The Daughterhood

by Natasha Fennell

  Knowing that having the degree in languages wouldn’t be enough to get a job back in Bethlehem, she signed up for a social science degree by night at University College Dublin, or UCD as it is known. I’m still amazed that she even considered doing two degrees at the same time. Trinity by day and UCD by night. For a woman who tells me that she lacked confidence in her early years, I can’t help but be inspired by her relentless focus and determination.

  It was during those years at Trinity that she first met my father, Desmond Fennell. He was eleven years her senior, a very handsome intellectual from Dublin who had studied in UCD and then gone on to study at Bonn University. When she met him he had travelled extensively to far-flung countries, such as Japan, Hong Kong and South East Asia, and had already published his first travel book Mainly in Wonder in London. They made a very handsome couple. My mother was very beautiful – long hair, high cheekbones, beautiful full lips and a great sense of style. My favourite photo of them together is at their wedding breakfast.

  My brother Oisín was born as my mother finished her second year in college. She was twenty-three. They went on to have four more children, Cilian, myself and then my two younger sisters, Sorcha and Kate.

  My mother didn’t go back to the Middle East for another thirty-four years. In the intervening years we moved to the west of Ireland to a tiny island called Maoinis that is connected to the mainland by a rickety bridge. It was 1969, the year after I was born, and my mother fell in love with Maoinis the first day she crossed that yellow bridge on to the island. The 1960s in Ireland saw a lot of people leave the urban lifestyle behind and head west to a simpler, less frantic place. My father also wanted somewhere remote where he could write, having become a full-time writer. Maoinis was and still is one of the most beautiful places I have ever known. When we lived there, it had a population of about 300 and most people earned a living by fishing, turf cutting and raising cattle.

  We depended on rain for our drinking water. There were no phones on the island and very few people owned a car. It is also an Irish-speaking part of Ireland where the first language is Irish and at school all subjects are taught through Irish. It was a two-teacher, two-classroom school down the road that had forty pupils altogether. Irish was our native language – we all called our mother ‘a Mhamaí’ – and the first English words I learned were ‘red handbag’, taught to me by my grandmother. The move to Maoinis was a major cultural and environmental shift for both of my parents but one they immersed themselves in for the next eleven years.

  My mother was only twenty-nine and she had three children when she moved there. Away from her family and friends in Dublin, she was learning to speak Irish like a native, as opposed to the Irish she had learned at school. She got a teaching job in the local secondary school three miles away and, along with my father, she got totally involved in local issues, the most significant of which was campaigning for self-governance for the Irish speakers in the province, which resulted in the founding of a national Irish language radio station that still exists today. She was also central to bringing running water to Maoinis in 1979, ironically the year we left.

  Those summers in the 1970s were hot and our days were spent on one of the beaches two minutes from our house, jumping off the big rock on to the sand. My mother was a great swimmer and she taught many of the local children how to swim. She wore maxi dresses, made a lot of her own clothes and made us a picnic every day that kept us on the beach until evening.

  At age eleven, we moved to Galway city, only an hour but a world away by very pot-holed roads. A few years later, my parents decided to separate and my mother got a job teaching in a Jesuit school in Galway. Through all those years since her early visit to Jerusalem, the wish to go back never left her.

  At fifty-six, she finally returned. I was in college in Dublin when she rang to tell me. ‘I’ve decided to go back to Trinity. I’m going to study Hebrew and Judaism for a year and then I’m going to go back to Jerusalem for my second year. I’m finally going back,’ she said. It was one of the first times that I can remember seeing Mary Troy as a woman in her own right, and not just as my mother. She had reclaimed her identity.

  It was the beginning of a new chapter in our relationship. I was now in my twenties and starting to carve out my own path, whilst my mother was doing the same thing in her fifties. Somehow it put us on a more equal footing and we moved away from just being mother and daughter, to being two women trying to fulfil their own personal ambitions.

  As much as I might be a Dedicated Daughter, like most people I need deadlines. The Daughterhood meetings provided a structure and a time frame for me to do the things that I wanted to do with my mother. I saw these meetings as a kind of monthly ‘mother check-up’ where I would set aside some time to review how I was getting on. More than anything it encouraged me to have conversations with my mother that I had been intending to have but had been putting off. Some of you might find it unthinkable, but one of the conversations I committed to having with Mary Troy was to discuss her wishes with regard to her funeral.

  But apart from anything, these monthly meetings had a profound effect on me. I was constantly moved by the willingness of these women to do what they could to work at their relationships with their mothers. Both Lily’s and Sophie’s relationships were so clearly fractured and yet, here these two women were in my kitchen trying to make sense of it all. I really hoped they would get something out of all of this. They needed The Daughterhood more than any of us.

  Reflections on the Dedicated Daughter

  As I got to know Natasha, I – Róisín – realised that I was the slow learner of this blossoming friendship with regards to my mother. I remember one day, not long after I’d met her, ringing Natasha to tell her about the developments in my mother’s recently diagnosed Age-related Macular Degeneration, or AMD.

  There is a wet version of AMD which is treatable and a dry version which is not. My mother, like Dame Judi Dench, has developed the wet version. I like that my mother has something in common with Dame Judi. Not that she didn’t already – they are both beautiful, talented, strong women. My mother once dabbled in amateur dramatics and has cropped grey hair. That’s an awful lot of common ground before you even get to the disease that causes gradual loss of central vision. Judi Dench can’t read her scripts any more. My mother needs the print on her Kindle to be in a much larger font. If she ever meets Dame Judi, she won’t have to worry about a conversation opener.

  One morning, a few months after her diagnosis, my mother woke up and experienced a sort of swimming sensation when she opened her eyes. The doctor told her the AMD had progressed and she was going to have to go in for eye injections. Go to a hospital. Where they were going to stick actual needles in her eyeballs. Meanwhile, I stuck my fingers in my ears. I didn’t want to know. La, la, la, la. My mother was not a patient. My mother was not weak. My mother was not someone who needed needles stuck in her eyes or anywhere else. My mother was not going to succumb to old age and the gradual decline that visits other mere mortal mothers with the inevitability of the tax man. Or – and I didn’t want to go there – was she?

  To be very honest (and cowardly), I didn’t much feel like hearing about this mother who doctors said needed eye injections. I like the mother I already have, thank you very much. The one who, when I ask what she’s done of a Monday, tells me she’s been to see two movies (one of which had subtitles) on her own and that she treated herself to dinner afterwards in that new sushi place I still haven’t managed to get to. I like the mother who goes to a creative writing class on Friday mornings and a memoir writing class on Wednesdays, and helps her wheelchair-user friend with his latest campaign to sort out reproductive health in Africa on Tuesdays. The mother I want is the social-media-savvy woman who became active on Twitter (@anningle – she needs more followers), Facebook and Instagram before I did.

  The mother I want to hang out with and boast about and cadge dinners from is the one who went on four holidays last year, to beaut
iful Co. Mayo with me, to North Carolina to see my brother Eddie, to Portugal with my sister Rachael and to London to visit to my brother Peter.

  The mother I’ve come to know, love and rely on is the chairperson of the board of a local, not-for-profit community newspaper. She energises the meetings, takes the minutes and ploughs through the agenda, while I (she roped me in, too) struggle with my energy levels and eat too many sandwiches to get me through the boring bits.

  ‘So how is she?’ Natasha asks me, snapping me from my mother thoughts.

  ‘She’s fine,’ I say, trying to close down the conversation. ‘She’s grand. She’ll just get the injections and it will be, you know, fine. Her eyes will just go back to normal. She’s fine.’ I stop then, trying to think of ways to change the subject and come up with other words that also mean fine to get Natasha off my back.

  This is what I mean by slow learner. But I was learning from a woman who could give masterclasses in Daughterhood. Natasha listens. And then patiently, warily, because she can hear the shrillness and low-level panic in my voice, suggests that I might want to ask my mother how she’s feeling about the injections. Perhaps I might enquire whether I could be of any assistance. Maybe even make a plan to be with her in the waiting room or collect her when she’s finished. I do none of that, as it happens. My strategy was to zone out when Natasha started talking about the injections and just hope she’d stop talking about it soon. We were just at the beginning of this thing, this non-journey, and the fact that I needed to really think about how I approach my relationship with my mother hadn’t really sunk in yet. Or maybe I knew, but it took a while for me to do anything concrete about it.

  It turns out the needle in the eyeballs episode was my own mini Bench Moment. I was starting to see my mother as someone who was failing, or at least growing more vulnerable. But I wasn’t yet facing up to it in the way Natasha had. She accepted her mother’s new vulnerability and made plans accordingly, but she still saw her as an independent woman in her own right. Natasha recognised the confusion in me regarding my mother – it was a bewilderment and resistance that I was trying to hide. I knew then that Natasha’s call had come at exactly the right time for me, in terms of where I was at with my mother. I had that virtuous feeling I always get when I embark on something pure and healthy. The one I had at my first anti-gravity yoga class/WeightWatchers meeting/meditation course. But for once it wasn’t a selfish mission. As the meetings continued and I got more clarity about what was lacking in me as a daughter, I felt I was about to start giving something meaningful back to the woman who had given everything to me. The plan was to become a little less dependent and a little more dedicated.

  6: TWO MORE DAUGHTERS

  In the beginning I – Róisín – wondered whether our fellow members of The Daughterhood would ever tell their friends about what they were doing. Membership of The Daughterhood wasn’t exactly something they wanted to shout about from the rooftops. Meanwhile, Natasha and I couldn’t stop telling people about our new club. It was talking about The Daughterhood to a complete stranger in a hotel lobby that led to Natasha recruiting Anna from England after two Daughterhood meetings had already taken place. Debbie, our final daughter, came to us at about the same time. We’ll let them tell you the story themselves . . .

  ANNA: THE RELUCTANT DAUGHTER

  I’m fifty-four years old and I never expected that in the autumn of my life I would be dealing with a mother whose winter is going on indefinitely. It’s the responsibility no one warned our generation about.

  One of the many reasons I didn’t have children is because I do not have a disposition well suited to looking after dependents. I do not have a maternal bone in my body and, similarly, I feel awkward in the caring role. I could never be a nurse or a primary school teacher, yet put me in a war zone or at sea in a storm and I’d take charge and steer everyone to safety. I’m good on the high seas, not in a crèche or a care home.

  My greatest fear is not that my mother will die; it’s that she will outlive me and I’ll never know a life free from her. There. I’ve said it now. I know that’s a seemingly callous thing to admit but it’s the truth; it’s how I feel. She’s eighty-eight now. Apart from horrible leg ulcers, she is as healthy as a moderately fit sixty-year-old. Her mind may be on the wane with the first hints of Alzheimer’s but she’s not about to keel over any time soon.

  I don’t, as a rule, tell anyone what I just told you. In the past six months I’ve started to take time off work to look after my mother. But I’m full of anxiety about it. I’m doing it through a sense of duty rather than love. I don’t feel like a ‘bad daughter’ but I do feel something of a fraud, as I don’t have that deep bond with her that daughters are supposed to have their mothers. I’m ambivalent about daughterhood. I am, in effect, waiting for her to die.

  When I first met Natasha I was dubious about the project. She was presenting at a conference in a hotel on the outskirts of Dublin. I had been flown over by my company – I work in travel, sending people away on singles’ holidays. I am single myself and love travelling, although packaged excursions to the Med are not really my bag. I am more a backpacking in the wilderness kind of girl.

  I was sitting in the lobby minding my own business when we started talking. And she asked me what I now know she was asking everyone: ‘Do you have a mother? How do you feel about her dying?’ I think she was taken aback by my answer. It’s not something I would normally blurt out to a stranger. But it was one of those anonymous conversations, where you know there will be no repercussions. She told me about the book she was writing and about how surprised she had been to find that so many daughters were struggling when it came to their mothers. It didn’t surprise me. The struggle has defined my life. But I’ve not let it hold me back. Natasha and I exchanged numbers. I didn’t expect to hear from her again.

  In fact, Natasha rang the next day. I was barely off the plane in London. She wanted me to think about being involved with her project. My first instinct was to say no and change my number so that I wouldn’t have to think about it again. But another part of me was curious. Was there really anything that could be done when it came to my mother? Or was it just a trial to be endured?

  I have only attended one Daughterhood meeting, when I was over in Dublin for business, but I like to think that I have done the correspondence course. The emails have flown back and forth. I’ve done my Motherwork, as well as I could in the circumstances. I’m a participant in the Open University Daughterhood Degree. By the time I met the others in Natasha’s house it seemed the other daughters had clicked. Maeve wasn’t there that night; she was on holiday with her mum. But Lily, Róisín, Cathy, Sophie, Grace and Natasha were ensconced on sofas, a tight little club; you could see there was a bond. They seemed happy to have fresh meat: me. They said I was to start at the beginning. So I did.

  According to my mother I rejected her from the day I was born. I wouldn’t take her milk. Apparently I howled whenever she came near me. This record played over and over from as early as I can remember. My mother told me so many times growing up that she did not want to get married, did not want to be pregnant and she did not want to have a child. She made very sure not to have another one after me. I grew up knowing that this life of domestic drudgery and motherhood and wifery was not what she had planned for herself; that in a parallel world she was living quite another existence. An opera singer, maybe. Or a model. In her twenties and thirties she looked like a Mediterranean beauty. Jet black curly hair, dark complexion, tall and slim. A complete catch. Like Sophia Loren with a 22-inch waist. But, in fact, she was from a dirt-poor London family with very limited experience of the world outside of Hackney. She had no sense of herself. No ability to fulfil her potential. Just a gnawing sense that things could have turned out very differently if life hadn’t been so unfair as to land her with a husband and a daughter.

  My dad was, like my mother, from a working-class East End background. He was from gypsy stock. He didn’t even have a bi
rth certificate.

  He was forty-six when I came along; my mother was more than ten years younger. But, even so, she was marrying and having her first child very late for those times. To have your first baby at thirty-five was really unusual then. She’d left it as long as possible before getting married. Years later I read something from author Annabelle Charbit that struck a chord. She wrote that her mother belonged to that group of low IQ individuals who find everything alarming and who believe that raising your voice is the most effective form of communication. That is and always has been my mother – maybe not the low IQ, but she certainly has an under-developed curiosity about the world and other people.

  I don’t have any memory of being put in hospital at the age of three. They say I fell off a pony ride. Apparently, I came off the horse in a very unusual way and broke my arm in several places. All I know is that while I was in the hospital, in this children’s ward where the windows had bars on them, I was physically abused. And while my memories of my time there are hazy, apart from being given dead legs and Chinese burns by one nurse, I remember connecting the sense of abandonment to my mother. I’d heard her enough times complaining about having had me. It seemed to me that I was being punished for being born. I don’t want to overstate this incident but only mention it to show that from an early age I was aware of being a troublesome burden.

  At home, I knew the set-up was different to that of my friends’ families. Their parents had friends round for dinner and drinks. My friends had record players, put music on, had their mates round. That wasn’t my life. My mother constantly moaned. She was never happy. She made mountains out of molehills and she never relaxed. I never got the sense that my mum and dad loved each other either. There was no intimacy between them. I firmly believe they had sex once, when I was conceived. They didn’t kiss. They didn’t hug. There was no tenderness. They’d slept in single beds since I was an infant. I expect it was because my mother was terrified of getting pregnant again.