My Mothers Breakfasts

by Sam

Mothers and food are linked. Mothers offer food or withdraw food to indicate love or disapproval. Women take the smallest portion, or the burnt or nothing at all to make sure that their families eat. I remember my own mother making me sit at the table for hours because I wouldn't eat my greens. This had become a battle of will. The cabbage was no longer a consideration by the time I left my seat. I could have held that cabbage in my mouth for hours rather than swallow it.

When I was very small my mother always ate her breakfast standing up. She was - and is - that kind of woman. She is in a hurry. A hurry from or to what I still don't know and I have known her now for thirty one years. My grandmother knew her for fifty five years and was still in the dark about my mother's need to rush: "I don't know where she thinks she's off to, she's in a rush to reach the grave" my nan would say darkly after another fleeting visit from my mum ("I can only stay ten minutes" is my mum's usual greeting). For breakfast my mother ate two Weetabix with sugar and milk (and she still does).

Perhaps this is why I prefer to linger over a breakfast choice; toast or cereal? fruit or - gasp - nothing? Breakfast is my favourite meal of the day. There is a fresh clean light on breakfast, there is post to read and there are cats to feed, and time - however brief - to contemplate the new canvas of the day ahead. My mum's most sacred ingredient of her breakfast was the top off the milk. Even this phrase holds almost holy significance for me: the-top-off-the-milk. It evokes almost magical connotations of a warm kitchen on dark 1970s mornings, no breakfast TV, purple carpet, brown dog.

These days we are all skimmed or half-fat but the milk was delivered in a pint bottle then and it had its own little silver foil cap. The bottle had to be kept upright and undisturbed for twelve hours so that the cream could collect on the top. Then she would carry it carefully - o! precious vessel! - to the cereal bowl to pour onto her cereal.

Hmph.

So I decided I wanted the top off the milk too.

At first my mum - quite rightly - resisted my demands. This was her special treat and she resented me suddenly trying to muscle in on it.

"I want the top off the milk"

"Why do you all of a sudden want it?"

"Well, you have it!"

"Do as I say not as I do" (a wild stab at keeping the lid on the situation, she knew it wouldn't work).

"But you have it". And so on.

I was her only child, her only daughter, and I know she understood the allure of it; the luxury, the grownup-ness. I am sure it represented at least these two things for her: when she was a child her grandmother made lumpy porridge for breakfast which she and my uncle hated. They would pull horrible faces at each other as they tried to force the porridge down their necks. Sometimes their nan (my nan's mum) would catch them at it and bellow at them: "don't make sheep's eyes! just eat it!". Maybe the top off the milk made my mum feel safe, independent, even decadent. She couldn't afford many decadent things.

The gentle squabbles over who would have the cream warmed up many winter mornings, my mother a determined woman (perhaps the age I am now), and me my mother's daughter.

The apple, as they say, didn't fall far from that tree. Occasionally my stepfather would attempt to intervene on his way out to work but we would ignore him - he was a quiet, undemonstrative man. He never disciplined me and rarely talked to me except in passing. Now I wish that she had said no and put her foot down but eventually my mum ordered an extra pint a day to be delivered. We both had our way. I glowed with triumph and she with compromise - only now I see that it is more often compromise that makes a winner. Happily, I suspect that my mum found a way to preserve her ritual (no matter how unhealthy it was). Many times when I lay in bed at night I thought I heard the rattle of spoon against bowl.

But there was never any proof.

Sam