Paper Dolls

Photo © {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/sinisterkid/}Alexandra Urbanowicz{/link}

Throughout my childhood, the person who filled my consciousness, cut up my food, taught me to read, cooked and tidied, answered questions and kept me entertained was my mother. As soon as I could talk I would ask her countless questions; I was a constant demand on her energy reserves. When I grew older it seemed to me that who she was, who she had been, and who she dreamt of being as a child was my business; that possessing knowledge about her past was my birthright. I would pry, snoop and push boundaries for the tiniest scrap of information. But she never relented. Her past was a closed book to me. The only insight was the catalogue of old photographs. Photos in a strange shape and finish, with a light and colour all of their own; albums and albums of happier times, past times. She always appeared as a sleek and poised subject, both in photographs and real life. The very model of British-chic: once in a micro-mini and futuristic tailoring, the next in decadent luxe, draped and dripping off her with a style that was more heiress than waitress.

We spent hours drawing and colouring, cutting and pasting, absorbed in the crafts devised to keep me occupied. She would draw me the outline of a woman to colour in. I would be asked to choose the shape of the skirt for my line woman, and I could choose from one of two styles: A-line or puffball (it was the ’80s). I would do my utmost to colour them well, to do them justice. I can see her face now, all ’80s choppy layers and cheekbones, as she mixed me an ad-hoc glue of flour and water and gave me old scraps of luxuriant cloth to make collages. I would sometimes go conceptual, but I always returned to making two-dimensional outfits out of the fabric, following the lines my mother taught me. I might cut out a little paisley skirt and match it with a t-shirt snipped out of a bit of summer seersucker. I would stick the hacked fabric to the page, creating a pattern clash. I can see and feel them now: the cloth, the patterns and textures, the seams and trimmings — the very weft and warp.

Sometimes, when I look at my mother, I feel so aware that I didn’t inherit her poise. Even now, when she is curling back into herself a little, beginning her descent down the horseshoe of life, there is something graceful about her. As I grew older, she started to open up. Once I became an adult, she confided in me and began to share little details of her life — tiny secrets and stories. In the old photographs of her, I could see the same paisley and seersucker that I had chopped and sliced and stuck to forgotten pages. When I first realised that these clothes and the scrapped fabrics from my childhood were the same, I felt bereft that I had unknowingly shredded a symbol of my mother’s earlier life. I wondered whether she had flinched when I made the first cut. As time passed, the feelings passed — and I accepted that she had chosen to discard those clothes and take up life with me as her child, and that my childhood arts and craft efforts weren’t a haphazard desecration of who my mother was. I began to see them as a reminder that she had let me in to her most favourite and special world and had opened up about her former self long before I even knew what that world and who that self were.

Charlotte Sandes is a writer based on the south coast of England, who loves nothing more than a day filled with charity shops, strong cups of tea with biscuits and a good magazine, and people watching from a safe distance. She blogs at Long Gone.