In her brilliant memoir Mother Daughter Me, New York Times journalist Katie Hafner asks a central, crucial question: what is our obligation to our parents as they age, particularly if those parents gave us a childhood that was far less than ideal? Reluctant Daughters are the daughters who, like Anna, struggle to answer that difficult question, often for much of their adult lives.
DEBBIE: THE DISAPPOINTING DAUGHTER
I’ve come quite late to the Daughterhood party. Until very recently I worked in a basement office in Dublin city centre. I called it The Bunker. A couple of the strip lights in The Bunker didn’t work, so every day from 7am to 4pm I sat in a pool of pale yellow, flickering light with my headphones in listening to people.
Lately, I’ve been listening to a focus group on catfood. ‘Well, my Tabitha, Tabby for short, my husband calls her T, is not impressed with the salmon flavour. And I don’t mind telling you I tasted a bit just to see, and she’s right it IS too salty. Now she loves the duck one. Can’t get enough of it. In fact, I tasted that, too, and it had a flavour a bit like foie gras to me. I had it once in Nice . . .’
I didn’t like The Bunker but I liked my job. If you are curious about everything, and I am (in Fifth Year I got the nickname Debbie the Nose because I was always asking questions), it’s the perfect job. One day I’m listening to cat owners and the next biochemists discussing cures for cancer. What I do is type up conversations so the clients have a record of what’s been said. I don’t know what they do with it then – my job ends when I send off the transcripts – but what I do for the clients is get it all down. Every word. Well, not the ‘ahs’ and ‘ums’ and the ‘likes’ and ‘yeahs’; people do a lot more of that than you might think. I get rid of them. I make people sound better on the page than they do in real life. I’m good at it because I type exceptionally quickly. My boss calls me ‘the Mo Farah of the keyboard’. Mo for short.
But you’re not here to read about The Bunker or my job or my boss’s ‘hilarious’ line in unimaginative nicknames. You are here to read about daughters and about mothers and how they get along. Or don’t in my case.
Sometimes I feel like an alien who has landed on planet Mother-Daughter-Love. I look around and I see daughters out shopping for special outfits with their mothers. Sharing intimate dinners in restaurants. Laughing together in the changing rooms of clothes shops. Friends tell me about what they are doing for Mother’s Day. They think carefully about the spa they’ve chosen or the restaurant they are going to afterwards. I notice they seem to be looking forward to these opportunities to be close to their mothers. I have no reference points to share with them, no common ground. But I don’t tell them that. I nod and smile. I make the noises I think might be appropriate. ‘Oh, I’m sure she’ll love that,’ I say. And I think about my mother and when they’re gone and I’m on my own I might cry.
My own personal survival technique is to cover it all up. That’s what I’ve always done. Not getting on with your mother is a lonely place to be but I’ve been here for years and I’m used to it. You try to assimilate. You find a way to fit in. You don’t let anybody know. You keep it all in. I mean, you tell me, what kind of dysfunctional freak doesn’t get on with their own mother? Who wants to hear about that? Who wants to talk about it?
At last, it seems as though somebody does. And I am here to transcribe their discussions.
Smokers, I have a question. (Non-smokers, you might also find this interesting.) Did you know that the amount of nicotine you have in your toenails could predict your risk of developing lung cancer? Until yesterday neither did I. I’ve been transcribing the keynote speeches from an international chiropodist’s conference. Fascinating stuff. Researchers took toenail clippings of male smokers who developed lung cancer over a twelve-year period and compared them to clippings from non-smokers. The ones with the highest nicotine levels were 3.57 times more likely to develop lung cancer. So there you go. I love my job.
My boss smokes. His fingernails are a mustardy yellow and he stinks of Benson & Hedges. There’s a courtyard at the back of the office, about the size of a napkin, where he goes to suck cigarettes and think up nicknames for the staff. My mother doesn’t smoke. My dad did. I was always trying to get him to give up but in the end it wasn’t the cigarettes that got him, it was this thing in his head that had been growing, the consultant reckoned, for around twenty years.
It couldn’t have been stopped. There was nothing we could have done. But you never believe that, do you? When you are left behind you wonder what if, and you think you should have noticed something, and you remember something that might have been a sign, like the time he left the keys in the door, which really wasn’t like him, and every so often you notice a bitter taste in your mouth and that is the guilt.
All those emails dripping with guilt from daughters Natasha spoke about? I don’t mind admitting I gave a little inner cheer when I heard about them. I think what they are doing is great but Natasha and Róisín seem to have the kind of chocolate-box relationships with their mothers that I’ve always dreamed of. But these other women who wrote in – I felt they were in my head. The relief. What is it that woman sang years ago? They were ‘strumming my pain’ with their words.
I related to Maeve and I understood her craving for intimacy with her mother. And the story of hiding from her made me laugh. In one way I felt sorry for her mother, you know, being turned away. But part of me admired Maeve for being able to stand up for herself. Your mum wouldn’t just turn up at your office in town and say, ‘Stop working, here’s your lunch.’ And I was chilled by Lily’s account of her adoption and her mother’s narcissism and rejection of her. It’s always secretly a relief to know that no matter how bad you have it, somebody else is going through far worse. I started to work on The Daughterhood file, even though I was running late on other more urgent files. I couldn’t wait to hear what happened next. I listened and I just kept thinking, ‘It’s not just me; I’m not the only one.’
Maggie, who sits two cubicles to my left, has been assigned a mediation case involving a couple who are fighting with the couple next door to them over a tree that is blocking their light. She’s been listening to them for weeks now. ‘If I hear one more effing word about that effing tree I’ll climb the nearest one and, so help me God, I won’t come down from it until Basil has assigned this to someone else,’ she said the other day while we shared a bag of Skittles in the kitchenette. Maggie talks with a slight lisp and so my boss calls her Toyah, after Toyah Willcox. He is tall and annoying and a bit mad so we call him Basil after Basil Fawlty. Behind his back, obviously.
Maggie is very jealous that I have The Daughterhood files and not the Mad Cow files, as she calls them, because one half of Couple Number Two is having a bit of a nervous breakdown about the trees. Maggie’s always looking to know what’s going on. ‘You mean to tell me that this is a group of women meeting to bitch about their mothers?’ she asked me when I first told her, not really believing. I had become enthralled by their monthly gatherings. It was like a soap opera. I was dying for the next instalment.
‘They’re not bitching,’ I said.
‘Well, I bet they are bitchy,’ Maggie said.
‘I wouldn’t say they bitch about their mothers. It’s more a reflective chat,’ I answered defensively – I became very invested early on with the project and felt a kind of affinity with the women. ‘They share their stories and offer each other support, and just a listening ear. They talk about their mothers but they also talk about themselves as daughters. They say they find it cathartic.’
‘Cathartic, my arse,’ said Maggie, but it’s just because she’s driven mad listening to the dimensions of that pine tree and the shadow it casts across Couple Number One’s decking and all the rest. ‘If my mother knew I was meeting to bitch about her with a group of women sitting around eating – what did you say they had the first time?’
‘Chilli with brown rice, and I think some sort of vegetable roulade and home-made garlic bread.’
‘Eating chilli with brown rice and roulade, or whatever you call it, she’d be appalled. Do they tell their mothers what they are doing?’
‘No, that’s not the point. The point is they are figuring out how to be better daughters and how to—’
‘Well, I personally think it’s disloyal,’ said Maggie. ‘Where would they be without their mothers? Nowhere, that’s where. And how do this bunch of ingrates repay their mothers? By sitting around a table telling each other how terrible their mothers are? It’s not right!’
‘How is your mother?’ I said then, to shut her up more than anything else. And it worked. She spent the whole rest of our lunch hour, and there’s no other word for it, bitching about her mother, without seeing the irony of it at all. I love Maggie.
Sometimes I can’t hear myself think over the hum of the air conditioning system in The Bunker. I’m sitting here, trying to ignore the buzzing, wondering what I’d have said if I met Natasha on a bus or on a train or a plane and she asked me about my mother. If she asked me, ‘How is your mother?’ I wouldn’t know what to say. Because, right now, I don’t know. She has run away to my sister in Australia. She won’t answer my calls. She is grieving for my father who died last year but it’s a private, personal, secret grief and she doesn’t want to share it with anyone, least of all me.
My father – clever, intuitive man that he was – predicted as much.
It was cancer. There was nothing the doctors could do. We found out and then three months later he was gone. You read about it in the papers, these kinds of things happening, but it’s always to other people. Now we are the other people. I miss him.
A few weeks before he died, before he sort of went into himself, into his head and you knew he wasn’t coming out again, he said to me, ‘Look out for your mother when I’m gone.’ He knew what would happen. He said she’d run away, as far as she could get, he even mentioned Australia, instead of facing up to the grief and to the loss and all the rest of it. Everything he said has come true. She has been to Australia twice since he died. She says she is going for a month and she ends up staying for two.
My sister works in a legal firm. She’s out at 7am in the morning and she often won’t be back until 7pm. Her husband is out at work, too; he works in financial services. So my mother is at home with the nanny and my sister’s two small children all day. She is bored, I think, that’s what she says when she does decide to call on Skype. My sister’s been reporting back that all she does all day is sit there on her iPad. I wouldn’t mind if she was reading. But she’s not reading. She’s playing games. Angry Birds and solitaire. (She is seventy-four.)
My sister’s place is quite isolated. One of those posh, gated estates, a cul-de-sac of eight identical detached houses. My mother doesn’t drive so she can’t go anywhere. Behind the houses there is a huge forest ‘full of snakes’ my mother says but I think she’s exaggerating. So she’s trapped in a way, or that’s how she sees it, and she won’t come home. Well, she will at some point but then she’ll be off again. Running away from the grief.
So, Natasha, in answer to your question that you haven’t asked me but you might had we met somehow on a plane or a train: I don’t know what to tell you about my mother. Since Dad died I feel as though I’ve lost her. Or she’s deliberately losing herself. I can’t talk to her about anything. How does she feel? Does she miss Dad? When is she coming home? When I try to go there she clams up or something mysterious happens to the Skype connection. She is escaping into herself. Into her games. Bloody, jaysus, pigging Angry Birds.
I went to some grief counselling after Dad died which helped and I tried to get Mum to go. But she was having none of it. ‘You don’t need to talk about all that, it just makes it worse,’ she said.
How is my mother? Good question. Missing in action. I think she has been all my life. That’s what I’d say.
I’m five years old. I’m sitting on my Granduncle’s big red couch. Uncle Tom is sitting beside me eating his sweets out of a bag. They smell like cloves, the ones Mam stuck in the oranges over Christmas and hung over the door with a red ribbon. The sweets are red and white but I don’t like them. I like my sweets. The ones in my bag. They’re called satin cushions. They’re all different colours and some of them have stripes across them. They look like presents. Inside the presents once you’ve sucked them a good bit there is a surprise and the surprise is chocolate. It sort of melts all out of the cushions, like the stuffing coming out of a real cushion that’s been stuffed too much, and it tastes gorgeous. When Uncle Tom eats his sweets he makes this sucky, clacky sound. Sucky, clack he goes. And then I go crunch, suck. And I don’t say anything but I think we sound like an orchestra I saw on Blue Peter except, instead of instruments, we have our mouths and our sweets. Sucky, clack. Crunch, suck. It’s a sort of music.
My parents have left me here while they’ve gone shopping. It’s the first time Uncle Tom has minded me all by himself. He’s lived alone since Aunt Margaret passed away before I was born. They asked him loads of questions before they went. ‘Will you be all right with her?’ ‘You won’t let her have any sweets, will you?’ ‘Will you make sure you ask her if she needs to use the loo?’
I don’t know why they asked him so many questions. I love Uncle Tom. He’s kind. As soon as they were gone he got a bag of my favourite sweets from behind the Bible on a high-up shelf and gave them to me with a big wink. ‘Our little secret, eh, Debs?’ he said. ‘Our secret, Uncle Tom,’ I say back and I try to wink but I just scrunch up my whole face and that makes him laugh.
My favourite programme is on the telly. It’s called Wanderly Wagon. It makes us laugh loads. Uncle Tom’s laugh is a kind of wheezy one. Haahahazzzzzz. Like that. Sometimes I’ll hear a little rattle and it sounds like it’s coming from his chest but I don’t say anything because I’m so happy. Uncle Tom says, ‘We’ll have a little fire, will we, Debs?’ and he reaches down to strike the match off the mantelpiece and then he throws it into the fire and I love the crackle it makes and the way the newspaper curls up and dances in the grate.
I’m five years old and I am sitting beside my Uncle Tom eating sweets and listening to his rattling chest and I think I can trace it all back to what happens when Uncle Tom leans over to me and says, ‘I’ll just throw another log on the fire, shall I, eh, Debs?’
They have started talking to me now at their monthly meetings. Addressing me, which almost never happens in this line of work. ‘Transcriber,’ they say, ‘don’t transcribe things like “pass the wine”, you’ll make us sound like alcoholics.’ ‘Transcriber, sorry about the clinking of knives and forks.’ I feel as though I know them now. I listen to their stories and I think about my story. About my mother and the distance between us. The other day someone from Natasha’s office rang up to ask whether they could have the latest transcript a bit quicker. She asked whether it was the same person transcribing all the sessions and I told her, yes, and that the person was me.
And then she asked me what I thought about it all. What did I think? I think it’s essential listening. I think it’s making me feel less alone and odd. I think I want to read this book and get my children to read it when they’re older. ‘I don’t really get on with my mother,’ I told her. And she said, ‘You’re not on your own there.’ And I remember laughing and I found myself telling her how much I was enjoying listening to The Daughterhood. It just sort of happened. Then she asked if I’d like to join. My first instinct was to say that my story wasn’t interesting enough. But then I got a bit indignant with myself. My story is as important and as interesting as anybody else’s. Plus, I spend so much time thinking about my mother it might do me good to let it all out. So I said yes. Yes, thank you for asking, yes I want to talk about my mother to people who will understand and who won’t judge. Yes. I put the phone down and I realised that I’d been waiting to be asked all along.
I’m not going to pretend it didn’t feel weird heading out to my first Daughterhood meeting. It did. I was a b
ag of nerves. Maggie from work couldn’t believe what I was about to do. ‘But that’s . . .’ she said, struggling to find the right word, ‘it’s . . . unprofessional.’ I knew what she meant but there had been a certain development in my business affairs which made me not worry too much about professional decorum.
I had escaped from The Bunker. I had got a loan from the bank. I was setting up on my own, transcribing from my house when the kids were asleep and when they were in bed and whenever I could get a chance basically. I had some clients who were willing to come with me. Including The Daughterhood. Maggie was stuck in The Bunker so I could understand her frustration. But I didn’t care. I was going to address something in my life that I had spent years running away from. I was going to face the problem of my mother.
But I’m a wuss at the best of times. This meeting was in Róisín’s house, which as it happened wasn’t too far from where I lived. I sat in the car outside her purple door for half an hour before I went in. I was worried. I thought I was being disloyal to my mother. I was fretting about what my father would have thought. I felt shy. What would the others think of me? In the car on the way over I was just chatting to myself, like a little train from Thomas the Tank Engine – can-I-do-this, can-I-do-this, can-I-do-this. Stupid really. I always imagine before I go anywhere that everyone is going to be like Marilyn Monroe, perfect, and I’m going to feel inadequate. But nobody was Marilyn. (They never are.) They were all just normal and welcoming and nice. I was early. Róisín was there and Natasha. And it all felt much more natural than it should have done. I nibbled at a bowl of crisps and had a laugh about recognising people from their voices. They all arrived. Lily. Maeve. Cathy. Grace. Sophie. Anna was in London but had sent a welcoming message. It was like meeting characters from a book in real life. I recognised their voices. I knew them but I didn’t know them at all.
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