The Daughterhood Read online

  ‘I can’t bear to be in the same room with her, if you must know. We fight most of the time. And yet, even when we’re fighting, I have this quiet dread about when she is gone. It comes over me at the oddest moments. I don’t even want to think about it.’ She was still talking two hours later.

  These conversations showed me that whatever their relationship, women my age had an awful lot to say about their mothers.

  Other questions I started asking were: Do you think you are a good daughter? Could you be a better daughter than the one you are now? When I look back now, this was the beginning of my preparation. I could see a treacherous cliff edge looming in front of me. I wanted to be ready when life came up and pushed me off. I wanted to prepare for the time when my mother wouldn’t be around any more.

  But how to prepare? Well, for me it was about casting a forensic eye over my relationship with my mother. For the past five years the dread of losing her has been occupying my thoughts so much that I decided to write this book. It is a book not just about my fears and my relationship with my mother, but about daughters in general and our attempts to negotiate the most complex, infuriating, joyous, messy, enduring relationship of our lives.

  The shelves and online bookstores are heaving with baby manuals but there are hardly any about making life with your mother as rewarding and life enhancing as it can be. The more I thought about it, the more I felt there was a need for a book to help daughters reflect on the relationship they have with their mothers and to help them consciously work to make that relationship the best it could be, particularly in those final years. A book to help them navigate the last years of their relationship. A book about the person many of us will always yearn for and turn to when times are hard – the woman with the ability to nurture, comfort and annoy you more than any other on the planet. One woman. For better or for worse. Your mother.

  Ever since The Bench I’ve been on a mission and by reading this book this mission is also yours, should you choose to accept it. Imagine if you could stand at your mother’s graveside and have no regrets. Well, let’s be realistic, hardly any regrets. Imagine if when you stood there you could be confident, even in the midst of grief, that you had done the best you could, particularly in the final chapter of your lives together.

  That is what this book is about. It’s about doing things with and for our mothers that will enhance our time and our relationship with them as they age. It’s about bringing pleasure to our mothers, whether you think they deserve it or not. This will come naturally to some of us and be more challenging for others. It is also about acknowledging that there might not be anything to do, apart from accepting that the relationship is as far away from the Hollywood version of mother–daughter relationships as it’s possible to be. The Hallmark crowd don’t make Mother’s Day cards for daughters who don’t get on with their mothers. But daughters who don’t like their mothers still send them. It’s just that they are usually blank inside, with no flowery message.

  Here’s what I found from talking to daughters: we are mad about our mothers. Mad with our mothers. And in many cases we are driven mad by the guilt that our mother–daughter relationships just aren’t good enough. We need to get to grips with all of this before it’s too late.

  The original title for this book, the one I knew probably wouldn’t end up on the cover, was Ten Things to Do with Your Mother Before She Dies. It had a macabre sense of urgency about it because what we are trying to do here is urgent in every sense. There is no nice way to put this – your mother is going to die. Most likely she is going to pop her clogs, or in my mother’s case her round-toed, leather slip-ons, well before you do. If you felt the need to buy this book or if someone gave it to you as a gift, I am making an educated guess that the longest, most complex relationship of your life is now in its twilight years. In footballing terms, we are in the dwindling moments of extra time.

  Parts of this book may not be easy to read, especially if your relationship with your mother isn’t in good shape. Some of the ideas may seem unthinkable. One of my suggestions is that you help your mother plan her funeral. For many people that might be hard to consider. The things we are going to explore in this book are simple, straightforward and, in most cases, blindingly obvious. But that doesn’t mean they are easy.

  If you are one of the lucky ones whose relationship with their mother is in need of nothing more than a daughterly MOT, then this book is your chance to make something already really positive even better. For others, reading this book might just be about finding ways to make a bad relationship bearable. Or finding ways to accept that the bad relationship, the kind not generally described on Mother’s Day cards, will never change. Or finding ways to forgive. Most of all, though, this book is about asking questions. Questions like:

  How do we make sure that when she goes we are at peace with the way we behaved towards her when she was here?

  And:

  How will we feel when she dies if we leave things exactly as they are?

  The answers will be different for everyone. The fact that you are reading this book suggests that, whatever your circumstances, we are all in the same boat, scanning a similar horizon. The scenery may be different but the destination is the same. One day we will be standing at a grave or in front of a crematorium curtain or reading a eulogy at the mother of all funerals. And we are going to have regrets. What we’re trying to do is minimise those regrets. Not tomorrow, not next week, but now. While we still can.

  2: A COLLABORATOR

  I set off on this mother-centric odyssey – I have banned the word ‘journey’ from this book, blame X Factor – feeling pretty confident that I could help others make the most of their relationships with their mothers. I had a clear mission: to pour a little healing oil on troubled daughters. I had done my research, talked to a wide cross-section of concerned women and had my own experience to fall back on. However, I am the first to admit that I was naive about the extent of the difficulties daughters were experiencing. As I said earlier, I am lucky. I’ve always had a great relationship with my mother. It’s not perfect, we have our challenges, but Mary Troy and I are good together. I talk to her on the phone every day. I genuinely enjoy her company. I seek her advice when I’m in tricky situations and she makes me laugh. The pleasure I get from my relationship with my mother is one of the great joys in my life. But having ‘interrogated’ so many other daughters, I knew that if I relied solely on my own experience this book wouldn’t accurately reflect the complexities of mother–daughter relationships.

  I had also begun to appreciate that I might need a bit of help. A collaboration started to seem even more attractive when I contemplated the pressures of running a company and writing a book at the same time. I also wanted a second opinion, a springboard for ideas, a brainstorming partner, someone who would bring fresh perspective to the tricky matter of mothers and daughters.

  I’d been reading Róisín Ingle’s column in The Irish Times for years. It’s one of those personal columns, the kind that aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. They are mine, though. I like her style. I’ve always found her funny, thought-provoking and, more than anything else, fearlessly honest, sometimes painfully so. I had noticed her mother provided lots of material for her weekly musings. She seemed brimful of love for her mother but she also wrote about taking her mother for granted and being too needy a daughter. So I called her, left a message which I hoped was intriguing but not off-putting. And I waited.

  Take a guess as to my whereabouts when I, Róisín, listened back to Natasha’s voice message? Exactly. I was sitting in my mother’s house, at her kitchen table, drinking pots of her excellent coffee. I’d like to be able to tell you my being there was a serendipitous, fateful happening. The truth is, at the time, if I wasn’t in my own house or at work, I was pretty much hanging around my mum’s. I was on another health kick and, since I didn’t have weighing scales in my house, she was keeping track of the logistical side of things for me. This was not an entirely straigh
tforward arrangement. My mother lives with my younger sister and I wasn’t keen for her to know that I was enlisting our mother as some kind of WeightWatcher’s leader. So I had my mother hide a blackboard behind her telly where she could surreptitiously record my progress in white chalk.

  When Natasha left that message I was in my mother’s house for my weekly weigh-in. I was also eating a plate of my mother’s fried mushrooms on toast. It wasn’t just the lure of the blackboard that had me round there so much. I’ll tell you later on about how wonderful she is but that is only part of the reason why I like spending time with my mother. See, apart from myself, there is nobody in the world as interested in me as she is. Mothers are, in a lot of cases, aren’t they? I wouldn’t have said it at the time but, since I met Natasha and started thinking about all of this, I’ve realised that her interest in me is one of the things I love most about her.

  She knows me – every particle of me – and, more importantly, she accepts the whole messed-up kit and caboodle of me. She sees all the stuff I try to keep hidden and loves me anyway. When I first learned and understood the phrase ‘unconditional love’ I thought of her. She is it. You know how boring it is listening to people’s dreams? Well, I could tell my mother every dream I’d ever had and, not only would she not want to kill me, she’d ask me for more details.

  I didn’t recognise the number when Natasha called so I let it ring and carried on talking to my mother about how hard it was to jog for two and a half minutes without stopping. And when I’d finished she told me about the latest short story she’d written in which she’d imagined Booker-winning novelist Ian McEwan listening to Desert Island Discs and seething with jealousy because he’d never been asked on the programme. Then she read it out to me in her best posh stage voice. I probably should have been in work but, what with the mushrooms and McEwan, we were having a rare old time and I figured five more minutes at her kitchen table wouldn’t hurt.

  A short while later I listened to the voice message. This Natasha person was very cagey on the phone. She said she wanted to talk to me face to face about some idea or other she had. When I finished listening to the message I got off the phone and told my mother. ‘Ring her and arrange to meet,’ said my mum. ‘It could be something good.’ So I did.

  My mother is sometimes wrong but not often, and she was right this time. It was something good. I knew it as soon as I walked into Natasha’s office and she said, ‘I’ve an idea for a book with the working title Ten Things to Do with Your Mother Before She Dies.’ She didn’t need to say another word. Help her write the book? I wanted to read that book. One recent trip with my mother to London goes some way towards explaining why.

  When I travel with my mother I know that, as well as her sleep-apnoea machine, she has to pack a suitcase of anxiety related to years of having to deal with my various losses and travel mishaps. I lose passports. I mislay boarding cards. I turn up late for flights. I am, to put it mildly, a bit of a liability. So it’s no wonder that on this latest trip to London my mother looked at me and saw all that potential for travel-related chaos.

  I get highly irritated by this, obviously. ‘I’m not a five-year-old,’ I mutter when she asks for the third time if I have my passport. Even when she’s not asking me, I know she’s thinking about asking me. ‘What a total head wreck,’ my inner thirteen-year-old silently moans. I’m clearly a responsible adult. I have twin five-year-old daughters. Having managed to keep Joya and Priya alive for five years, I think I know a thing or two about being responsible. I only put jalapeños instead of gherkins in their lunchbox that ONE time. Give a mother a break.

  We accidentally lose each other at the scanning machines. When we find each other again there’s a man waving a boarding pass he has found on the ground.

  ‘Did you lose your boarding pass?’ she asks. I stare up at the screen to check for our gate number, pretending not to hear. Eventually she stops asking. We carry on to the gate. When I produce my boarding pass I see a familiar look in her eyes: relief.

  I can’t blame her for this constant fuss but, of course, I do because she’s my mother. She is remarkably restrained in London, I notice. I nearly lose my phone twice and she manages not to tell me to be more careful. I can see it in her face, though: the care, the concern, the worry. (Infuriating, obviously.) But she mostly doesn’t turn the concern into words, for which I’m grateful.

  Still, there are other ways she manages to make me feel like that hard-done-by thirteen-year-old. I buy some bone-handled knives in a charity shop but she vetoes the purchase of two cups because she doesn’t like the look of them. And just before we go downstairs for my sister-in-law’s fortieth birthday party, she wonders – tentatively, I’ll give her that – whether I might be going to brush my hair. The icy stare I summon up is enough to send her scuttling out of the room.

  Of course I was going to brush my bloody hair, I think, getting the hairbrush out and making it look slightly less Worzel Gummidge. I don’t need my mother to tell me I have hair issues.

  Anyway it’s a great party. My brother Peter makes a wonderful speech that annoys all the men in the room who say he’s raised the bar too high. Everyone loves the food and Nigella’s Guinness cake. Even my generous offer to sing ‘The Mountains of Mourne’ at 1am – with too much Prosecco on board I’m convinced it will have deep resonances for all these smart London folk – doesn’t spoil things.

  ‘People are happy, it’s a good party,’ Peter says kindly. The subtext is clear: Percy French, no harm to him and his Mountains of Mourne, will take a wrecking ball to the ambience.

  It’s a flying visit for me but my mother is staying on. We’ve barely woken up the next morning when she’s asking what time my flight is. ‘10pm,’ I tell her through gritted teeth. ‘Are you sure?’ she asks.

  I check the time on my phone just to keep her quiet and discover, through my hangover, that I’m wrong. ‘It’s 6pm,’ I tell her. She manages not to gloat.

  Before I leave she wonders whether it might be wise for me to take the bone-handled knives out of my hand luggage and give them to her to bring back in a suitcase. How annoying and at the same time how massive-security-incident-avoiding of her.

  When I get to the airport the flight is closed. Because, as the woman on the airline desk tells me, the flight is not at 6pm; it was at 4.45pm and it’s on the tarmac about to take off. I have to buy a new ticket for the next flight which costs twice as much as the one I bought to come over.

  When I ring my mother, distraught, she says she’ll book it on her Visa and that it’s only money and she knows I’ll pay her back. Then she says she feels bad because she should have checked up on me regarding the time of the flight but, you know, she didn’t want to treat me like a child.

  Later I sit in the airport and cry. Over my stupidity and over the fact that, when my mother goes, there will be nobody else in the world who will care about me as much as she does. I make a promise I know I’ll break: that I’ll never again react negatively to her concerns, whatever my inner thirteen-year-old might think. Because – and you’d think I’d know this by now, you really, really would – she ain’t heavy, she’s my mother.

  I love this idea of Natasha’s. The notion that we can be more conscious of our mothers while they are still alive, rather than regretting what we did and more importantly what we didn’t do when they die. There’s lots I still want to do in my life. I want to learn another language. I want to get fitter. I want to play at least three songs well on the guitar. I want to run for an hour without stopping. And I want to be a better daughter. It’s as simple as that. Or not. We shall see.

  3: FINDING THE DAUGHTERS

  The day after comedian and actor Robin Williams died, I – Natasha – listened to an interview he did at home that was broadcast in his memory. During the podcast, between the glorious comedy riffs, candid stories of drug addiction and revelations about the fear that followed him constantly, the man who was Mork talked about his mother. He had heard something once tha
t struck a chord: ‘Mothers know how to press your buttons. They know because they installed them.’

  Our mothers install our buttons during our childhood and they spend the rest of their lives pushing them. Accidentally sometimes. And sometimes by design. That, in a way, is their job. With all the argy-bargy and ructions between mothers and daughters, it’s a wonder we survive them at all, never mind get to know each other woman to woman. Since we met and decided to start working on this book, Róisín and I had begun to look more closely into the world of mothers and daughters. In one book we read as part of our research, a frustrated daughter exclaimed: ‘If she wasn’t my mother I’d divorce her.’ But, by and large, mothers and daughters don’t divorce each other. The relationships, even the difficult ones, endure longer than any others in our lives.

  A book like this wouldn’t have worked fifty years ago. Not because there wasn’t a need to discuss mother–daughter issues, but because the mother–daughter relationship didn’t last long enough to warrant quite so much examination. We twenty-first-century daughters are spending longer with our mothers than any other daughters in history. Life expectancy since the 1900s has doubled. Women are generally outliving men. The fact that past the age of seventy women are often living alone has obvious repercussions when it comes to the intensity of their relationships with their children, particularly their female children. As they move into late middle age, daughters begin to worry more about their mothers. And, as they age, mothers become more concerned with their children who will be left behind, and about what will happen to them when they go.