The subject of celebrating our mothers came up a lot during The Daughterhood. How do you even begin celebrating a woman who you don’t like or who you simply don’t get on with at all? We can hide behind the tradition of celebrating milestone birthdays but it doesn’t mean we’ll enjoy it or want to do it. However, we’ll probably feel less guilty knowing that we’ve made an effort. I understand that it’s not an easy thing to do if you can’t stand your mother but maybe you can find some small way that is sincere and hopefully brings both of you joy. That’s all you can hope for.
4. Cook with Her (and for Her)
My mother has two copies of a book called Fifty Great Ways With Mince, or Fifty Shades of Mince as it might be called today. When I told Róisín about this book that I was reared on, she laughed uncontrollably. My mother got it from a German friend Helga in the early 1970s. We had minced beef every way you can think of growing up and some you probably don’t want to imagine. Don’t knock it. Spaghetti Bolognese, meatballs, home-made burgers, lasagne and shepherd’s pie – we lived like kings on that stuff. The only downside of her devotion to that book is that my mother hasn’t been able to look at minced beef, cooked or uncooked, since around 1983.
Finding even just one thing that we like to do with our mothers can add so much to the relationship. My mother and I have a shared passion for cooking. Even during the minced-beef years my mother was a creative cook. When she was seventeen she was sent off to finishing school in Germany for a year as she was too young to go to college. She learned to do everything a woman of that time needed to know about running a house, from baking to ironing to cleaning to budgeting and sewing. It may sound archaic today but she claims she would have been clueless on all these fronts if she hadn’t got that training. Money was tight so she made all her own clothes for years with a Singer sewing machine, made delicious blackberry jam, apple crumbles, home-made brown bread and all those minced-beef dinners. I also have very fond memories of helping her with the cooking and cleaning for the many dinner parties and house parties she held over the years.
My mother doesn’t cook much on her own any more but we love cooking together. My passion for cooking really started when I lived in Australia and Bangkok. I had no choice but to learn and I became quite good at Thai cooking, which is my favourite cuisine. So we often cook together and try out new recipes.
During the years when Sorcha and her family lived away my mother and I had cookathons at the beginning of December where we cooked ten dinners that went into the freezer until Christmas when everyone descended home to my mother’s. The cookathons took place over a weekend and, although exhausting, they were great fun. We cooked everything from Thai curries, to chicken and chorizo stew, to fish pies and, of course, the much-loved minced-beef meatballs. The quantities were made to feed at least ten people to save cooking every day during the Christmas holidays. This whole exercise took up loads of time in pre-planning. Long phone calls in the evening were taken up with choosing the dishes to be cooked, the eternal search for containers big enough that would be suitable for freezing, new meatball recipes, maybe adding in some minced pork this year.
The cooking started on the Friday night and normally finished by Sunday lunchtime. My mother’s role was very clear: she was chief supervisor, chief advisor, chief taster and provided moral support, as she said herself. She was also responsible for refilling my wine glass or making me a gin and tonic, depending on our mood. These long days together provided good opportunities for great chats and laughter, between the chopping, cutting, mixing and tasting, along with the sips of wine.
The other kind of cooking we do together simply involves trying out a new dish. A few months ago we cooked paella for the first time and another Saturday was spent learning from my mother how to cook the perfect Irish stew. It doesn’t sound like much of a bonding activity, but some of the best conversations I’ve ever had with my mother are when we’re waiting for the potatoes to roast or the fish pie to bake.
In the early years of my mother’s illness she struggled with letting us take over the cooking in her house when we visited. She would insist on doing the shopping before we came and cooking on the Friday night when we arrived. The next morning was spent in bed recovering the energy that she had exerted the day before. Over the years she has managed gradually to surrender all the responsibilities of cooking to her children. The reality of her limitations set in and she has finally accepted that it’s OK to let us do it. Now she even enjoys the fact. But I know how hard that transition has been for her. Having cooked for all of us for so many years, letting go of her role as chief cook has been very difficult. But the beauty of cooking together is that it is a team effort. When we’re cooking, she’s not my sick mother and I’m not her potentially disempowering daughter. We’re both playing our part and together we can create some great food.
5. Keep Her up to Speed
When my mother grew up in 1950s Limerick, her telephone number was Limerick 9. Her family had one of the few phones in the city because her mother, Kathleen, was a doctor and needed to be reached by her patients. Keeping up with modern technology at that time meant knowing how to turn the dials on the wireless and operating the mangle in the backyard.
In the 1980s I remember my mother introducing my grandmother to the magic of a fax machine. Kathleen, my grandmother, couldn’t cope with the idea that the message on a piece of paper in one office could materialise on the clunky machine in my mother’s kitchen. Learning how to fax meant my grandmother could receive messages from her sister Terry, a missionary nun in Zimbabwe, which gave her a thrill every time. My mother did the same thing with the microwave when that came along and with the video recorder, which apparently blew my grandmother’s mind completely. My mother was keeping her mother up to speed with the ways of the modern world so that she wouldn’t be left behind.
I find it difficult enough keeping up with the advances in technology. ‘It’s in the cloud,’ my brother Cilian is always saying. I still don’t know exactly what he means. My brain isn’t wired that way but, thankfully, I have a great staff in their twenties who put up with my Luddite tendencies and help keep me in the loop on a need-to-know basis. At the same time, I am a gadget queen and I am constantly investing in the latest gizmo that will make our lives easier and more enjoyable.
For our mothers, people who remember the days of mangles and one-digit telephone numbers, keeping up can be a nightmare. But technology can also have a hugely positive impact on their lives, so I think we owe it to them to lead the way. In my case it’s the blind leading the slightly blinder.
My mother now has an iPad, a mobile phone – she ditched the smartphone because she found it a pain – a Kindle, a Bluetooth speaker, a smart TV with Netflix, a laptop and a digital camera. She uses the iPad to watch Netflix in bed, the mobile phone to keep in touch with us and the Kindle to read books. The TuneIn app on her iPad talks to the Bluetooth speaker so she can listen to radio all over the world. She writes on the laptop, sends emails and Skypes my sister Kate in Turkey. Kate has a one-year-old daughter called Anu. My mother saw her youngest grandchild’s first attempt at walking on the computer screen.
It hasn’t been easy introducing her to all this new technology but, in terms of her independence and enjoyment of life, it has been worth it. The challenge? We knew there was huge potential for arguments, especially if she didn’t get it first time. A smart, sharp woman who has been using various computers for decades, she is probably more advanced than I am in some ways. Still, when I first got her the iPad, the notion of swiping a screen was completely alien to her. When it came to that piece of kit, I must have spent hours repeating the instructions of how to navigate the various apps and showing her how to touch the screen so she could make it work.
But I knew if she got the hang of all these things, she would be more independent and it would allow her not only to keep in touch with us all but it would alleviate the boredom of illness by enabling her to escape into books, movies, writing
and the radio. I just had to walk a fine line between not making her feel like an eejit and giving her the confidence she needed to operate all these gadgets.
Of course, some mothers resist the attempts by children to school them in modern technology. While I don’t think iPads and Kindles should be forced down anyone’s throat, I think it’s worth trying to persuade them to give it a go. Even if you don’t feel able to teach her, find a niece or nephew who will relish the challenge of teaching the older generation a few new tricks.
6. Be Patient with Her
Of course, introducing new technology to your mother can open up a whole load of fresh possibilities. I don’t just mean for how she lives her life – I mean new ways of becoming impatient with your mother. I am talking, of course, about the nine circles of Internet-password hell. My mother has two degrees, was a lecturer at Trinity College, completed an MPhil written in Hebrew and is fluent in five languages. But do you think she can remember her Amazon password? No, she cannot. If you decide to take my advice about the technology, you will also need to steel your resolve when it comes to biting your tongue. Being patient with our mothers, especially as they age, is always challenging. But when you find yourself having to reset a Kindle, email and smart TV password fifty times a year, that’s when your mother love will get a full stress test.
But patience is crucial when it comes to our mothers. They have been on the planet decades longer than us. They were in the world long before anybody even had a notion we would ever come along. They have lived and loved and fallen down and gotten back up and now, in the last decades of their lives, the least they should be able to expect from their daughters is a little patience when their ways don’t quite fit into how we think the world should run.
And yet we are still impatient. My mother, because of her condition, walks much slower than she did a few years ago. I’ve had to stop myself hurrying her along, especially if I was carrying two heavy shopping bags. It was an unconscious thing, but I used to walk ahead of her, looking back impatiently every now and then. The unspoken message from me to her was, ‘A Mhamaí, could you go a little faster?’ Until one day I realised that this was putting her under pressure and I began walking alongside her so we could talk.
I know I can be the Busy Daughter sometimes but I try and take St Francis de Sales’ advice when he says have patience with all things; but, first of all, with yourself. I’d add – and with your mother.
7. Don’t Be Her Doctor
My mother has an excellent team looking after her: Dr Kavanagh, Dr Waters, Dr Gayne and Dr O’Regan look after all her medical needs. At home she has Olive, known to me and my siblings as Saint Olive. She’s really well looked after by her doctors and Olive, so why do I still feel the need to appoint myself Dr Fennell?
That is what I did when she first got sick. It was a whole new world. I was getting used to the reality of having a mother with a debilitating, devastating illness. Dr Fennell here thought that micro-managing everything could somehow alleviate the effects of lupus and pulmonary hypertension.
I was acting out of fear. If my mother had a rattle in her throat, I’d suggest she might need to go to the doctor. If she tried to walk out to the garden, I would object on the grounds that she wasn’t able. When I visited her, I’d tell her when to take her tablets and how many. If she wanted a glass of wine with dinner, I’d question whether it was allowed. I thought I was doing the right thing. The daughterly thing. It was only after a couple of weeks that my mother, at a low point and exasperated, told me that my ministrations were not helping. ‘I’m trying to figure this out myself, Natasha. Please give me the space to do that.’
It took me a while to get out of the habit and I still have to stop myself. It’s our instinct as daughters to try and mind our mothers and help them when they are vulnerable. I’ve been getting on much better with this lately. I sometimes worry that I’ve gone too far the other way. A couple of months ago I was in her house when she started having the shakes. I had fired myself from being Dr Fennell for so long that I was at a total loss and presumed this was just one of her regular symptoms. Until Saint Olive appeared. She took one look at my mother and asked whether she had changed her morphine patch recently. My mother’s face fell. It should have been changed five days before. Saint Olive found the patch, my mother changed it and the shakes stopped.
Some of my friends have found themselves stuck in doctor mode. It’s a hard role for daughters to step away from. One friend Tara has been trying for months to get her mother to move into a bedroom downstairs. She can see that her mother’s nightly trek up to her bedroom is becoming increasingly difficult. It takes ten minutes for her to get up the stairs and Tara is scared that one day, when she’s not there, her mother will fall. It’s a battle that never ends. Tara insists that her mother changes her sleeping arrangements, her mother insists that the sleeping arrangements she has had for thirty-five years are not going to change now. As daughters with ageing mothers we are learning all the time to navigate their new more vulnerable reality. Tara is torn between respecting her mother’s wishes and feeling like she should force the issue and install a bed in the front room.
My mother was told that she would have to be on oxygen permanently while I was on holiday recently. She wouldn’t take any calls from my siblings or me as she was coming to terms with her new diagnosis. It was very difficult, but I had to stop myself from calling her and respect her need for space.
It can cause huge frustration but, after discussing this with my mother, I think the crucial thing here is to respect our mother’s wishes even in their vulnerability. My mother has told me that her biggest fear is that her children will take control of her medical decisions, that she will be disarmed and left without any autonomy or control. We assure her that this won’t happen, but seeing the concern she has gives me some insight into Tara’s mother, making her way slowly up the stairs night after night.
I’m not my mother’s doctor any more but there is still a lot I can do for her. We enjoy going through the bedtime ritual together – the endless to-do list as my mother refers to it. It involves checking the oxygen machine and getting a clean glass of water, and I sit on the bed as she takes her evening medication. I make sure her sleeping tablets and painkillers are close to hand, in case she needs them during the night. We chat, plump up her cushions so her back doesn’t get sore and I make sure she is comfortable before I leave. It’s about letting my mother take control while I play a supporting role.
8. Let Her Interfere
In all the reading I have done about mother–daughter relationships there was one recurring theme: the constant conflict between intimacy and autonomy. On the one hand, wanting to be close to our mothers; on the other hand, the desperate desire to keep and maintain our independence from them. This Daughterhood business is all about balance. We don’t want to let them in too much but at the same time we don’t want to shut them out either. If you have an aversion to your mother interfering, my suggestion might sound strange. I say, let her interfere. By that I mean, give her a hearing. Let her state her case, her opinions, her concerns.
‘Tell me about it. Persuade me,’ is something my mother often says when I tell her about a plan I have that she doesn’t agree with. ‘I might surprise you.’ This can be a difficult thing to do, especially when you know your mother isn’t going be 100 per cent behind your latest life plan. When I talked about this to Róisín, she told me that her way is often to shut her mother down immediately when she tries to contribute her tuppence-worth. But afterwards, having climbed down from her high horse, Róisín will often slink back to her mother in search of the advice she initially spurned.
Breaking away on our own and getting to a stage where our mothers accept decisions we make in our lives, even when they don’t always approve, can be the biggest challenge of all. Somehow that is what I have managed to do in my relationship with my mother. I did it, I think, by letting her in, even when I didn’t feel like hearing what she had to say.
I have had a very fulfilling career since I left college. I worked at RTÉ, Ireland’s public service broadcaster, as a reporter for five years after I returned home from my travels. My brother Cilian was also working there at the time producing The Late Late Show, Ireland’s longest-running chat show. My sister Kate was in the Arts Department, so it was a bit of a family affair. But after five years I was ready to make a move and I applied for Head of Fundraising in Fianna Fáil, the political party that was in power at the time. My mother didn’t respond well when I initially told her.
‘But you’re so happy at RTÉ. I thought you loved your job,’ she said. She was right, I did, but I was still only in my early thirties and I wanted to try something else. When I was appointed to the position she still didn’t totally approve.
Fianna Fáil had a terrible reputation of corruption and cronyism, and a lot of it stemmed from the financial donations. ‘They only care about staying in power,’ she said. ‘And they don’t care how they do it.’ But, as time went on, she got used to the idea as she saw me relish the challenges of the job. And there were challenges.
Despite her quiet and sometimes not-so-quiet disapproval, I stayed in the job for nearly five years and I loved it. I got a real insight into how a political party works. I loved the buzz of the elections and I felt I was working at the heart of where all big decisions were made. Looking back on it now, I was slightly naive as Fianna Fáil fell from grace a few years after I left and are now blamed for the disastrous years that caused Ireland’s crash. Of course, my mother was right when she said that they only cared about power. What political party doesn’t? And it was for that very reason that I finally left. I don’t regret a day that I spent in Fianna Fáil but I do remember my mother’s relief when I told her that I was moving on.
The Daughterhood Page 23