The Daughterhood

by Natasha Fennell

  There’s a reason I never go away with my mother and I suddenly remember it as I’m standing in line waiting to check in. She has already vetoed the check-in machines. ‘I don’t trust them. I want to check in with a human being not a computer screen,’ she says. I’m about to lecture her on the time-saving benefits of the machines when I catch myself. I’ve been doing a lot of that with her lately. If there is one thing I think has happened since this whole Daughterhood business began, it’s been me biting my tongue in the presence of my mother. It was hard at first. Sometimes half a critical, chastising sentence would come out, ‘Ah, Mam, please don’t give me any more gherkins, I’m coming down with—’ before I’d stop and change the sentiment to a more positive one. Then gradually it got better. ‘Ah, Mam,’ I’d say, and then stop myself before going any further at all.

  All I can tell you is that I’ve become more conscious of how I am with my mother since that night a few months ago when I first sat down with all the other daughters. Although nothing much happens at the meetings, exactly – we just catch up on what’s been happening in our daughterly worlds – somehow talking about your mother on a regular basis, in a conscious way, seems to have the affect of altering your behaviour. It has in my case anyway. I’m blaming hormones, too, though. You see, I’m six months pregnant.

  I knew this at the beginning of the process, which is why I wasn’t knocking back the wine. I’m normally a big wine person. And then the night I told the others I was pregnant they were madly curious as to how it would impact on my relationship with my mother.

  I played it down. I mean, I didn’t know. Maybe she’d only ever want to talk about the baby and start telling me how to rear it and what foods to give it to eat. As it turned out, it’s been exactly how the other women said it would be. We’ve grown closer. But I think the closeness is definitely due to me learning how to bite my very loose and sometimes cruel tongue.

  But here I am at the check-in desk. She’s asked me if we are going to be late for the flight around seven times now. She has worried about whether her extra baggage would be too big and whether her 50ml cosmetic bottles in her hand luggage were actually 100ml or 200ml. I stood there thinking, ‘Three days and three nights of this . . . I don’t actually know if I can handle it.’ But before I left I made a little contract with myself. I was going to make this trip with my mother as good as it could be. And, of course, I knew I’d have to report everything to the others so that kept me straight. If I wasn’t censoring myself, I’d have told her to chill out a thousand times by now. ‘Chill out, Mam. Would you just relax, everything is fine.’ And I’d have got myself irritated and she’d be worried that she couldn’t open her mouth. So, even though all her worries were hard to bear, not voicing my annoyance was already making this trip better than it might once have been.

  I had decided to bring her away last Mother’s Day when we were having dinner together. I’d had a voucher for a new French restaurant and I wanted to make a special effort, partly because I always make a fuss of her and partly to have something to report to the other women. Since I became pregnant I could sense this need in her for more intimacy. But we were also easier together. I think my mother had worried that I would get so wrapped up in my job and in searching for work that I would forget to have a baby. When she tried to bring it up before, I’d shut the conversations down. Now my mother could relax and I could almost feel her exhaling and our relationship had grown calmer as a result.

  We just sat and talked for a couple of hours in the restaurant. We had steak and chips with peppercorn sauce. The crowd was buzzy, just the kind of atmosphere she likes. My brother Peter and his wife, Ann, had just moved in with her while they waited for their home to be renovated. We talked about that for a while and how Mam hadn’t realised how much she enjoyed her own space until she had to share it with her son and his wife. She made jokes about the fact that Peter’s habits hadn’t changed much. She said she found herself picking up after him and scolding him to finish everything on his plate. Her daughter-in-law wasn’t impressed. Peter and Ann had said they might join us for dinner and I was relieved when they didn’t show. I was realising that I operated better with my mother one on one. In crowds, at family gatherings, I often become irritated just by my mother’s ways. Her manner, her quirks. She was selfless and well meaning, but it was too much to take sometimes.

  My mother is obsessed with this baby. Sometimes I think she’s even more interested in it than I am. And I let my guard down with her. I let her rattle on about the clothes she was going to knit and the cot she was going to buy. I was moved by how much she cared. I realised how lucky I was.

  Over that Mother’s Day dinner both of us seemed to relax. I had bought her a face cream for a present, and she was so delighted it touched me deeply (although it might have been because I was a bit weepier than usual on account of all the pregnancy hormones). That night she texted me thanking me for the present and for the treat of dinner. I texted back asking whether she wanted to come to Portugal with me for a few days. ‘Travel with her’ – I hadn’t forgotten that it was top of my Motherwork list.

  We got to Portugal without any arguments. An achievement in itself. The place we’d booked was perfect. That first night we went to a restaurant by the sea and had beautiful seafood and she had her glass of wine. I knew that she needed this time away. She had told me about a friend who had let her down very badly. And it was a good way to open a conversation that I’d really wanted to have with her. I’ve always felt she was too giving. That she didn’t concentrate enough on making herself happy. I really wanted to know if she was happy. In her own life, I mean. And if she was happy, what was the cause of the happiness? I suppose I feel a lot of the time that there are self-improving things she could be doing – reading the newspaper, going on courses, up-skilling – that might make her happy. I wanted to find out if that was just an assumption on my part.

  I was surprised by the conversation and by her answers. As the water lapped on the shore and a loud Portuguese family celebrated the birthday of a little girl and the wine waiter kept saying, ‘Irish, eh? Roy Keane!’ she told me that she was happy. Really happy. And that what made her most happy was her children being happy. That her whole focus in life was the pursuit of our happiness and she didn’t want to change that.

  She knows I’m the kind of person who is always striving. I need to change focus constantly; I need new projects and new challenges. But talking to her that night, I discovered something that was really quite comforting and surprising. She is happier with a smaller lot. And my expectations of what should make her happy are very different to the truth. I told her I worry about her sometimes that she is anxious and highly strung and that she can often focus on the negative. I told her that I think we are very alike in that way, in our insecurities and tendency towards thinking the worst. ‘I wouldn’t view myself that way at all,’ she said, looking out at the ocean, really thinking about what I was saying. ‘I feel confident in myself, confident in where I am and what I am and I’m happy, too. I’m happy.’

  We talked about my dad. It’s always awkward bringing him up in conversation. But, because this felt like a more relaxed and open conversation, I even steered the chat around to the age gap between him and her and whether he was the right choice, given she was left quite early on as a single mother. Then she surprised me again. ‘I have no regrets about your father,’ she said. ‘I want to be really clear about that; I want you to understand that.’ She told me some of the things about my father she first fell in love with, how he made her laugh and how he always remembered the little things about her that nobody else noticed. She said she wished he hadn’t died when I was so young because I would have loved certain aspects of him. And that I was like him in certain ways. She had never told me that before.

  It was a beautiful few days. There were slightly tense moments. She kept offering me money to help for when the baby comes, but I don’t want to take her money. So I tried to be diplomatic while t
urning her down. As we sat eating lunch she must have asked me twelve times whether I thought the way I was lying on my lounger when sunbathing was going to hurt the baby. But we laughed about it. I was able to say to her, ‘Mam, you have to stop saying that now.’ And she didn’t get offended. I looked at her on that holiday full of wonder; especially since somebody is going to be calling me Mam in a few months. I saw traits in her that maybe I recognised in myself – that slight anxiousness, a perfectionist streak. I was looking at my future self, I thought. And it didn’t seem so bad.

  The Busy Daughter writes to her mother:

  Dear Mam

  It feels very strange to be writing you a letter because I don’t think we’ve ever communicated in this way, apart from the odd holiday, pre-technology, when I was away for the summer. Or maybe I’m thinking of those unpunctuated emails you sent during the years I was abroad.

  I’m really glad that I’ve taken this time recently to focus consciously on my relationship with you. Some of that was making more of an effort to spend time together and get to know you, but also what was important for me was thinking and focusing on our relationship. What it means to me. How I can cherish it that bit more.

  We’ve always had a close relationship. We see each other and chat regularly. Maybe in many ways I took that for granted, the fact that we have that closeness and that you’d always be there. I know you won’t, though. To think about that is very difficult.

  I love being in your company, your philosophy on life, your vivacious personality. I enjoy making you laugh. I do realise that a lot of my criticisms of you, when they arise, come from my own impatient and intolerant personality traits.

  I manage to censor that with most people. But it’s the ones you love the most that sometimes bear the brunt of our weaker moments. We are so very alike in many ways. We know each other well on many levels. But, then again, I feel I have held back from telling you everything that was going through my head or in my life. You have probably done that, too, in terms of your past history. I think perhaps it’s good for us that there are some elements left unknown.

  You are an amazing mother. Totally unselfish, all-giving and full of unconditional love. Sometimes I think that can both overwhelm me and make me protective of you. I always want to make sure you’re getting everything in life that you want and have always wanted for me, in terms of happiness and fulfilment, achievement, respect and love.

  I hope your life, despite some of the challenges and traumas, has been a happy one; that you’ve felt loved, fulfilled and rewarded for your self-sacrifices. I hope you are proud of who I am. And I hope I can be half the mother that you are when my time comes.

  Love, your daughter,

  Maeve

  THE DAUGHTER OF MADNESS’S MOTHERWORK

  Sophie wrote to us about her mother who had suffered with mental illness all her life. She wanted to cultivate more of those As Good As It Gets moments. Here’s how Sophie got on . . .

  There is a rocky path that winds down to a small swimming cove near where my mother lives. She loves to swim but only in seawater. She’s always had a thing for sea swimming. I have childhood memories of her getting up at 5am, when it was still dark, and waking me up in her swimming togs. She’d drag me half asleep into mine and down we’d go, with the waves higher than she was sometimes, in all weathers. I’d shiver on the shore, afraid to go in. Madness when I think about it. But I knew no better at the time.

  ‘It wakes me up,’ she used to say when I was small. ‘The salt is good for the bones.’ She had a thing about chlorine. The toxicity of it. So she never took me to the pool where my friends were with their parents, doing normal parent things. But I’m grateful to her because swimming in the sea is now a panacea for everything I’ve carried into adulthood. I’m not fond of swimming pools myself these days. Like mother, like daughter, in this if nothing else.

  Since I joined The Daughterhood I’ve been trying to find more of those moments when I can manage my mother and be in her company without feeling hopeless and too full of rage about everything I never had. About all that she has never been able to give me. Telling the group about my desire to find more of these moments with my mother has spurred me on. It was at one of our meetings that I remembered how much she used to love swimming in salt water. I gave her a call one Friday afternoon.

  She had been waiting for me to ring, which I found touching. ‘I was hoping you might get me out of here,’ she said. By here she meant her home, although she made it sound like she was incarcerated. Life with my father is tough. I sensed her need to escape so acutely, it seemed to spill out of her down the phone line. Her life is lived that way. Wanting to escape but incapable of doing anything about it; that’s been her way for so long now. She’s like a small animal in a cage. The cage door is swinging open but she just doesn’t have the strength to crawl out to freedom. I have accepted that I cannot help her but it still makes me sad.

  ‘What about a swim?’ I said.

  ‘A swim? Well, now . . . I don’t . . . would I be able? A swim. The seawater. But I don’t know . . . Do you know where my swimming hat is, the white one? I don’t know . . .’

  I was expecting this, the stream of consciousness uncertainty. I could see her standing in the hall, lips pursed in confusion, doubting herself, doubting me and my motives. I pushed my annoyance away. ‘Of course, a swim. I’ve my bag packed here anyway,’ I lied. ‘The togs are wrapped in a towel; do you remember the way we used to roll it like a sausage? I can be over to you in twenty minutes. Where are your black togs? And that big flowery towel? Can you have everything ready?’

  ‘I could, I suppose,’ she said. I left it there before she could come up with an excuse. I grabbed my gear and headed over, wondering whether she’d actually come with me.

  As I drew nearer to the house the anxiety came over me again; it happens when I’m with either of my parents. It’s the unpredictability of their behaviour. I never know what to expect. I can’t rely on either of them. I’m on the back foot the whole time. After the first Daughterhood meeting, I was overwhelmed by some of the other women’s obvious love for their mothers. Natasha even said, and she may have been joking, that she was going to wear a vial with her mother’s ashes after she died.

  When I went home after the meetings sometimes I would get upset thinking of my mother. The guilt and shame was immense. I thought at first I was betraying her in front of all these women; that she would die at the thought of me speaking about her. But as the months passed this changed. I began to realise that by being forced to go through this period of reflection a new respect for my mother was blossoming. I could go to the meetings if I kept remembering this. I was starting to accept her as she is. And this acceptance was allowing me to break the cycle, to free myself from the past, so that there was even more space to invest in my relationship with my daughter.

  I drove up the path to the house and sat there, just breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, the way my yoga teacher taught me. I grew calmer. When I walked up to the door she was standing there waiting on the other side. I could see the shadow of her. She opened the door clutching a plastic supermarket bag, it had holes in, I noticed, and she had put on her old swimming hat. One of those padded ones with a strap under the chin. Seeing the way her skin was pinched there choked me up. With what? Love? I don’t think we’ve ever had that between us. But, as I led her out of the house and into my car, I realised that I still, despite everything, had an urge to protect her. The fact that I cared enough to want to mind her seemed like something good I could hold on to.

  Since she came out of the hospital after her last breakdown, my sister, who was home from America, had taken charge of her. They have an easier relationship. Stacey was away when I was left minding my mother in the house during the worst of her breakdowns. She doesn’t have the same memories of her illness as I do. She wasn’t burnt as badly by those experiences. She was glad to help and I was happy to let her. But she has gone back home now. Ba
ck to her husband and her family and a life where she is too far away to feel too much guilt about her mother back in Ireland.

  We parked up on the grass verge, close to the path. My mother didn’t want to get out of the car for a while. She just sat staring out to sea as the cruise liners crossed the bay. ‘They want to knock the chimneys down,’ she said after a few minutes of silence.

  It was in the news that the electricity board were planning to raze the Poolbeg stacks, an old electricity power station, and there was a campaign to keep them. The chimney lovers were never off the radio spouting eulogies for Dublin’s own twin towers. I followed her gaze over to the red and white chimneys by the sea, landmarks of my childhood. I remembered the sight of them coming home when I worked in London during the nineties. I used to see them from the aeroplane window and get that sick feeling in my stomach. They made me anxious. Reminded me of what I was coming home to. My mother loved them, though. ‘They won’t knock them, Mam,’ I told her. ‘There’d be war.’

  My mother is not at peace. When I’m around her I feel the crackling tension of all that she cannot express swirling around inside of her. I realised sitting there looking at the Irish Sea that I am getting better at detaching myself from all the crossed signals and the noise. I know at the Daughterhood meetings I had talked about how you have to make a decision to forgive. A decision to accept the things about my mother I cannot change and will never be able to change; that serenity poem really does say it all.

  Here is where I am now with my mother: she is an old woman who needs help. An old and vulnerable woman. But I can make a choice. I can decide to dump the baggage; I can jettison the rage about how useless she was at motherhood. I can leave that all behind. I’ve spent years trying to figure out the steps in this detachment dance and now I feel I can do them without even thinking. This might not seem like much to anyone else, but it’s huge for me. It’s progress. I’m detaching from her; detaching with love.