Inheritance

I am standing in the kitchen, up to my forearms in frothy, warm water, when I realise I am becoming my mother. The train that will take us to London, and by extension, Paris, is in one hour and twenty minutes. I am still wrapped in my blue dressing gown. Cupboards are thrown open behind me, ready to receive clean crockery. I am planning on cleaning the hob next. Then I will sweep the floor.

I don’t know what it is – this urge to clean when on the precipice of a journey. There have been many childhood holidays in the past where I have watched my mother doing the same thing. As my dad loads the car (always his job) my mother runs a sponge across kitchen surfaces. She dries plates with a kitchen towel. If asked what she is doing, she gives exactly the same answer that I give, all these years later. “It’s just nice to come back to a clean kitchen.”

As I’m drying up plates from yesterday’s raclette, I reflect on inheritance and all these little quirks my parents have given me. My mother’s dry wit. My dad’s receding hairline. My mother’s knobbly knees. My dad’s loud bark of a laugh. I have never felt closer to my parents than I do in these moments of mimicry, in this moments of learnt behaviours. There is a kind of love there, spread through the genes, through the years spent together.

Of course, that doesn’t make cleaning the kitchen just before we leave for France a good idea. I still have other things to do. I haven’t packed enough t-shirts yet, or a wash-bag, there are Christmas cards not yet written or posted, I need to charge my phone, and I am still planning on having a shower and washing my hair between all that too.

But I chose this moment because I’ve also inherited anxiety. Partly from my parents, partly from the pressures of society. I have always found standing at the sink and washing up very soothing to my brain. I have a task, it has a fixed time limit, and I can see clearly how much left I have to do. I am in control. My lizard brain is satisfied. It does not think of all the things that could go wrong on the journey ahead.

I guess in the end, you have to take the good with the bad. And there is a lot more good than there is bad.

(I could do without the receding hairline though).