The Year In Music: 10th March/Mother's Day

The Wish, Bruce Springsteen (written approx. 1988, released 1998)

When I was a child, six or seven, I collected recipe cards and little leaflets giving health advice from the supermarket and the doctor. We had a little loft in our house above the utility room which I made mine; I’d go up there and make a world with them, imagine running a shop, or a surgery, something more fantastical. My mum let me have my private world and how I dwelt in it, how I still do.

E has started collecting recipe cards too, without prompting, without my recounting of any of my quirky childhood habits. I think of what we pass on as mothers through words, and what we pass on without them, through brain chemistry or passages of blood or the twists of DNA.

I think of how you’re so much like me, how you differ, how you’re getting older, how hard I find it to let the cord stretch, to let you go.