ANNA COTTON
I Am the Jam 1992. I hit puberty – Mum hit the menopause. I came of age – we came to blows. I remember her clenched fist striking my upper arm, fracturing my freshly-formed TB jab scab. I recall the pain in my tricep and my throbbing indignation. I don’t remember my crime. It wasn’t the half-smoked roll-up stashed in my school bag, nor the shoplifted Sonic Youth cassettes stowed beneath my bed. It might have been a butter-coated knife spoiling a pot of raspberry jam, liquid eyeliner on a white towel, something resembling a last straw. ‘Why don’t you leave home?’ Mum’s face was livid beetroot. ‘Because I’m thirteen.’ She crumpled in a pool of remorse and sweat. I shivered, staring at the kitchen window, flung open despite the February frost. What’s happened to her? It’s like an intruder’s snuck through the window and switched her for an alien. ‘Why are you acting weird, Mum?’ ‘I’m not going on HRT. It gives you breast cancer.’ ‘Have you been to the GP?’ ‘No, his wife’s in my aerobics class. I couldn’t look her in the eye knowing he’s seen me stripped off.’ ‘You haven’t done aerobics for months – you get all hot and knackered.’ ‘Fat chance I have the time.’ I listened, but only now I’m older do I truly hear. Only now I am the jam, spread too thinly. I am generation sandwich, mother, daughter, holding everything together… and sometimes, everything is too much. Three decades on, Mum has retreated into dementia’s fog. It’s pointless explaining what I’ve come to know – that her fears arose from wisps of half-truths and myths, that it could have been a different story. We never spoke of that day she crossed a line. It never happened again. We’ve rubbed along ever since – not always seeing eye to eye, but, like bread and jam, a time-tested pairing.
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