The Daughterhood Page 10

  As the years have passed, she has slowly accepted and adapted. My mother is a very reflective and spiritual woman and she has worked hard on accepting that this is the way it is and will be. This is her lot and that lot could be a lot worse! She gets deeply frustrated at times by her lack of energy. The way one task or small outing a day results in having to go back to bed for the rest of the day. She had such an active life before she got sick and coming to terms with her new limitations has been hard.

  Even though my mother has accepted her lot I can’t honestly say that I have. She is going to die on me some day. That initial fear of her not being here has never left me. It’s a constant undercurrent that gently flows beneath the surface all the time. Sometimes I allow it to rise up; I force myself to feel what it will be like when she is actually gone. It’s the Life Without My Mother Test. I sit with that thought and see where it takes me.

  In the early days tears welled up within seconds but now an image of a wide open space appears and I’m filled with dread. It’s as though I’m preparing myself for when that time comes. I’m testing myself out to see if I’ve made any progress. And, at the same time, I’m so conscious of how lucky I am and so grateful for the borrowed time that has passed since she got sick.

  I’m not alone in conducting what I call the Life Without My Mother Test. My great friend Veronica told me recently that she did something similar. She was driving to Galway a few months ago to see her mother in hospital after she had been diagnosed with a brain tumour. ‘I was speeding along the motorway and I forced myself to imagine what it would be like if she died. What would my world look like?’

  Veronica had to pull in on the side of the road, put on her hazard lights and have a good sob because she was worried that she might have an accident. (Anyone attempting this test should not do it while driving or while using heavy machinery.) Luckily her mother is now in remission and doing well. ‘What annoys me’, she said, ‘is that just because my mother is eighty-one, I’ll be expected to get over it pretty quickly when she does go. But losing her will have a profound effect on me; she is still my mother. I know it will take me a long time to get over it.’

  For the daughters of women with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, this grieving takes place while their mothers are still alive. They don’t have to do the Life Without My Mother Test. It’s happening every day. The mother they knew is fading or is already gone because of this progressive neurodegenerative disorder. Her personality, her quirks, her outlook on life, all changed utterly and for ever. The disease robs daughters of their mothers in the cruellest way. Their mothers are there but not there. Still alive but different. Nothing near the mothers they used to be.

  Ireland – and indeed Western Europe’s – ageing population means that the number of people living with dementia is expected to treble in a generation. There are currently almost 48,000 people living with dementia in the Republic, over half of whom have Alzheimer’s. That number is expected to rise to over 153,000 during the next few decades. On a global scale, Alzheimer’s Disease International figures show that nearly 36 million people are suffering with Alzheimer’s or a related dementia, and two out of three people with Alzheimer’s in the world are women. That is an awful lot of mothers and daughters dealing with the tragic loss of a relationship they can never regain. And feeling, like Grace, as though they are grieving their mothers before they die.

  RÓISÍN: THE DEPENDENT DAUGHTER

  My mother is in the top four people on this planet I like to spend time with. The others are my daughters and their father Jonny. Life feels better with my mother around. I make a point of including her in everything we do, not because I am a dutiful daughter but because I want her there with me. My mother improves every social occasion. A bit like crisps and cheese.

  As part of my work, I get invited to lots of interesting shindigs. Much of the time I bring my mother. When I had to do a public interview with the Irish literary giant and all-round legend Edna O’Brien in Belfast, I asked my mother if she would come with me. Knowing she was in the audience gave me a confidence boost, while she adored bathing in the wisdom and intellect of O’Brien for what was a magical hour. I brought my mother with me to Ballyfin, probably the most luxurious hotel in Ireland, where we wallowed in the beauty of the place. I may not be able to drive a car but I can drive a golf cart, which was the main thing I learnt on that trip. I drove that golf cart around the grounds for hours, delighted with myself.

  I bring her with me whenever I can because she loves me. Excuse me while I channel Sally Fields delivering her much-slagged-off Oscar acceptance speech when I tell you, tearfully and truthfully: ‘She loves me, she really loves me.’ And at a very basic level it is uplifting to be around that kind of love, so I drag her with me everywhere as much as possible.

  It’s the unconditional nature of her love that I’m grateful for. That, coupled with her intimate knowledge of me as a human being. She loves me. She understands me. She accepts me. Those three things together are a very potent cocktail, a cocktail I may or may not have become addicted to over the years. Perhaps it’s a healthy addiction. Like the one I’ve been developing lately for tabbouleh. (Breaking news: bulgar wheat mixed with spring onion, coriander, mint and chopped tomatoes is tasty. The health freaks are not lying this time.) But I know that when I think of what I need to do with our relationship it’s about not being so dependent on her for so much in my life.

  When I sat with the other daughters at the first meeting I told them all of this. I also mentioned my tendency, when my mother and I go out to lunch, to talk about myself the whole time. It’s not that I don’t ask her questions, I do. But the joy of having my mother all to myself means I want to let her know every little happening and problem and triumph I have had. Sometimes she just doesn’t get a look in.

  I also came clean about our family gatherings. How when we’ve got together lately, a few of them were spoilt by me being argumentative with some of my seven siblings. When my brother came home from India a couple of Christmases ago, he organised a replica Christmas dinner, like the ones my mother used to do in Inglenook, where we grew up. (Yes we were stony broke but our house had a name. I like to think of it as beautifully aspirational on my mother’s part.) There was only one sibling missing, Eddie in America, but when we sat down around the table heaving with beautiful Christmas food (albeit in November), a small grievance I’d been having with my younger sister exploded into full-on war. Cutlery was thrown, a glass was smashed and, as though no years had passed since I was a paisley-pyjama-wearing teenager, I stomped back to my own house around the corner in the rain. I know plenty of us regress when we are back in the bosom of our families, but I was taking things a bit too far. My mother was upset and the day was ruined, until it was salvaged by less volatile siblings.

  In addition to my tendency to throw grenades into otherwise peaceful family gatherings, the appalling details of my dependency should be laid out here: I am dependent on my mother materially. If I lose my ATM card, which happens too frequently, or too many bills come in at the wrong time and I need a dig out, my mother is there. I pay her back, eventually, but I know that I shouldn’t be relying on her in this way. A few years ago, I got myself into some serious financial trouble and she bailed me out to a significant degree. I know she was happy to do it but I also know that the funds she loaned me represent money she could have now been enjoying herself or using to splurge on her, wait for it, seventeen grandchildren, or using to help my other siblings out. I lean on her financially way too much. I need to stop.

  I am dependent on her emotionally, too. Take the other night. I was feeling a bit fragile after a long day at work. I took a call from a well-meaning friend who started to suggest gently that I might need to take time for some exercise. He wasn’t wrong. I DO need to take some time for exercise. But at the moment I haven’t got the time or I find it difficult to make the time. So this well-meaning person’s comments riled me. After I put the phone down, all my strug
gles with being fitter and healthier, mostly so I can run around after my children and not pretend I don’t have a swimming costume just so I can get out of going to the pool, came bubbling up.

  I talked to Jonny about it. And he was good and kind, as he always is, but I knew the only person I really wanted to talk to about it, the only person who would really understand why I felt so bad was my mother. So, instead of dealing with my hurt and confusion and frustration on my own, like a grown up, I rang my mother and spewed it all out down the phone.

  I howled out my pain, I wailed, I talked for twenty minutes, hardly drew breath, and all the time my mother was there saying, ‘I know, I know.’ And she did know. Otherwise her ‘I knows’ would have irritated me. I knew she knew. And that knowing was like a balm across my heart, a salve for my soul. Eventually, I calmed down. I had been heard. I had been understood. I had been loved back to some kind of equilibrium by the only person in the world who could have done it: my mother. But is she the only person? No. I know my work with my mother is about learning how to depend on the other person who has the power to love me back to sanity: myself.

  I’m six or I am seven and my mother is the centre of my world. I don’t really know my father. Although he is there in the armchair, shouting at the horses on the television: ‘Go on, ye daisy. Go on, my son.’ Or he is holding my hand crossing the road past Ryan’s pub on the corner where the smell of hops tickles my nose. Or he is at the door, a stranger with a beard, a brown paper bag full of sweets in his hand. I haven’t seen him in a while and, with the new facial hair like Captain Birdseye from the fish finger ad, I don’t recognise him as my father. I reach back through the years and I try to remember his touch or his smell but there’s nothing. I can see a twinkle in his blue eyes, though. And I can hear him singing ‘Tura lura lura’ in his beautiful, warm, rich voice. I have a memory of that.

  Daddy is sick, you see. He has schizophrenia, but I don’t know what that means at six or seven. I just know he is not with us the way my friends’ dads are. He is there but he’s not there. He is a ghost in the house. With eight children, my mother is keeping the show on the road. We have no money because Daddy, a taxi driver, can’t work. There are butter vouchers in the drawer, though; they are given out to poor people in 1970s Dublin and Miss Roddy, who owns the local shop, lets us buy other things with them. Bread and milk, whatever we might need. And the nuns down the road, the sisters of charity, bring us black bags of clothes, which we have great fun sorting through. At Christmas the bags are full of toys. It’s where Santa gets his stuff.

  Sister Agnes is the nun who helps us. She sits in the kitchen talking to my mother for ages while we run in and out and around her to the back garden where we make mud pies and construct elaborate obstacle courses. Before she goes back to the convent or on to the next struggling family, she hands an envelope to my mother and there will be cash – one note, sometimes two – folded neatly inside. I know all this. I know about the butter vouchers and the black bags and the charity but I never feel poor. I feel lucky. I am snuggled up with my mother on the sofa, beside the fireplace my father built, and there’s a smoky smell from the briquettes and Blake’s 7 is on the telly, and I feel I am the luckiest girl in the world. That is my mother’s gift to me.

  One day, when I’m eight, my father, who has been promising to do this for quite a while now, kills himself. He takes a blue rope and he goes outside to our back garden and he puts it around his neck and he ties it to the tree and he hangs himself. We don’t have a phone, so when my mother finds him in the morning she runs next door to Mrs Smith’s house and she bangs on the door until they wake up.

  The Smiths have a phone. It’s in a specially built cubicle just beside their front door. The phone was such an important and glamorous item then that it had its own little house. My mother picks up the heavy black handset and dials 999 and the ambulance comes as quick as it can but it’s already too late. When we wake up that morning my eldest sister says, ‘Don’t look outside’, so I don’t. I am grateful to my sister. I hope nobody else looked.

  The thick blue rope is on a counter near the back door. The house fills with people. Daddy’s dead. I’m floating above the scene. I’m not really there. I float out of the house because I’m going to school. I know what’s what there. The house is confusing to me now. I float around for days. I float into Miss Roddy’s, where she doesn’t charge me for my usual brown paper bag of Fruit Salads. I float into the funeral home, where Daddy is in the coffin and my mother says he has donated his eyes to science and I think that means another man will be walking around with Daddy’s eyes and I wonder will they still have his twinkle. I found out how he died from my brother Michael. A boy on a bike had shouted across the road to him: ‘Your dad hung himself from a tree.’ I got annoyed with Michael when he told me what he’d heard, convinced he must be lying. When I told my mother what he’d said, she confirmed it was true.

  We younger children don’t go to the funeral. We sit in the back room of the Borza’s chip shop, which is three doors from our house. I love Borza’s. We can have anything we like because we are children with a Dead Daddy. When I think of my father dying I taste hot, fat chips and a burger smothered in crispy batter. I see the goodbye note he wrote on my Peter and Jane reading book. All our names listed there in his bockedy handwriting. I have dreams that my father comes to visit me. But they are nightmares. He really is a ghost now.

  My mother is my superhero. Her youngest child was one and her eldest sixteen when my father died. She is English and came over to Ireland in the 1960s after marrying and meeting my father there. She had no other family in Ireland except us. I will never stop being grateful for the fact that she raised me to care about the things she cared about – books and culture and being curious about people. That she didn’t fall apart. That she managed the widow’s pension and the social welfare payments and was able to give us the building blocks for a good life. Before Daddy died she had bought the entire set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica – the Google of the day – which we consulted on everything from quiz questions to school projects. She purchased it on the never-never from a door-to-door salesman, even though there was no money for luxuries. When Daddy died one thing that happened was the encyclopaedias were paid off because of some kind of insurance clause. I doubt he knew it would happen but I always think of it as his gift to us.

  You try to join the dots in life but sometimes you can’t. My father killed himself. Is that why I began to use food to comfort me and still do? Is that why I was such a pain-in-the-neck teenager? Is that why I’m so dependent on my mother as an adult? I don’t know. I just know that it would make my mother happy to know that I am finally sorting myself out and standing on my own two feet. I know that mothers like to be needed. But in my case I know my mother would like to be needed less by me. I will try.

  I’ve been thinking a lot about why I’m so dependent. And the conclusion I’ve come to does not paint me in a good light. Somewhere along the way, when we grow up and away from our mothers, the mother–daughter dynamic is supposed to change. Where once it was a child and adult scenario, the daughter should emerge as an adult in the world and their relationship should, as a natural consequence, achieve a more equal footing.

  This hasn’t happened for me yet. When I close my eyes and think of my mother, I don’t see her just as a woman, with needs and hopes and dreams. This is what I think when I think about my mother: she is there to mind me, to look after me, to keep me safe. She is there to keep the wolves from the door and the monsters from under my bed. She is there to rescue me from dragons and ride in on a white horse to save me from myself. Until I started really looking at our relationship, I hadn’t realised this to be the truth. I think everybody else in my family probably sees it, which is why she sometimes gets called an enabler when it comes to me. I know it causes a certain amount of resentment. But perhaps that resentment is justified, which is something I never considered before now. I thought my work here was going to be
about not taking my mother for granted. Now I see my work is bigger than that. I need to grow up. What a surprise.

  I am the Dependent Daughter but I think I’m a Dependable Daughter, too – with some qualifications. I am one of the most squeamish people I know when it comes to hospitals, for example. I hate the smells. The unexpected sights. A surgeon’s blood-splattered, slip-on shoes. Nappies piled neatly on a table beside an older person’s bed. It’s as though I resent being reminded of what actually goes on there and I find this resentment hard to hide. If I needed to go to hospital and wanted a friendly face to gaze on, I would be the last person I’d call. So take pity on my mother. Over the past few years, every time she ended up in hospital, it’s been her hospital-phobic, decidedly non-nursey daughter who, for some reason, has been the one to accompany her. I was with her when she went to the doctors for a routine check-up and it was decided that she needed a heart scan. I sat petrified and resentful in St Vincent’s for an afternoon trying to think of soothing things to say. Mostly ‘You’ll be grand’, if I’m honest, although I didn’t know if she would be. She was, as it turned out. I, on the other hand, needed a couple of days to recover.

  Not long afterwards she went to Belfast to visit me. I had moved there for work and was always finding schemes to make her come and spend time up there with me. I once brought her up because the world record for most people kissing in one space at a time was being attempted. It was only when we walked into the space that I realised it wasn’t exactly the most appropriate mother–daughter outing.