Wooden Box

The wooden box was borne out of my daughter’s hands. It smells divine — of wood, of varnish. It holds my jewellery — mainly costume, mass-produced, along with my grandmother’s hand-written note.

My daughter crafted the box with her slender determined hands at school. I imagine the focused crease between her eyebrows as she measured twice before cutting. How accomplished she has always been when building things; be it Lego sets or flat pack furniture when it was just me and her siblings and I was teetering on the edge of survival while also thriving like never before as a solo mother.

My brown-eyed curly haired teenaged daughter made this box for me, with a beautiful carved out sunrise on its lid. I must tell her that her desire to make something meaningful rather than existing in a world of ready-made disposable things impresses me daily. Even though she is hard on me and yet without fast fashion and online deliveries I would have likely drowned.

When she brought it home from school, the box became my daily reminder that love pulls us through. Adolescence was not easy on my daughter and she now tells me how sadness enveloped to disable her. The box holds the promise of a renegotiated mother/daughter relationship and of the love, the grief, the nostalgia all swirling within me from our very first skin to skin when I learned why we exist to love.

My grandmother, my Baba, she too navigated womanhood, like our ancestors before her. She wrote the note for my school project, by correspondence from Poland to England. Baba shares how at the same age as my daughter World War II shaped her outlook; how she held a deep-seated sense of responsibility, patriotism, a desire to organise, to rise up. Post war her and her mother did not have a common language ‘we did not understand one another at all’ she writes.

In my 40s and full of rage incited rebellion, I read Baba’s note when I need to be held, with my hair gently stroked, like she used to. I have never settled for a life of regrets, I have aways become the woman I set out to be. This is what Baba would have wanted for me. All she saw in me was possibility and that sense of unfolding within me remains.

I do not have my daughter’s talent for creation of physical things. I am full of admiration for her sewing skills, inventiveness, textural passions. The wooden box holds memories of the past, my cheap plastic rings, the engagement ring which Baba gave to me and her own mother had worn. I now wear it with the wistfulness of loss and the bravery, along with promise new beginnings and of being truly loved. Though my mass-produced rings will outlast us all, women will continue to rise up as sure as that sun painstakingly carved by my daughter atop the wooden box.