The Daughterhood

by Natasha Fennell

  The point, I realised afterwards, is that bad motherhabits don’t just disappear because you want them to. The point is you have to keep trying and keep failing until you want the change so badly that one day it happens. Samuel Beckett once wrote in a completely different context: Ever tried. Ever failed. No Matter. Fail again. Fail better.

  That’s the best I can say. That I’ve been failing better when it comes to my mother. And it looks like this: one day you will walk into an Italian restaurant where all your family and your mother are gathered and you will wrap your resolve around you like a bullet-proof vest. You will choose your seat far down the table from people you sometimes spark off. You will be out of earshot of some conversations, instead of having your ears flapping waiting to be antagonised. You will ignore things you hear that for some ridiculous reason displease you and concentrate on the ones that bring you joy. You will keep your mother at the heart of the occasion and notice when there are moments that could bring disruption. Like a motorist keeping an eye out for potholes, you will swerve around those moments. You will be impervious and so serene that at one point your mother will try to get you to join in with her slagging of one of her daughters and you will nobly refuse. She will look at you funny, as though she doesn’t recognise you. But it will be worth it because at the end of the meal there will be no broken glass, no bruised egos and a mother in the centre of everything smiling beatifically. And you, the Dependent Daughter, will be the reason for her smile.

  This exact scenario happened to me near the end of the Daughterhood. And it tasted like success.

  The Dependent Daughter writes to her mother:

  Dear Mother

  Remember that song? The one with the chorus that says ‘Look, Mummy, no hands.’ Fascinating Aïda wrote it but then Camille O’Sullivan did it in her fishnets and top hat and made it even better. (Fishnets and a top hat make everything better, in the right hands and on the right legs.)

  We’d seen her in the Spiegeltent together. She was on a trapeze, as is her wont, and you could almost see and hear the old-fashioned merry-go-round that was spinning around in her head. She conjured up this whole world of childhood. And afterwards, going home, you sang it in your slightly off-key voice, your voice breaking with emotion, those tears that come so quickly for certain songs, like Don McLean’s ‘Vincent’ because it reminds you of Daddy, threatening to spill from your blue eyes. And I laughed. With you, not at you. I understood. At least I thought I did.

  Remember the fair, Ma,

  The two of us there, Ma,

  By the merry-go-round?

  Remember that song? I didn’t know really what it meant until this past five years as a mother. I didn’t know how it made you feel at a cellular level inside. But now I sing it and think of Joya and Priya. They need me now in a way I’ve never been needed by anyone. It scares me. They need me in the way I needed you when I was small, to keep me safe and wipe my tears and tell me everything will be all right. You never seemed scared. You were my champion. Mammy the Champion of the World. In your arms the monsters came out from under the bed and everything was OK. I learnt the lyrics off once; I wanted to sing them to you. I sing them to you now.

  Look, Mummy, no hands;

  I’m riding the roundabout all by myself;

  Look, Mummy, no hands;

  I called as I passed her,

  Faster and faster;

  ‘Hold on tight, darling!’

  She called out in fear;

  But I laughed and pretended that I couldn’t hear . . .

  Do you remember the time I got my head stuck in the railings of Sandymount Green and the fire brigade had to pull me out? Remember that other time I bumped my head and a cartoon bump appeared? We went on the bus to the hospital. You held my hand. Remember that time you reefed me out of the pub when I was hanging around with a dodgy crowd? I screamed at you all the way home. Remember?

  I do.

  Remember the years.

  Of the sulks and the tears?

  Do you recall? I hated you when

  You said ‘Be back by ten,’

  I knew it all;

  Always asking to know what I’d done;

  When as far as I knew, I was just having fun;

  I was just having fun. But I know it’s all ahead of me with the girls and:

  Remember the daughter.

  And all that you taught her?

  She’s grown up at last;

  With a child of her own.

  She struggles alone

  As the years all rush past;

  But now you’re not there to answer her calls;

  You’re not there to catch her as she stumbles and falls;

  You’d be bawling by this point. You’d be in absolute bits. And I know why now. The thing about me and that song, the difference is I still have you here. We have years left, I hope. You aren’t gone so I don’t have to miss you. Yet.

  Look, Mummy, no hands;

  I’m having to do it all by myself;

  Look, Mummy, no hands;

  I used to dismiss you,

  Now I just miss you;

  . . . How careless we are when we’re young . . .

  How careless. For me, the biggest learning and the biggest realisation from this Daughterhood business is that I need to be more thoughtful and appreciative of you as you grow older. You are going to be weaker. You are going to need all of us more. And, in the meantime, just because you are seventy-five and hale and hearty, doesn’t mean you wouldn’t like a bit of mollycoddling. I know there is a time coming soon, hopefully not too soon, when I am going to have to give back to you in a bigger way. I need to start adjusting to that. Preparing for that time. And that’s what the Daughterhood has been for me – a wake-up call that things need to change.

  I don’t want to be careless when it comes to you any more, Mother. My love for you is slowly coming of age. Thank you for being the best mother in the whole wide world. And for all the laughs.

  Your daughter

  Róisín x

  THE DEDICATED DAUGHTER’S MOTHERWORK

  When I started this book, I wanted to call it Ten Things to Do with Your Mother Before She Dies. I wanted to get across a sense of urgency with this project. The reality is we may not have as much time to work at this relationship as we’d like. Before I started The Daughterhood, I had already begun my ten things and I’ve continued to do them since. They are like my Ten Commandments of Daughterhood. You can make up your own commandments but here’s what I do or try to do with my mother.

  1. Get to Know Her

  As we grow up, the story of our mother is handed down to us through scraps of conversation, photographs and funny incidents told on a loop over dinners and family get-togethers. At least a version of the story gets handed down. The story of our mothers then gets stuck in one place. We grow up and sometimes we decide we know our mother’s story and that there is nothing else to learn about her. The story stops evolving. If there are gaps in the narrative, they don’t get filled. But when my mother dies, I want to know her full story. I don’t want there to be any gaps – well, as few as there can be. So as part of The Daughterhood I asked her to fill in some of the gaps that had been niggling at me.

  I’m lucky because my mother is an open book and I can ask her anything. I was always interested in my mother’s relationship with her mother. She lived with us in a granny flat beside the house and we all adored her. But, even as a young child, I sensed that there was tension between them. I had never really asked my mother about their relationship. It was something I was very curious about, though. She was such a wonderful mother, had she had a good role model herself?

  As we sat in my kitchen having dinner one evening, baked sea trout and asparagus, one of our favourite meals, I gave her an update on The Daughterhood. It really is pot luck who ends up being your mother, one of the most important lotteries in life, and I brought up the subject of my grandmother. ‘I found my mother very controlling,’ she said, taking a sip of wine. �
�You wouldn’t have noticed, Natasha, but I often came out from the flat crying. She was so impossible at times. I felt like her maid.’

  ‘Do you think she loved you?’

  ‘I know she loved me, although she didn’t tell me till very close to the end. I remember it so well. One night when I was in with her I gave her a glass of sherry. I had one, too, and we both relaxed into a conversation about the horse racing that day. The chat led on to other things and she asked for another sherry, which was unusual for her. I don’t remember exactly the words she used but the sentiment of what she said stayed with me. She told me that she appreciated the care I was giving her.’ My mother said it was a special moment. ‘I held her hand and told her I loved her. I had never told her that before.’

  On another occasion, I asked my mother about her love life; she had asked about mine. It was a spontaneous conversation that kept us at the kitchen table in her house for hours. ‘Did you have any boyfriends before you met Daddy?’ ‘Did you ever have your heart broken?’ I listened to her as she drifted off into a reverie of remembered romances and flirtations. I knew that I was connecting with Mary Troy the woman, rather than Mary Troy my mother. It reminded me that there are so many layers to her life and that I’m only one of them.

  Your mother might not be an open book, though, and you might have to tread a bit more lightly in your investigations. But most people enjoy talking about themselves and telling their stories, so you might be surprised at how much your mother has to say when you start to ask the questions. But you need to ask.

  2. Travel with Her

  I used to do it all the time. On trains, buses, planes and boats all over the world. But since my mother got sick it has required a bit more planning. Here we are, my mother, my sister Sorcha and I on a plane to Oslo. My mother wanted to see the ice cliffs of the Antarctic. But her lupus meant we had to downgrade that one, so we are off to the Arctic instead to see the Northern Lights. We just dropped the Ant. We knew, because of her health, it would be our last chance to make this trip happen, so here we are, my sister Sorcha, my mother and I, arriving in Tromsø, Norway. It is snow covered and one degree Celsius. We are scheduled to board a ship to see the Northern Lights the next day so we have a night and a day to explore this picturesque town.

  We have come well prepared for the cold. Layers and layers of thermals, jackets, ski gloves, woolly hats and socks. We tramp like Michelin women through the ice-slippery streets to the polar bear museum and go in and out of the gorgeous shops. Sorcha goes to look for a supermarket to stock up on supplies, as my mother and I sit outside a café in our layers having a much-needed, if extortionately priced, coffee.

  Even though it’s freezing, it’s too beautiful to sit inside. Sorcha comes back with supplies, aghast at the prices in the supermarket. ‘I can’t believe we’re here. Aren’t we so lucky,’ my mother says. It’s like her catchphrase for life. I am thinking of getting it printed on a tea towel.

  We board the ship the next day and get settled into our rooms. Mammy is tired and so decides to rest for a while before the ship leaves. We spot a pub on the harbour. Sorcha and I decide to go over for a drink. Over two beers (24 euro!) I discover that Sorcha is the worrier amongst us. We have to be really careful with Mammy, she tells me, the changes of temperature from hot inside the boat to the freezing temperatures on deck will really affect her chest.

  ‘We can’t let her get sick, she’ll get an infection and she’ll miss everything.’

  Of course she’s right. But Mammy will be fine, and we need to be careful not to boss her around too much. We slip back to the ship like two bold teenagers. Mammy is awake and reading in her cabin, all set to have a good look around. My mother has always been an adventurous traveller. She travelled a lot with my father in their early years, including to Russia. As her children went to live in various parts of the world, she came to visit us. In the early nineties she went to visit Sorcha in Nairobi where she was working with an NGO and I travelled with her to St Petersburg to see my sister Kate who was teaching English there. When I was living in Australia, in the mid-nineties, she came over to backpack with me through the Australian desert, up the Gold Coast and on through South East Asia. After I moved home in the late nineties we visited Sorcha and her family in the various countries she has lived throughout Africa and Central America. A year before my mother got sick we did a trip of a lifetime together to the Galapagos Islands, another place she had always wanted to experience.

  The rest of our days in the Arctic were filled with amazing experiences. We were lucky to see the Northern Lights twice, and my mother treated us to some dog sledging.

  A week after we returned home, Mammy contracted an infection and was back in hospital. It had begun on the last day of our trip. Her chest was tightening and her breathing was bad. It was two weeks before Christmas. ‘I don’t care that I got an infection,’ my mother said from her hospital bed. ‘It was worth it.’ She was home by Christmas. It was worth it. I am already planning our next trip, a sun-filled Christmas in Lanzarote. I just hope she will be well enough to go.

  Thankfully, not every mother’s idea of a good time is a trip in sub-zero temperatures to a country where there’s only two hours of daylight. My friend, Rosetta, told me about a recent trip to Knock with her mother. Now, for those of you who don’t know, Knock is a place of pilgrimage in the west of Ireland where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared. Her eighty-year-old mother wanted nothing more than to go there for the day and Rosetta, after me driving her mad talking about The Daughterhood, volunteered to bring her. Her father had passed away the year before and she was conscious of spending more time with her mother.

  ‘Shortly after I’d agreed to bring her, Natasha, I became deeply suspicious of her intentions – I think she was trying to bring me back to God or something.’ Rosetta’s suspicions weren’t far off the mark. They said the three traditional rosaries in the car on the way down and three more circling the old church in Knock. ‘All was going relatively well, I was even beginning to feel quite virtuous, until my mother insisted we say three more rosaries on the way back. And so there I was, somewhere between the Roscommon bypass and the third sorrowful mystery, uttering my own private mantra, “I value my mother, I value my mother, I value my mother”.’

  So whether your mother’s idea of getting away from it all is a religious pilgrimage, a package holiday in Spain or an overnight in a five-star hotel, travelling with her is a way of spending quality time on neutral territory. There are opportunities for conversations that you otherwise might not have. It takes you out of your mother–daughter routine. I always take lots of photos and talking about the trip afterwards brings almost as much pleasure to both of us as the travel itself.

  3. Celebrate Her

  ‘Are you sure thirty chicken breasts are enough?’ We’re in the supermarket buying provisions for the latest party we are throwing my mother. The trolley is filling up and all I can think about is how many gins and tonics it will take to help me cook all this food. Mammy is walking slowly around the aisle – her beautiful, funky walking stick in one hand and her very long list in the other. ‘Can we just stick to the list, a Mhamaí?’ I ask, as she studies the price of the olives. We’re making smoked mackerel pâté for starters. Our version of keeping it simple. ‘But do you think it will be enough? Should we make a chicken liver pâté as well, just in case?’ I steer her away from the olives. It’s the same palaver every year when we throw a party for my mother.

  She hasn’t come on these supermarket trips for years. Since lupus, really. Every July we celebrate her birthday with a party in the garden. This year the other helpers, my two sisters, are not here. They’re both living abroad. I get up at 7.30am for what is a 2pm invite. The house is quiet, my mother is asleep. I can hear the oxygen machine puffing away. Unfortunately gin is not ideal in the morning, so lots of strong coffees get me through the task ahead instead. It’s a beautiful morning, we’re having the party in the garden so we’re praying for go
od weather, which will take a bit of divine intervention after the insane rain we’ve been having.

  The preparation hours in the kitchen before a party are some of my favourite times. That beautiful quiet time when I am chopping, mixing, tasting, adding a bit more curry paste, another grate of ginger. I throw a baleful eye at the thirty breasts of chicken piled on the counter waiting to be chopped. Why didn’t we pay the extra and get the pre-chopped chicken? Where are my sisters when I need them? I am making a Thai curry so the chicken needs to be cut small. I am on number eleven with only nineteen to go and my mind wanders. A few minutes later, I look down and the size of the chopped chicken has been steadily increasing, as I’ve stopped concentrating.

  Celebrating my mother while I still can is a fundamental one of my Ten Commandments of Daughterhood. I have no clue how long she will be with us but as a family we treat every birthday as if it is her last. I want her to know how much I love her for who she is and who she has become, both as a mother and a woman in her own right. Making a fuss of her on her birthday validates her. It is an expression of our love and admiration for her. She has celebrated us over the years, now it is our turn to celebrate her.

  My mother’s seventieth was a really special one. We invited old friends she hadn’t seen in a long time because she had been too ill. She surprised us by giving each of us a beautiful hardback bound book of photographs taken since we were babies. That day was the happiest I had seen her for years – surrounded by her family, in-laws, grandchildren and new granddaughter, Jessica, she looked so happy. Sorcha gave a speech that encapsulated my mother’s story from her early years through to her teaching years, her return to Jerusalem and then her lupus diagnosis. Sorcha highlighted her great character, her courage, her great sense of humour, her generosity as a friend and her continued love and support as a mother to all of us.