I remembered her on the verge of tears moments before I entered that exam hall. Tears of pure distress at her less than perfect child.

The women in her social circles looked up to my mother, the wondrous woman who had so graciously adopted a little mixed race girl. She had told all her friends that she had fallen in love at first sight, regardless of my colour and that she had so wanted a little girl after three boys. In my teenage years it became apparent that I was quite fair for a child with mixed parentage, someone ‘like her’, as some of my mother's friends would refer to me, though I wasn't entirely sure if they meant adopted or not white (specifics aside, I was different). I always felt that they were silently saying you did so well with the boys, it must be some of that bad blood she has in her.

My mother attempted to make me fit in. She had kneaded and moulded me with all her will; the ballet classes, violin, horse riding, all conspiring to form my shell, her image of perfection. She seemed to have forgotten all the precious blonde girls who she looked at wistfully as she dealt with my wild curly locks. The English Rose blusher handed out by my ballet teacher hardly grazed my skin. I seemed to be the only one left with the memory of her shouting on the morning of the exam; pulling the biggest comb she could find through my mane with such gusto she broke several teeth. How could she have forgotten burning me with hot irons she found on a trip to America? All the Sunday evenings spent cross legged as she pulled my hair mercilessly into a failed French plait.

I remember entering the colourless exam room, still surrounded in a cloud of hair lacquer, wincing from the pins shoved into the bun, my thick thighs (from the bad blood) rubbing ever so slightly.

She picked up my graduation picture, and with a final sigh, ‘I just wished you hadn't have worn your hair like that. There are ways to control it now.’

Rebecca Solomon