My mother used to drive a yellow Volkswagen Beetle. Bodacious, it bounced over the dual carriageway, as she sped to Sainsbury’s.
“There’s nothing new under the sun” she’d say.
As a matter of fact, my mother reserved these phrases for moments she deemed just right.
We’re all mosaics of the people we’ve loved, admired, resented, lusted, favoured, fawned.
Echoes of the voices we’ve listened to, heard, ignored, neglected, even.
How many palms have touched yours?
Like praying pilgrims, our hands come together for a brief moment of touch.
We share our warmth.
Our hands hold years of weight, turmoil, pressure, love, care, nurture.
On mine, my right hand – three scars, a blister, a burn, and a row of callouses that won’t
leave.
Reminders of the toil and labour under those fluorescent lights.
On my left, a singular brown freckle on my index finger, just a centimetre from the second
notch of knuckle. Like my mother’s.
My mouth purses, a cupid’s bow that’s been pasted through the generations.
My bottom lip stained with a freckle, like my sister’s, like our mother’s.
I used to believe originality to be virtuous, I strived for individuality, to go against the grain.
I truly believed that only in originality could I truly create. To be myself was to be hand
carved, cut our materials untouched. Unspoiled.
Now I’m older I realise how erroneous that is. I am not so much a creative, as I am a
collector.
I am nothing if not borrowed, woven into a tapestry among many stitches.
I carry my sister in my crowing cackle. My English teacher with her acerbic colloquialisms,
my father through his microscopic attention to music. The sharpness of my tongue is my
mother when she is restless.
I see my mother in my face – I am not an individual, but just my mother’s daughter. My one
crooked tooth – an imperfect inheritance from my father, reminding me that the details of
my face are my mother’s, but in my smile, he lingers.

I swore I’d never become her. To be anything other than myself was to be betrayal. An
erasure of my identity. But to hate my mother, is to hate myself. What is here now, has
always existed. Before and after.
“Nothing is new under the sun” she says.
The words spool around my mind. I am a hand-me down of others, my bouts of patience, a
gift from my love. My stubbornness, a relic from my grandfather.
I’ve collected mannerisms from strangers, gesticulating with their friends to compensate for
the enormous screech of the Northern Line.
I’ve borrowed, kept, lent.
Who can say which is mine?
My mother calls me a “magpie” – I suppose I don’t know what is authentically me. Perhaps
because my truest self are the things I gather, stitched together, never quite knowing what is
wholly mine.