I broke the ice by telling them to go easy on the cutlery clanging, explained how it distorted the sound on the Dictaphone. We laughed about the fact that, later, I would go home and have to transcribe this meeting, clanging cutlery and all. Like most people I hate the sound of my own voice. I wasn’t looking forward to it. I’m like my mother. We are both quite self-conscious, nervous people. I learnt it from her. She panics if the phone rings.
But this was my first meeting and I was the main event. I started talking and it was such a liberating feeling to talk about my mother without censoring myself that I thought I might never stop.
First, I told them about what had gripped me listening to their conversations. I’d remembered at the first meeting Natasha being surprised that people could not get on with their mothers. ‘How could they not?’ she had asked. And what was amazing, I told them, was that some of you didn’t and that you were all able to sit around a table talking about it. I told them how much I related to Maeve hiding from her mother. Because I do that with my mum. I’ll be working and she’ll need to talk but I need to get my work done and so I have to shut her out. I remember thinking, ‘I’m not alone. I’m not the only person in the world who does this.’
When I listened through my earphones, it was like eavesdropping on a group of friends who I had so much in common with, even though I had never met any of them. I thought of my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law, a mother and daughter, who are thick as thieves and go everywhere together, and even live beside each other. It made me wonder what was wrong with me. Am I abnormal? Am I the only one in the world who doesn’t want to be beside their mum?
When I said that, Róisín laughed and said, ‘Well, you are in the right place to say that out loud.’ And it did feel like the right place.
I told them about my dad dying. And how since he died everybody has been saying to me, ‘How’s your mum? How’s your mum?’ And how I just kept telling them, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ This week I don’t know because she’s gone off again to Australia, even though it was the first anniversary of my father’s death. I was upset. Everybody coming up and remembering the anniversary and asking what we were doing and saying, ‘How is your mother?’
I haven’t even spoken to her in two weeks. She refuses to use an ordinary phone. She will only Skype and I hate Skype. I don’t like seeing myself. And I like to be doing something else while I’m talking – filling out an invoice, say, or peeling the potatoes – and I’d prefer her not to see that. Also, my kids come in and start trying to use the computer and putting things up on the screen and . . . I know I’m behind the times but I just feel like it’s not a proper conversation. She won’t use the ordinary phone because it costs money and she’s obsessive about saving money.
Then I told them about the struggle of the past year with Daddy dying. And how he said to me before he died, ‘Look out for your mother.’ And how he told me exactly what was going to happen and how every single thing has come true. And then the group wanted me to go back to the beginning and by now I felt comfortable and at home in the strangest way. It sounds cringey but it was a safe space. I didn’t have to pretend. I’ve spent such a long time pretending.
I told them about my little brother Billy. He was born with Down’s Syndrome and associated heart problems. He had to have lots of operations when he was a baby and I suppose what happened was that I took on a lot of the responsibility for my sister, Edwina, Billy’s twin. My mum was always so worried about Billy. She would run here and run there, taking him for this operation and that operation, and I think it was back then that I started to distance myself from her.
And then I went back a bit further. I told them about the day thirty-eight years ago when I was five years old and my parents went shopping and left me with my Granduncle Tom.
I described the room, how the carpet was red, and so were the sofas, covered with some sort of bumpy material like a circular corduroy. I used to sit on the sofa rubbing it, feeling the bumps in the material.
And I sat on that sofa for what felt like a lifetime, rubbing the bumps to comfort myself while Uncle Tom lay unconscious on the floor. He was blocking the door so I couldn’t open it to tell anyone. I just rubbed the sofa and looked at the telly. And then the dog, Uncle Tom had a Border Collie named Shep, just started to howl and I couldn’t get the dog to stop.
I said, ‘Uncle Tom, wake up, wake up.’ And I kept saying it. But eventually I thought, Uncle Tom is not going to wake up so I will just sit here watching Wanderly Wagon until my mum and dad get back. And it seemed to take them ages. And Uncle Tom never did wake up.
When they did get back from the shops all hell broke loose. An ambulance arrived. I heard a man say ‘massive heart attack’ and I was shoved into a bedroom upstairs. My mum took me to the doctor a few weeks later because apparently I had become a bit withdrawn. The doctor said, ‘She’s five years old; she’s not going to remember this.’ But I do remember. I remember everything. I remember the red and gold swirly pattern on the wallpaper, the ticking of the huge mantle clock, the fire crackling and then glowing and then dying and Uncle Tom’s dog howling, howling, howling, and the crunch of sweets in my mouth.
The funny thing is I never thought about it much. I didn’t spend years trying to figure out how that incident had affected me but I know it did. About thirty years later, I’d been suffering with depression and I went to a counsellor. That’s when it all came flooding out. A dam burst. That first day the counsellor told me to go home and talk to my mother about it. So I did. And she wouldn’t talk. Just refused. She said, ‘I don’t want to talk about that, it’s in the past.’ And then she said, ‘You don’t need to talk about it. That’s nonsense. Leave it be.’ And, ‘You’re fine, you’re fine. You are just over-analysing.’
Our relationship deteriorated from that point. But I think the start of the deterioration was when I was five. She thought she was doing the right thing, taking the doctor’s advice, not talking to me about it. But it was the wrong thing and from there we started to grow apart. And then Billy was born and I had to take care of Edwina and gradually, over the years, a coldness descended between us. When debs time came around, it was my dad who took me to choose the dress. Imagine, my dad doing the thing that everyone else did with their mum. It’s sad, when I think about it now.
I felt I’d been going on for ages but the group never made me feel like that. I told them that my mother’s relationship with my father was rocky. They were always close, they did everything together, but were never friends that you would have noticed. As he was dying, you got a tiny glimpse that they loved each other but when I look at it now I think that my mum and dad just weren’t meant to be together.
It wasn’t right. My dad was deeply antisocial, didn’t like going out, didn’t see the point. But my mum wanted to meet people, to chat, have a glass of wine. My dad would say, ‘Why waste good money?’ And so she stayed at home, too. Dad’s perfect Sunday was a roast with his nine grandchildren around him. So they were different people but they stuck together because there would have been no other option in their minds.
I can forgive my mother. I can leave her lack of compassion for five-year-old and 43-year-old me behind. I don’t know, though, if she can forgive me. I feel I disappointed her. The usual teenage shenanigans that people get up to, well, I got up to them. But my mother could never get over it. I’d let her down. And this has carried on. I constantly feel like I don’t live up to her expectations.
I came home one day to find her sorting my husband Stephen’s underwear drawer. I know it sounds funny, but she was doing it in an exasperated way. In a way that suggested I was useless and couldn’t even manage my own home. And the other week she was going to have my eldest son, Ryan, who is fifteen, to stay in the sunny south east with her. He’s a great boy. I told him to pack his blue bag with enough clothes for a couple of days. And he did. I picked up the bag and threw it in the car. Ryan got into the car with no shoes on – he was too busy with hi
s iPod.
I only noticed his shoeless state when we were halfway down the N11. I thought it was funny. When we got to my mum’s, he walked down the drive to the house in no shoes and then I realised I’d brought the wrong bag. He had no shoes and no clothes, other than what he was standing up in. He and I were laughing at our silliness. I gave my mum some money and asked her to pick up some cheap stuff for him in Penney’s. She went mad with me. Really hysterical.
‘You should have checked. You are his mother. Are you stupid? You are stupid!’ This was all in front of Ryan. I get this all the time from her. My house is a mess. I don’t do enough for my children. I work too hard. The truth is, I don’t feel good around her. I feel like a failure. If I decorate the kitchen she’ll say, ‘That paint is a little bit dark in that room.’ It’s the negativity that is the hardest thing to bear.
But then lately I’ve been asking myself, what do I do to make her feel good? Does she feel good around me?
Maybe it’s just not the right time for this Daughterhood business. She is still grieving Dad. He’s only dead a year. I’m self-employed and working ridiculous hours. But she’s been brilliant with the children, minding them down at hers during the summer holidays so I can get work done. I arrived to bring them back up to Dublin on Sunday night. I could have sat and had a cup of tea with her before we went to bed, or we could have watched a television programme we’d both enjoy. Instead, she sat playing Angry Birds on her tablet and I got the laptop out and started to do some typing in bed. We have bad mother–daughter habits. I don’t know what to do to change that. I don’t want to disappoint her any more. And I want her to stop disappointing me.
Reflections on the Disappointing Daughter
No book on mothers and daughters would be complete without the Disappointing Daughter. Perhaps you recognise her already? I – Róisín – do. I don’t think I am disappointing to my mother and yet I still feel a bit of a disappointment. Let me count the ways:
1. I haven’t sorted my finances out. I am forty-two. I still treat her like she’s a branch of my local credit union. The other day I lost my bank card and so I went around the corner to borrow hers. ‘This is the last time,’ she said. I laughed. I’d heard that before. I always wonder if it really will be the last time until she bails me out again.
2. I still haven’t got my issues around food (too much) and exercise (too little) under control. She is very understanding of this, more than anybody else because she knows all the reasons behind it. But I would like to get this sorted so that she doesn’t have to worry about me as she gets older.
3. I rely on her too much. She doesn’t mind my constant need to run things past her, to ask her for favours, to spill out my innermost grievances, but I know she’s concerned that I’ll be lost without her when she’s gone.
And I will. I will be lost when she’s gone. That’s me saying that as a grown-up adult woman. It was worse when I was younger, in terms of the grief I caused her. Although I do think teenagers are supposed to be a bit disappointing. It’s almost part of their job description.
You give life to these children, you feed and nurture them, you do your best for them, you fall in love with them, and then adolescence comes along and replaces your child with a raging (I was an angry teenager), white-haired (I had a thing about Billy Idol for a while), pyjama-as-daywear-advocating (blame Morrissey) monster.
In a family of eight children, I was the bane of her life. I spent a lot of my teenage years trying to get out of going to school. I had a repertoire of ‘tummy aches’ and ‘splitting headaches’ worthy of an Oscar winner. I wasn’t a morning person. A lot of things ‘weren’t fair’.
School wasn’t fair, for example. I always felt it should have started at a reasonable hour, like noon. This ludicrous 8.45am kick off was all too like we were heading out to put in a day’s work in an accountancy firm.
But nobody agreed with me and so I faked illness as often as possible. Sometimes it worked but most of the time my mother could not be fooled. So when I think of my teenage years I remember countless duvets being reefed off me in the cruel, cold morning light. I taste neat vodka and hear the ‘Wham Rap!’ which I still know off by heart. But as I grow older the specifics, the details, get further out of reach. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.
All I know is, like a lot of teenagers, I was a Contrary Mary. One day bunking off school to get Gay Byrne (the Irish equivalent of Michael Parkinson; I told you I was contrary) to sign my copy of his autobiography, the next stalking silver-voiced buskers on Grafton Street. One minute wishing I could be as cool as the people who hung around with a Dublin band called The Garden Hasn’t Changed Much and the next cuddling up with my mother on the sofa to watch Barry Manilow television specials.
‘What was I like as a teenager?’ I asked my mother recently so my memory could be jogged. ‘I don’t keep those things in my head,’ she said. She’s blanked them out, more likely. I wouldn’t leave it, though. ‘What was I like? What are your memories of teenage me?’
She thought for a minute and then recalled, ‘The time you ran away from home to that boy’s house and I didn’t know you were gone until the boy’s mother rang to say you were there.’ She was on a roll now. ‘Even when I made nice dinners you very often wouldn’t eat the vegetables and filled up from Borza’s instead,’ she continued, making me yearn for fish and chips from my childhood haunt. I suppose they were nice dinners. But I always craved something else. I spent years wondering what that was. I’m still figuring it out. ‘You did wear some strange clothes, which upset your sister when we visited her in Glasgow.’
Oh, excuse me. That was the brilliant paisley pyjama top which I wore as a shirt every day that summer. I was too cool for my entire family. They just didn’t get it. They didn’t get me. I slammed a lot of doors. ‘You know I can’t think of anything too terrible but there must have been some bad things because why did I ring whatever organisation it was that mothers who can’t cope turn to?’ I do remember a family counselling session where all my family sat around in a circle and I seemed to be the problem. But it’s all water under the teenage bridge now.
‘You did bring some strange people into the house, but then I was used to that,’ my mother added. She brought a few strange people into the house herself, if she didn’t mind me saying, especially during her Internet-dating phase.
There was silence then. Each of us trying to remember.
I do have a memory of one night when I spray-painted my wardrobe with black flowers. In the morning my mother tried to get me up for school as usual. I couldn’t talk, couldn’t move my legs or arms. Overnight, the fumes from the spray had rendered me incapacitated. Of course, my mother thought it was another one of my classic put-ons. Later, when I could move again, I celebrated my bona fide day off school in front of the telly with a waffle and vinegar sandwich. In How to Build a Girl, Caitlin Moran refers to the teenage years as a time ‘when you veer wildly between thinking you are a nuclear accident and thinking you might actually be here to save the world’. Sometimes I still feel like that. The teenager hasn’t changed much. Some of us don’t. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
I feel I disappointed my mother then, but she doesn’t see it like that, which gives me a sort of absolution. I don’t feel I disappoint her now. But I do disappoint myself; that’s another story. Absolution. A clean sheet. The chance to start over. We need that from our mothers. They are supposed to be the people who can wipe the slate clean without it costing them a thought. If we don’t get that, if the disapproval never ends, it can be devastating.
7: THE MOTHERWORK
I – Róisín – was never great at getting my homework done at school and I knew I would struggle with this most important part of The Daughterhood. From the very first meeting we decided the most appropriate name for the work we had to do with our mothers was Motherwork. It was like homework except it was all about our mothers. Naming the work made us more conscious of what we had to do. Without the
concept of Motherwork, we were just women meeting up for motherchats. We needed something concrete and the idea that we had work to do gave us much-needed focus.
In the beginning we had ticked off the ‘things’ we could do with our mothers. The trips, the exercises in patience, the lunch dates – but in a lot of cases as soon as we ticked the boxes we promptly forgot about our Motherwork. As our mothers know well, us daughters lead busy lives. But over the course of a few months, Natasha and I would gently remind the daughters and ourselves of all the things we had signed up to do at that first meeting. We met every month over dinner in Natasha’s house or mine and gave each other updates about how we were getting on. Emails and texts were sent between meetings, gently encouraging and cajoling each other and reminding ourselves of what we were trying to do.
In truth, after the first meeting we didn’t know what to expect. To go back to that rookie orchestra analogy, we were playing it by ear. We had started a club and, from our experiences of other clubs, we knew it was likely that at least one person would bail from the proceedings at some point. Perhaps the whole thing would collapse after a few meetings under the weight of promises none of us could keep. There was also the risk factor. Some of our daughters were dealing with extreme situations in their mother relationships and we were hardly equipped to advise them if something went horribly wrong.
Our hope was that The Daughterhood would operate, with apologies to Simon & Garfunkel, as a bridge over troubled daughters, but it was also a potentially explosive social experiment. Anything could have happened. Here’s what actually did.
THE BUSY DAUGHTER’S MOTHERWORK
Maeve had written to us because she kept hiding when her mother turned up unannounced for lunch bearing a variety of home-made pickles. She wanted to deepen the connection with her mother and let her in more. Here’s how Maeve got on . . .
The Daughterhood Page 15