But as the words fill the page it becomes even clearer to me that all my gripes are insignificant and can be put aside. I just want to say two things: thank you and I love you.
Debbie
THE DEPENDENT DAUGHTER’S MOTHERWORK
Róisín wanted to stop relying on her mother as much as she did and to stop being the cause of ructions at family gatherings. Here’s how Róisín got on . . .
I got email spammed halfway through this Daughterhood non-journey. Spammed. I woke up one morning to observe that overnight I had apparently sent an email about a weight-loss product costing 128 euro to the several hundred people in my contacts list. Oh, let us rejoice on this happy day.
I have quite a few mental blocks around technology. I sat there blinking at my screen thinking about all the people I hadn’t talked to in months, possibly years, suddenly getting an email from me suggesting they could do with shifting a few pounds. Just what you want to wake up to on a Monday morning.
Lots of people contacted me to suggest I send everyone on my contacts list a message informing them I’d been spammed, so they wouldn’t accidentally buy a bottle of weight-loss pills for 128 euro. But I couldn’t figure out how to do that. Also, I reckoned that most of my contacts were shrewd enough to realise that I wasn’t actually sending them an email asking them to shell out 128 euro for a weight-loss product. Most of my contacts. But not my mother. So I emailed her within minutes of realising the scam to tell her not to press the button. To tell her I didn’t really think a bottle of magic pills was going to do anything for me.
Ever since I was old enough to be slagged for being ‘fat’ (around the age of fourteen when, in fact, the pictures show I wasn’t), my mother has listened to me about weight-loss woes. As I already mentioned, we both like our food a bit too much and, in my case, use it as a panacea for all kinds of ills that will not be cured by a bag of chips. Believe me I’ve spent a lifetime trying. Handy tip: chips will not cure what ails you. Fact.
Together over the decades we’ve spent hours discussing the Atkins Diet, WeightWatchers and Unislim, Motivation Weight Management Clinics and Cabbage Soup Diets. We’ve talked about the 5:2 Diet and the South Beach Diet and the ‘fact’ that French Women Don’t Get Fat. In the last couple of years, my mother, using none of the above methods funnily enough, has managed to lose and keep off two stone. She did it by sheer willpower and not eating when she wasn’t hungry. (She should write a book but it wouldn’t sell because there’s no gimmick. In the diet game, as in one of my favourite musicals Gypsy, you gotta have a gimmick.) My mother inspired me with the slow, methodical way she achieved a weight loss that was motivated by her ambition to live until 100. She had looked around and seen that women of 100 years of age were generally skinnier than her. Ipso facto she wanted to be a bit skinnier. She wants to see her youngest grand-children grow up to be young men and young women. Her motivation was pure.
(As an aside – and this will be a long aside so bear with me – I want to make it clear that it is my daughters that are my main motivation for trying to become healthier, not any idea of what society says that I or any other woman should look like. I genuinely don’t give two figs what society says I should look like. I wrote a column once inspired by Tara Erraught, an Irish opera singer, who was slated by critics in four broadsheet UK newspapers for her size. During that week in five separate reviews, five senior opera critics reviewed Der Rosenkavalier at the UK’s Glyndebourne Festival and chose to focus on the body of this mezzo-soprano instead of her voice. The Dundalk woman was dismissed by them as ‘a chubby bundle of puppy fat’, ‘dumpy’, ‘unbelievable, unsightly and unappealing’ and ‘stocky’. These men from The Times, the Telegraph and the Guardian thought this singer’s body shape was more worthy of comment than her voice, the instrument that is her life’s work. One of them said Erraught was not a ‘plausible lover’. ‘Look at her,’ I imagine them thinking, ‘how SHOCKING. She’s supposed to be a love interest. How are we supposed to believe someone could love THAT?’
I wrote about the big fat lie. The idea that there is only one kind of lovable, sexy, seductive person. Look around. In real life people love all sorts. Men love women who are ‘stocky’. Women love ‘chubby’ men. Fat men love ‘dumpy’ blokes. Skinny women love larger women. ‘Fat’ people succeed. ‘Fat’ people fail. We live out our lives the same way people who look good in skinny jeans do. We dream. We laugh. We feel sorry for ourselves. We snap ourselves out of it. And mostly when it hurts, it’s because somebody has reduced us to the number on the label of our dress or our trousers.
I don’t have any interest in being a size 10 or a size 12 or a size 14. If there has to be a label, I think a size 16 is what I naturally should be, as it happens. I have no truck with thighs that never rub off each other or thinspiration hashtags or seeing people’s collar bones or ribs. I have no interest in size 0 skinny or congratulating women who ‘get their figure back’ quickly after pregnancy so that they hardly look as though a baby came out of them at all.
A broadcaster in Ireland, 2FM DJ Louise McSharry, who also wanted to be a healthier weight, told listeners to her radio show one day that she was going to make some lifestyle changes. Louise was engaged to be married at the time but had made no mention in her talk that these lifestyle changes had any connection with her wedding. A tabloid subsequently wrote a story with the headline: ‘2FM’s Louise McSharry is on a mission to fight the flab before her wedding.’
‘No, I’m not,’ Louise explained on Twitter that day. ‘My wedding is not my motivation. As I said, health and fitness and a future where I can run around with my children are my motivation. I don’t want to be connected to the idea that brides need to diet before their wedding. Every bride is beautiful, no matter their size.’ I cheered and the tabloid amended the story, apologising for their ‘mistake’. End of aside.)
I had a great year when it came to my own fitness challenge. I started running with one of those Couch-to-5k apps. There was a polite young Englishwoman in my ear saying ‘well done’ or ‘slow down now’ or ‘you’ve done great’. I wasn’t running really, I was slow jogging, slogging, if we’re being factual. My sister Rachael stuck a big huge skyscraper-sized carrot in front of my nose – a trip to New York if I’d do the Dublin Marathon with her. I did the marathon but not with her. Always a bit of a whippet, she became a lean, mean running machine, while I trained to walk the marathon with a group of other women, led by Breda, a kind, older woman who got in touch with me through my column asking did I want to start walking at weekends.
I had been walking with Breda and co. for weeks. It was Breda who had the idea of starting the marathon at 6am in the morning instead of the 9am official start. It took us eight hours and we got lost at one point in the Phoenix Park due to the fact that the signage wasn’t up yet. But I did it and that Christmas I felt better than I had in years. I had conquered something.
After Christmas the self-sabotage crept in and halfway through the Daughterhood ‘journey’ I was back where I started. I was in a worse place than when I’d started. I would sit at my mother’s kitchen table in the blackest of black moods and she would sit there looking at me and trying to encourage me back to some kind of positivity. ‘You can do this,’ she’d say. ‘I love you. I love you whatever size you are but I know you are not happy. I want you to be happy.’
‘I can’t do it,’ I’d tell her, crying now. ‘I can’t. I’m an idiot. A self-sabotaging moron. I am a bad mother who can’t even run around after her children.’ And I know she has been worried about me lately. About my mental health, as much as my physical well-being. And when she got that spam email, she was so wrapped up in trying to help me, so worried about the state I’d got myself into that she clicked on the button.
She spent 128 euro, money she can’t afford, on a bottle of weight-loss pills. She sat there looking at her screen, only recently returned from her American holiday and jetlagged. Seconds later I emailed to tell her that I’d been spammed. She was mort
ified. A week later the package came with the pills. She tried to get the delivery man to take them back but he said he couldn’t. They are still in their packaging on the top of her wardrobe, never to be opened, making her feel stupid every time she thinks of them.
And worse. They reminded her that her love for me, her desire for me to be happy and sort out my long-standing problems, had seriously clouded her normally excellent judgement.
‘This has made me see that I can’t help you with this anymore,’ she said to me in the kitchen after confessing to falling victim to the scam. I had at that exact moment come to the same conclusion. ‘I don’t want you to help me,’ I said. ‘I need to do it on my own.’ My mother should not, at the age of seventy-five, have to take on my personal struggles. I know she will always support me. I know that nobody else on the planet will be happier than she will when I finally get this one licked. But I am on my own in this. I don’t feel as though I’ve lost something with that realisation. I’ve feel I’ve freed my mother from an unfair obligation and finally taken responsibility for something only I can fix. That’s some serious Motherwork right there.
One of the other things I told the Daughterhood group that I wanted to change was how self-absorbed I am around my mother. I challenged myself to bring her out for lunch and consciously talk much less than I usually would. So I arranged a couple of lovely lunches in places we’d never been before. And during each meeting, I blabbed on about myself, as usual, perhaps even more than usual. It was only at the end of each lunch that I remembered what I had been trying to do. It seemed my habits were so ingrained around my mother than even when I consciously tried to do something different, I just carried on in the same vein.
That’s when I came up with the idea of interviewing my mother – conducting an interview with her as though she was someone I’d have to interview for work. In that kind of interview scenario, I generally just ask questions and don’t volunteer anything about myself, which is an essential part of the process. There are exceptions to this and they occur when I am also trying to be best friends with the person I’m interviewing. (Sorry Caitlin Moran/the Dalai Lama.)
I brought my mother to Cleaver East for the interview – that place where the dishes are so small you worry you’ll be starving afterwards but you don’t have to worry because you will be full up at the end. I promise. The timing was good because she had recently been getting treatment for her AMD. As I’ve previously mentioned, the treatment involved monthly injections right in the eyeball, so I knew there would be some fresh angles to explore.
When we sat down I put the Dictaphone on the table and, as if by magic, I managed a two-hour conversation with my mother where I mostly just asked questions and cooed over the food. (‘You have to taste this salmon, mother; it’s like they’ve turned fish into silk. I bet there’s one of those sous vide yokes from Masterchef involved.’) She just talked. And talked. And as with all the best interviews, I learnt a few things about my subject I didn’t know before:
1. My mother would quite like some more ‘alone time’ with all of her children. One-on-one meetings. Without their partners or children. (No offence to either of these valued communities.)
2. She would quite like to go to Venice. It’s been a dream since the 1980s when she first saw that ‘just one Cornetto, give it to meeeee’ ad.
3. Sometimes when she doesn’t hear from me for a few days – probably the longest I ever go without getting in touch with her – she’ll be delighted. This might not sound right but the reason she’ll be delighted not to see me is because not seeing me means I’m OK. That I’m getting on fine without her. I found this very surprising and was a bit ashamed of myself at the worry I cause her. I thought about all those times I turned up at her house wearing the long face I generally try to hide from the world and just sat at her table luxuriating in my sadness. Hearing how worried she gets about me made me resolve not to burden her in this way any more.
4. She’d like to feel a bit more cared for. When she came back from getting her eye injections last week, she had to take to bed because the ordeal had taken so much out of her. She would have liked if someone, one of us children, would have noticed that it was the day of the injections and had rung to inquire how she had got on. Sometimes she thinks that because she’s relatively healthy (apart from the sleep apnoea and the macular degeneration) she doesn’t get minded as much. ‘Everyone thinks I’m grand and fit and well and they don’t need to worry about me. But I think I’d like people to worry about me a bit more. I think I’d like that,’ she said, offering me a (stunningly executed) courgette chip.
5. She doesn’t like being patronised or talked over. ‘Mother wouldn’t like that’ or ‘Mother isn’t getting any younger’ are things, which after interviewing my mother, I know not to say – at least not within her hearing anyway.
6. She would like to feel more appreciated. We were going into rhapsodies about this little lobster number or maybe it was the slow-cooked veal when she reminded me of all the energy and thought and love Jonny and I put into raising our girls. ‘I did that for all of you,’ she said. ‘I did that; I put so much energy and time into it and I loved it. I wanted to do it. It was my job. But sometimes I don’t know whether people are grateful to me for that. I’d like to have more of a sense that I was valued and appreciated.’ Then almost in the next breath she blamed herself for the idea that, as a family, we don’t show our appreciation to her more. She took a sip of water. Speared an asparagus tip. ‘Maybe it’s the way I brought you up. I told you I didn’t want any Mother’s Day cards. I told you all to go off and do your own thing. When you left home I didn’t want you to look back. But you’d wonder sometimes. Do they really love me?’
This was a bit of a bombshell. I wondered how the rest of my family would feel about this.
A couple of hours after we sat down, apart from having a sumptuous and surprisingly filling lunch with my mother, I felt I’d gleaned some valuable insider information. These were things I’d never have discovered had I not sat down and interviewed her. She told me afterwards that she enjoyed being the centre of the attention during our lunch and when I played back the recording I could hear how, by asking questions and taking myself out of the picture, I’d left room for topics of conversation that would not have been covered had I not been in professional interview mode.
Some of the fallout from the information I gleaned during this interview was that, as a family, we clubbed together and bought her a trip to Venice. My sister Rachael has made plans to take my mother out to lunch, just the two of them. And I’ve been trying to remember her medical appointments so that I can show her I do actually care.
So the message here is if you find yourself unsure what it is you could be doing for your mother, try interviewing her. You might be surprised by what you find out.
Apart from listening to my mother more and talking less, I also had some Motherwork to do around family gatherings. When my brother Brian came back to Ireland, this time from Ukraine (he gets around), we decided to try to have a sibling dinner again. No partners and no children, just us eight brothers and sisters as it used to be around the table in Inglenook.
Brian was staying with me at the time and was helping to get the roast chicken dinner ready. As we chopped and basted, I reminded him of the fact that he can sometimes antagonise some of our brothers and sisters and that he should bite his tongue at all times. He reminded me of the fact that it was my fault not his that the last sibling gathering had gone awry. He had a point. But this time I was determined that ructions would not happen.
I was on a mission – a mission to bring peace. I know, because she has said it to me a million times, that my mother gets no greater pleasure than just looking around a room where her adult children are gathered, seeing everyone getting on together, enjoying each other’s company. What she hates is when that family harmony is disrupted by pointless, petty arguments. Today, for our roast chicken sibling dinner, I was on the case.
It was all going so well. The roast chicken (free range, organic) was beautiful, the vegetables (spiralised with a new kitchen gadget) were a triumph, and the roast potatoes (secret recipe, I’d have to kill you) were Michelin-star worthy.
Then my mother started talking about how much she enjoyed living with my younger sister. She wanted us all to know that she was happy there, that she wouldn’t want to be anywhere else and that we should all appreciate the fact that my sister was very good to her. (That sister wasn’t at the dinner – perhaps avoiding the inevitable ructions, I don’t know.)
Now, on a normal, non-peace-seeking-mission occasion, I would have had a lot to say to my mother about this. Not necessarily all of it peaceable. I mean, I would like my mother to live with me. Katie gets a live-in babysitter along with my mother. She gets to live with the person who makes the best lasagne outside of Pisa. It’s hardly a hardship. I would have said it all, probably until a row erupted.
But post-Daughterhood I kept my powder dry and, instead, found my Dictaphone, placing it strategically next to my mother. This conversation could be good material for the Daughterhood, I was thinking. An innocent enough thought. I’d been taping all my conversations with her since I started this project. But with this one movement I detonated a bomb.
Before you could say Big Brother another sister had spied the Dictaphone and decided my decision to tape the family conversation surreptitiously was bad form. Which, when I type it now, seems perfectly reasonable. But not at the time. No. At the time, with chicken congealing on plates, I freaked out and my sister freaked out and she flounced off and then I flounced off and another sister joined in and my mother was upset and in tears. My peace mission had been sabotaged. By me.
It took an hour for things to calm down. After a while, a box of childhood pictures were produced by the offended sister, and nostalgic comments about a certain appalling item of 1970s clothing were made by the offending sister. Peace came dropping slow. My mother looked happy. But I wasn’t. I had done it again. I had done it, even when I was trying very hard not to do it. What was the point in trying?
The Daughterhood Page 21