We went to the cinema to see A Beautiful Mind instead. We were walking up the steps into the cinema and when I turned around in the dark to ask her which row she fancied sitting in, she was gone. I followed a muffled groan to discover her lying on the plush cinema carpet mumbling something about her left arm. I can see us both now, whispering in case we disturbed the other patrons’ enjoyment of the trailers. ‘Are you OK,’ I whispered. ‘No, I think it’s broken,’ she whispered back.
Embarrassed, I managed to get her up from the floor and lead her out of the cinema whispering about whether we should get an ambulance to the Royal Victoria Hospital. We took a taxi instead.
The first thing I did when we got there was ring my sister. ‘Rach,’ I said. ‘I’m in the hospital with Mother. I think you better come down here.’ The fact that my mother had said she didn’t want to bother anyone else was immaterial. I was not about to start playing nurse when there was someone much more qualified a phone call away. I don’t think I relaxed until my mother was so full of morphine she was in no position to judge my skills as a Florence Nightingale. We got A Beautiful Mind out on video a few months later. She cried.
The phone rang at around 9am one morning a few months later. ‘Róisín,’ she said. ‘I fell down the stairs at work and . . .’ She had broken her other arm.
Four months later, the right arm had not healed. An operation was called for. In an operating theatre in St Vincent’s, a portion of bone was taken from her hip and grafted on to her broken arm. Everyone else was at work and, though I had deadlines looming, I was moved to action by the thought of her waking up from the anaesthetic all disoriented and afraid.
So, against my will, against every unbroken hospital-hating bone in my body, I was there, stomach squirming, as she emerged, an oxygen mask on her face and a drip coming from her arm, looking as confused as a child who has just awoken from a bad dream.
‘Am I OK?’ she asks and I tell her that she is. And she asks me to kiss her, so I do, on the forehead. I stroke her hair like I remember her doing to me when I was young. I listen to the nurses in the ward sympathising with this lady about her frail hips and that young girl about her accident. Smiling and joking and cajoling, even as they empty out bedpans and listen to pain and wipe away blood. I think they are some of the most incredible people I’ve ever seen. And I think I am one of the most cowardly.
But, I tell myself, I am here. And, though I don’t believe her, my mother smiles over from her hospital bed and she tells me that is enough.
I’ve caused her so much grief over the years. And yet, she asks hardly anything in return. Like most mothers, I think. Ordinary mothers. Although, really, there are no ordinary mothers. And she is certainly not ordinary. I am writing this a few days before Mother’s Day. But she doesn’t do Mother’s Day. Doesn’t need cards. Doesn’t want chocolates. There are no rushed, guilty trips to the newsagent. No buying overpriced bunches of carnations that still bear the sticker from the convenience store. No fussing over which restaurant to take her to. Happy Mother’s Day? No way.
The Dependent Daughter wants to give her something anyway. A mother and daughter story: once upon a time there was a daughter who was not always kind to her mother. She stole coins from the drawer in the kitchen. She stole notes from the purse with the sticky clasp. She once lied so brazenly about where she has been until this hour of the night that the mother had to go searching the neighbourhood in a frenzy until she found her and dragged her out of the pub. The daughter hated the mother that night. But she appreciated the gesture when she realised what, and more precisely who, the mother had saved her from.
One day the daughter decided to run away. She had been given too much maths homework and, anyway, there was this boy she liked with white make-up on his face who looked identical, if you squinted, to Robert Smith from The Cure. He lived in Co. Wicklow, so she took a train to the end of the line and then a bus and then somehow she arrived at the right house on the dark country lane.
The boy had seemed full of encouragement on the phone but now just looked embarrassed. And she thought he didn’t look that cool after all, in his posh school uniform, with no white face and no blood-red lipstick. Reluctantly, he agreed that the girl could live for a while in his garden shed. They ran across the lawn, which was sort of difficult when you were bent double so that his parents wouldn’t spot you from the living room window, and down to the shed at the side of the house. It was a posh shed. With windows. Inside there was a mound of chopped logs. Her new home smelled like a Christmas tree. What a pleasing development, she thought as she settled down on a wood pile where she hoped some snogging might happen later.
After a while she got bored and the boy got worried, so he pretended to go and get them both a snack but instead he told his parents who told her mother who had to get a friend to drive her the 20 miles to the house late on that rainy school night.
On many levels the daughter was difficult to live with. She was full of anger, lashing out at everyone, making life a misery for the rest of the people in the house. She was a nursery rhyme – when she was good she was very, very good but when she was bad? Oh, horrid. The mother tried counselling but that didn’t help. The horrid daughter just sat there looking sullen while the rest of the children told the woman with the understanding expression how their sister made their lives a misery. She slammed doors until they fell off their hinges and she pretended to be a witch to scare her younger brother.
All this time the daughter knew she didn’t deserve the mother who would make beautiful meals: meatloaf and mashed potatoes, chicken pie and beans, a fry-up on Saturday morning, bubble and squeak with the leftovers of her perfect Sunday dinners, which sometimes featured big fluffy Yorkshire puddings. Nobody else the daughter knew had Yorkshire puddings. Sometimes the daughter would turn her nose up at all of this and buy chips instead. Knowing she didn’t deserve this mother sometimes made things worse. She wanted to be good but more often than not it didn’t work out like that.
This daughter was always saying, ‘Sorry.’ Sorry for bunking off school. Sorry for letting boys into the house when you were away. Sorry they then wrecked the house and stole the special bottle of Martini and broke her eldest sister’s Spanish guitar. Sorry she got sacked from her Saturday job for liberating a packet of mouth fresheners from the shelf. She meant to pay for them. She forgot. Sorry for throwing a plate of spaghetti Bolognese at the wall. ‘Sorry,’ she said.
The mother was always saying, ‘I forgive you.’ I forgive you for worrying me to death. I forgive you for running away. I forgive you for being selfish. I forgive you this. I forgive you that. It seemed to both of them as though the cycle would never end.
But if mothers and daughters are lucky, the cycle does end. Eventually the daughter counts the mother among the people she can talk to most honestly and laugh with the hardest. The small encounters of their lives, the ones other people might be bored by, are discussed in detail. The daughter loves to listen to the mother’s stories from her work. The tiny triumphs. The dramas and the politics. A perfect afternoon will be spent drinking coffee and eating cream cakes while the rain pours down outside. There will be no slamming doors. There will be no crying over spilt spaghetti sauce.
Because this mother is not ordinary. This one has superhuman strength. A heart that is always prepared and willing to give. Eyes that see through you, right into the beauty and the beast of you. And still this mother manages to love you, no matter what demons are discovered inside.
The daughter still says sorry and she is still forgiven. So no flowers, only friendship and a Happy Unmother’s Day every day. From the Dependent Daughter to the mother I need to start depending on a little less. The mother I need to start seeing as a person in her own right, and not just the most highly evolved support system I’ve ever had the pleasure to lean on.
I don’t know how to make the transition from Dependent Daughter to whatever lies on the other side. I don’t know if I have it in me. But that is the work
I’ve signed up to do.
Reflections on a Dependent Daughter
I remember when Róisín walked into my office for the first time and I told her about my ‘Ten Things to Do with Your Mother Before She Dies’ idea. There was a split second when her eyes seemed to pop. I wasn’t sure if this was a good or a bad thing. It turned out that, not only did she think it was a good idea for a book, it really struck a chord with her and she was clearly excited.
I had read Róisín’s pieces about her mother in her column and it was obvious that she loved her. I was also struck by Róisín’s incredible honesty when it came to confessing her shortcomings as a daughter. She was upfront about the fact that she relied on her mother a bit too much. But, in our early months working together, this wasn’t that obvious to me. At times I wondered whether she was hiding her dependency. Sure enough, though, soon the curtains came down. One night we were in my house working on the book and my printer broke. Róisín, almost immediately, as if in default mode, called her mother and asked her to print out the thirty pages that we needed. Before I knew it, she was halfway across Dublin picking up the pages from her mother’s house. It all happened so quickly that it was only when I stood at my front door, watching the taxi take off down the road that I thought, ‘How did I let this happen?’ How could we, two grown-up forty-somethings, end up asking a 75-year-old woman to go through the hassle of printing reams of paper at 9.30 at night? Clearly, I’m blaming Róisín entirely for this. The Dependent Daughter was doing what comes most naturally to her. She was doing what she had always done since being a child – leaning on her mother at the drop of a hat.
When I finally met Róisín and her mother together I saw how well they got on and how compatible they were. And I could see how easy their relationship is. So why wouldn’t Róisín depend on her mother? Her mother totally got her. Over time, Róisín and I talked a lot about her wish to move away from being a Dependent Daughter and to start to see her mother more as a woman in her own right. Our ‘mother’ conversations were making her become much more conscious of the need to think twice before dialling ‘M’ for Mother.
It was clear that she was willing to participate and not just be an observer in The Daughterhood. In fact, from very early on, she was drafting all sorts of plans and lists of things she was going to do with her mother. But in making such a dedicated daughterly start, I was concerned that she would run out of steam halfway through. However, I realised The Daughterhood was having an impact on her when I got a call from her one day.
‘Guess what? I went for lunch with my mother today,’ she said.
‘Brilliant,’ I said. ‘Did you go anywhere nice?’
‘Never mind where we went, I didn’t talk about myself once through the whole lunch,’ she replied with a sense of achievement in her voice.
Róisín was clearly determined to come out of this process a better daughter. If I were a betting woman, I’d have put money on her achieving the Gold Star of Daughterhood. Whatever way it was going to turn out, The Daughterhood would be with her every step of the way.
NATASHA: THE DEDICATED DAUGHTER
I have digital scales in my bathroom that talk to me in an American accent when I stand on them. Sometimes I don’t like what I hear. I have the talking scales because I’m legally blind. In restaurants, friends are used to me pulling out my state-of-the-art magnifying glass. I always book seats in the front row when I go to the theatre. I don’t drive and every document on my computer is presented in size 28-point font on my ginormous screen.
When my mother was pregnant with my older brother she contracted toxoplasmosis, a condition which can affect the sight and in many cases the brain of the carrier’s unborn children. My brother wasn’t affected but two years later I was born with the condition. My mother instinctively knew something was wrong. After a few weeks she brought me back to the hospital where I was officially diagnosed.
At the time, doctors told her I would almost certainly be blind and possibly – although they couldn’t be fully certain – brain damaged. My mother refused to accept their findings and it turned out she was right. There was nothing wrong with my brain and I could see.
Still, they told her I would lose my sight and possibly suffer brain damage at some point during adolescence. It was only a matter of time. I did temporarily lose my sight as a teenager, but regained 30 per cent of it, which is what I still have today. Luckily my brain was never affected. What the condition did affect, though, was my relationship with my mother.
Looking back, it’s as though my difficult start and her championing of me created an unusually strong bond between us. Perhaps this is why I grew into the Dedicated Daughter. I was aware of her dedication as a mother from a very early age.
Having me as a daughter was a crash course in something all those baby manuals had yet to put a name on: attachment parenting. Family legend has it that I screamed the place down if anyone apart from my mother so much as looked as though they wanted to pick me up. I wouldn’t even countenance my father being near me for those first couple of years. I wanted her and I wanted only her.
At my insistence, for the first few years of my life we were joined at the hip everywhere we went from a deserted beach to a crowded supermarket. She couldn’t put me down to dry herself or even butter a slice of toast. As mother–daughter relationships go, we were deeply connected. We still are.
As it became evident that toxoplasmosis wasn’t curable and that my sight would be severely limited, she was determined never to let the condition limit me. Instead of overprotecting me, she encouraged me in everything. She never made me believe that I was anything less and I never ever heard her say I couldn’t do something because of my vision. Despite my condition, my mother always let me figure out my own capacity and levels, as did my brothers and sisters. Nobody was precious about my lack of sight. Quite the opposite, in fact. No one was ever found when I was ‘on’ during Hide and Seek. And, much to their joy, I always ended up with the least amount of eggs during the Easter Egg hunts. My lack of vision was never allowed to define me. My mother taught me to concentrate on the 30 per cent that I do have, as opposed to the 70 per cent I don’t.
I joined every school activity, from hurling to cycling to drama, music and debating. I was sent to France on two student exchanges long before any of my siblings got to go. I was a ferocious reader, preferring a good book to climbing trees outside with my sisters. I have no doubt that my level of confidence in myself has come from these early foundations.
I love being a daughter. I actively take on the role of being a daughter. Now it clearly helps that I love my mother and want to do daughterly things with her and for her. I have the advantage in that I have more time than most as I don’t have children. But I’m also driven by the belief that there are inherent duties that come with being a daughter, particularly as our mothers age. It’s part of the daughter deal, it comes with the territory.
To a large extent our roles are now reversed. It’s my turn to give back to her, to consider her needs, to show her that she matters, that she’s important to me. I include her in lots of ways. We take regular trips together. I invite her to my house parties. Weekends at home with her and with me in Dublin are scheduled ahead so that there is never too long a gap between seeing each other. When I’m in town buying those outrageously expensive coffee capsules that you can only buy in one particular store, I buy them for her, too. When I see a bargain in the sales that I think she would like, I call her. I keep toiletries and nightclothes in my house for her.
It helps that my whole family are a part of this. It’s not like I’m the only one that makes conscious decisions to include her in our lives. We are far from the Waltons in other regards, but at all times our mother is an automatic part of our decision making.
When my sister Sorcha and her husband Ron moved back with their three children from Mozambique a year ago, they and my brother Oisín built a bedroom and bathroom downstairs in their house so that she could go and stay w
ith them for long periods of time. I donated the curtains and Cilian, my other brother, bought her a TV.
Being in Dublin for longer periods meant we saw more of her and she was included in our day-to-day lives, thus saving the two-and-a-half-hour journey to her house in Galway at the weekends. As the weather gets better in spring and summer, she moves back home to her beautiful garden beside the sea. This is where she is happiest. Many of our summer weekends are then spent over long meals sitting in the garden and swimming in the sea.
Despite her illness, my mother makes it easy for me to be a Dedicated Daughter. She’s very aware that her illness has put further responsibilities on us and that she’s more dependent as a result. She is forever telling me that she doesn’t want to be a burden to us and it helps that she appreciates whatever we do for her. Above all, I know that she feels loved and secure.
Mary Troy grew up right in the centre of Frank McCourt’s home city of Limerick in the 1940s and ’50s. Both her parents were doctors and she was the youngest of five. Her father died when she was only ten, which left her mother to run their GP practice on her own.
After school she followed her parents’ career path into medicine but only lasted six months in pre-med. She told me she couldn’t think of anything else as a career choice but she soon realised she didn’t want to lead the life of her mother. Her mother was on call all the time and it was really demanding.
She always had a sense of adventure and a huge appetite for life, which remains with her today. At nineteen she packed her bags and set off volunteering in Jerusalem and Palestine. At the time, it was unheard of for an Irish person to be travelling to an Arab country, and even more unheard of for a woman to do so. Her experience in the Middle East confirmed for her that she wanted to study Arabic and Hebrew. She came home after nine months and enrolled in Trinity College to do just that. Not only was she one of only two women taking this degree, but she was also one of the first Catholics to do so. ‘It was 1962 and women had to be off the campus by ten o’clock at night. But that didn’t stop us – we regularly climbed over the wall. We had great fun doing so.’
The Daughterhood Page 11