The Daughterhood Read online

  THE

  DAUGHTERHOOD

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2015

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © 2015 by Natasha Fennell

  This book is copyright under the Berne convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Natasha Fennell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  1st Floor

  222 Gray’s Inn Road

  London WC1X 8HB

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney

  Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi

  Lyrics from ‘Look Mummy No Hands’ reproduced by kind permission © 1986 Sweet n Sour Songs Ltd. Music by Dillie Keane, lyrics by Dillie Keane and Adèle Anderson.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-47113-530-9

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-47113-532-3

  Typeset in Bembo by M Rules

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  For Mary Troy & Ann Ingle

  CONTENTS

  1 The Bench Moment

  2 A Collaborator

  3 Finding the Daughters

  4 The Daughterhood

  5 Meet the Daughters

  Maeve: The Busy Daughter

  Sophie: The Daughter of Madness

  Lily: The Daughter of Narcissism

  Cathy: The Becoming-My-Mother Daughter

  Grace: The Grieving-Her-As-She-Lives Daughter

  Róisín: The Dependent Daughter

  Natasha: The Dedicated Daughter

  6 Two More Daughters

  Anna: The Reluctant Daughter

  Debbie: The Disappointing Daughter

  7 The Motherwork

  The Busy Daughter’s Motherwork

  The Daughter of Madness’s Motherwork

  The Daughter of Narcissism’s Motherwork

  The Becoming-My-Mother Daughter’s Motherwork

  The Grieving-Her-As-She-Lives Daughter’s Motherwork

  The Reluctant Daughter’s Motherwork

  The Disappointing Daughter’s Motherwork

  The Dependent Daughter’s Motherwork

  The Dedicated Daughter’s Motherwork

  8 The Last Supper

  Epilogue: A Note From Ann Ingle, Róisín’s mother

  A Note From Mary Troy, Natasha’s Mother

  Acknowledgements

  One day you will be at the mother of all funerals. Imagine if you could stand at the graveside and have no regrets . . .

  1: THE BENCH MOMENT

  It’s a Tuesday. I’m standing in a hospital on my way to see my mother. The corridor smells of pharmaceuticals and over-boiled vegetables – I’m guessing Brussels sprouts. It’s a nose-wrinkling, stomach-flipping cocktail.

  I’ve always been fond of a carefully handled Brussels sprout, thanks to my mother’s way with them which involves chestnuts and bacon. She has never overcooked a sprout in her life. If she can smell these sprouts from her hospital bed, I’d say they are momentarily distracting her from the recent diagnosis of lupus, which was handed over to her by Dr Kavanagh.

  Ah. Yes. Lupus. What an idiotic name for an illness that causes havoc to the immune system. It sounds so harmless and about as terrifying as a crocus or a snowdrop or any other spring flower you care to mention. But it’s that same lupus that has me standing here in front of a lift on my way to Room 41. My mother has it. We just found out. She just found out. Which makes me think that, on balance, she’s probably not thinking about Brussels sprouts. I push the button for the lift that seems to be stuck somewhere, above or below. It’s in lift limbo. I know how it feels.

  Eventually the lift arrives. I get in and a few moments later I get out on the seventh floor. I look left and right in search of Room 41. I am forty-one. I feel more like a two-year-old right now. I was a clingy child. I spent most of the years nought to five attached limpet-like to my mother’s legs. I have a flashback to a supermarket in Galway – my mother is trying to reach for a can of beans and I won’t let her because it will mean she is detached from me for several milliseconds. It must have been desperately annoying. But she never let on. I can see her smiling at me now while I threaten to topple a display of tins in my determination to Never Let Go Of Her For As Long As I Draw Breath.

  Room 41: is this the one? No, not this one, there’s a frail-looking old man in it watching Countdown. My mother is not frail. I wouldn’t even have called my mother old, although I suppose at sixty-nine other people would. I like the word Older much better than plain old Old. Because everyone is older than someone else. The teenagers are older than the toddlers, the octogenarians are older than the fifty-somethings. Old, on the other hand, suggests an ending. You have arrived at Oldstown, your final destination: please make sure you have your luggage and surprising facial hair before departing the bus. Enough. I don’t want to think of final destinations at the moment, especially not in terms of my mother.

  And now here I am. Room 41. I go in, walking past the woman who tightens her dressing gown around her when she spots me, towards the furthest cubicle on the right by the window. I lean in close to the pink fabric curtain. I take a breath.

  ‘A Mhamaí,’ I whisper. ‘It’s me. Tasha.’

  No response.

  ‘A Mhamaí,’ I try again. ‘It’s me.’

  Parting the curtain, I see a grey and white head of hair resting against a pile of pillows. She has a tube stuck up her nose and there’s an inhaler lying on the bedside locker beside a bottle of water. The oxygen machine on the floor next to the bed is puffing away. Her eyes are shut and her face seems bloated. Her chest moves up and down with every assisted breath. In this unfamiliar scenario, I take comfort in the familiarity of her yellow nightdress, the favourite nightie of my mother, Mary Troy.

  I can do nothing except stand there staring, afraid to move in case I wake her although, at the same time, I desperately want her to wake up. I tiptoe to the chair by the locker, put down my bag and the spare nightclothes I brought for her. I sit down on the chair, my eyes fixed on her. She is so still. I look out the window. I am not ready for this.

  In my head I tell this woman, the person I love more than any other, what I can’t yet say out loud: This can’t be happening. You, Mary Troy, are going nowhere. You have only just stopped working. You’re supposed to stay with me this weekend. You said you’d help me pick the tiles for my bathroom and I know that sounds inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, but nobody else I know has your eye for a mosaic tile. We have booked our trip to Egypt and, if I’m not mistaken, you want to see the ice-mountains in the Antarctic one day. Don’t you dare even think of leaving. I want to do so much more with you. I need you. We all need you. This is not your time.

  Feeling guilty for giving out to her even in my head, I lean over and stroke her bare arm. Her skin feels soft and loose beneath my fingers. She stirs in the bed and tilts her head towards me, her eyes heavy with sleep. Then she takes the tube from her nose and whispers: ‘Oh, hi, love. You’re so good to come.’

  So good to come? Her politeness is more than I can bear. We talk for a while, neither of us saying anything about how we actually feel. As though by unspoken agreement we keep the conversation on neutral territory. There is talk about a court case in the paper and the mush that passes for hospital food. She confirms that some sprouts did indeed die in vain to create part of the midday meal. There is no reference to the rapid decline of her health or to the sudden shock of her being here or the
confusion and helplessness I know we both feel. But we can see it all in each other’s eyes, which is one of the reasons I don’t hold her gaze for too long.

  She doesn’t say anything but I can see that she is tired again. I say goodbye, reluctantly, and stumble back down the corridor the way I came, jabbing at the elevator button. ‘Oh, bring me down,’ I think. ‘Let me out of here.’ The lift finally arrives. I press G for the ground floor. Where is H for Help? I reach the ground and head for the exit, pushing open doors, moving further away from her as I pass through each one.

  I’m outside now. I steady myself on a wall taking greedy gulps of sprout-free air before making my way to a nearby bench. I’ve never been here before but I suddenly recognise this unremarkable piece of outdoor furniture. This is it. The Bench that marks the first stop on the road to losing someone. A place where we pause before daring to contemplate whatever awfulness might come next. I take a seat, inwardly screaming at all the other people who have done time here before me. Can you all shift over and leave this one to me? Move along please. My turn now. But they are just ghosts and I am alone.

  I rummage in my bag for a bottle of water. When I find it, I knock it back as though the liquid holds some kind of cure. I drink too fast and the water splutters back into the bottle. No graces here today. No mercy either. My body bends forward. I clasp my arm across my stomach and I do what I’ve wanted to do since I first parted that pale pink curtain in Room 41. I cry. I cry and, not for the first time today, I think: My mother might leave me. But she can’t leave me. She’s my mother.

  I will never forget that hour outside the hospital. My Bench Moment, I call it. Just thinking about it I can taste the overwhelming panic I felt as I sat there with all those thoughts of what might be to come swirling through my head. I am normally good in a crisis. A fixer by nature. But not this time. Sitting on The Bench I felt inadequate and helpless and out of my depth.

  On the one hand I am worried sick about my mother’s illness for her sake but, even as I consider the possibility of her being on an oxygen machine for the rest of her life, I am consumed with the prospect of her dying and how her loss will affect me. Me. When I think of my mother dying the tears I cry are two parts grief to one part self-pity. And along with those self-indulgent tears a tidal wave of self-scrutiny crashes in:

  Have I been a good enough daughter? Have I told her how much I love her? Does she know how grateful I am for everything she has done for me? In my forty-one years what have I done for her? Is she aware of how I respect and admire her as a woman and as a mother? And, if she doesn’t, is there still time left to let her know?

  That moment on The Bench was my moment of reckoning. It marks the day I began asking questions about the nature of my relationship with my mother and started looking for ways to cherish what we have. Until that hour outside the hospital, I’d never grappled with the concept that my mother was going to die and that I would be left behind. But there I was on The Bench and that is where this book really begins. It is the place where I first realised the loss I am facing and contemplated how I’m going to deal with that loss. At that point, though, on that dismal Tuesday as I contemplated my first cigarette in twelve months, I didn’t have a notion where to start.

  My mother contracted lupus five years ago. I first realised something was wrong when we were on holiday in Morocco. One day she noticed her skin was covered in ugly blemishes, which we both assumed were caused by the intense sun. But what we thought were heat rashes turned out to be lupus. It is a disease in which the body’s immune system becomes hyperactive and attacks normal, healthy tissue. It comes with a whole range of symptoms including inflammation, swelling and damage to joints, skin, kidneys, blood, the heart and lungs. To complicate things even further, she was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension and has been on and off oxygen ever since.

  Our relationship changed in the early stages of her diagnosis. Suddenly the vivacious and fearless mother I knew was reduced to relying on oxygen and on her children for care when home from hospital. As a family we took it in turns to make sure there was always someone with her and when I couldn’t be in Galway, I talked to her on the phone several times a day. I couldn’t shake the feeling that compared to what she was going through, my work and everything else in my life was irrelevant. Living and working two and half hours from her in Dublin, where I run a communications consultancy with my brother Cilian, meant I felt constantly guilty about not being around for her when she needed me most.

  While I was being educated on the finer points of lupus and the array of medication my mother needed to take each day something else happened.

  In an entirely separate and shocking development I started to realise I was sliding into stereotypical middle age.

  At the monthly dinner parties I have held for years with my close female friends, a familiar pattern was emerging. We were all getting older and, having left our twenties and thirties behind, at times the conversation would turn to the subject of newly discovered aches and pains. We had started to talk about Our Ailments. As the corks popped, we’d catalogue how somebody’s knees had begun to ache when they went upstairs. Somebody else had a weird twinge in their ankle and wondered could they be overdoing it in Pilates. My friend Moira was going through early menopause and we got the blow by blow details of the symptoms over vegetable tempura one memorable night. As she grappled with the awfulness of her first hot flush, I had a flashback to a time when our conversations were exclusively concerned with the latest hot men in our lives.

  On top of our various physical complaints, another topic kept creeping across the dinner table: our mothers. The question came as sure as main course followed starter. ‘And how is your mother doing?’ We’d take it in turns to deliver our mother-related news bulletins. I’d describe in minute detail the latest update on my mother’s condition like an expert – I wasn’t one – giving a breakdown of the various treatments she was receiving. I talked about her funny illness-related sayings: her oxygen machine was attached to a long tube we kept tripping over – ‘Just follow the lead and you’ll find me,’ she told visitors. I talked about the guilt of kissing her goodbye and taking the train back to my life in Dublin on Sunday evenings.

  My friend Nora’s father had died a year ago and now her mother had been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis so she knew what I was talking about. She was an only child and had to make a four-hour round trip to her mother’s house every weekend.

  ‘I’m not sure what’s worse. The hassle of the trip or the guilt about how much I resent having to make it,’ she said.

  Jennifer’s mother was in great health and had recently made out a list of Christmas presents she wanted to buy for her grandchildren.

  ‘It’s flipping June!’ she seethed, the sun splitting the lime green walls in my backyard.

  Nora reckoned she could do one better. Her mother was hosting a book club and was insisting on getting the room painted for the occasion. ‘I told her nobody was coming to the book club for the paintwork but she has four shades of green on the walls and wants me to choose one,’ she groaned. Moaning and laughing about our mothers was what passed for scintillating conversation at my dinner parties these days.

  What we were discussing was serious but we always managed to have a good laugh. We couldn’t believe how much of our evening was taken up with ‘mother talk’. I enjoyed these conversations because, quite simply, I adore my mother. She’s an intelligent, warm and wise woman with just the right dose of cynicism. Luckily, we’ve a lot in common. We are the kind of people who will obsess for weeks over something as inconsequential as the perfect G&T glasses, or chat for hours about a Brian Friel play at the Abbey Theatre. I’ve always felt lucky to have such a close relationship with my mother but until I started writing this book, I didn’t realise exactly how lucky I was.

  During one of these dinner parties, I listened as a friend despaired of her mother who, despite having cancer, was insisting on retaining her forty-a-day fag habit. And ano
ther who needed to offload about a recent visit by her mother who had spent the entire time criticising her parenting. ‘Everything from Sam’s hair being too long to the fact that I hadn’t started Sarah on music lessons. She just can’t help herself.’

  As my own mother’s health became more of a worry, I looked at the anguish in the faces of my friends and realised our relationships with our mothers were on our minds now more than ever before. We needed to talk about them. We needed to make some kind of sense of our relationships with them before it was too late.

  I had an epiphany during one of these dinners: if my friends and I were feeling this way, it seemed likely that most other forty-something women were, for better or worse, spending more time thinking about their own mothers.

  This marked the start of my Interrogation Phase – I began asking every woman I met two simple questions:

  Firstly – ‘Do you have a mother?’ And if the nonplussed person I was interrogating answered yes, I then asked, ‘Are you worried about her dying?’

  At a very basic level I was asking because I wanted to feel less alone in my panic. But I had also become curious about whether other people had ever thought about their mother’s death and considered how they would feel when she died. But, even if I didn’t realise it then, I know now that it was a curiosity born of self-interest. I needed to know how other people were dealing with this so that I could deal with it better myself.

  So, if you were a woman and we were introduced socially, you got asked these questions. I asked them at dinner parties. Art exhibitions. The beauticians. On trains. The reaction was instant. Colour drained from the faces of the person I was asking. Or they rolled their eyes before they could help themselves. Even if they started saying the subject was too personal to discuss, they always ended up telling me about their relationships with their mothers. The good, the bad and the guilt. Always the guilt. Just mentioning the word mother and dying caused an emotional earthquake in the faces of the women I spoke to. In one case I had a memorable conversation on a plane from New York to Dublin with a woman who answered my question about her mother by saying: