The Daughterhood Read online

  In her excellent research study Mothers and Their Adult Daughters, Karen L. Fingerman Ph.D. points out that, apart from this new longevity, the uniquely enduring nature of the mother–daughter relationship is down to certain psychological and social factors. ‘Their shared femaleness contributes to the nature of their ties,’ she writes. ‘Women share a disadvantaged status in society. Poverty, educational deprivation and poor health-care forge ties between mothers and daughters. Women are more likely to require assistance with daily tasks, emotional problems and financial needs than are men; they often receive this assistance from their mothers or their daughters. Yet . . . even women who are well-off retain strong bonds to their mothers.’

  Fingerman talks about the fact that, throughout life – although this is changing as fathers become more involved in child rearing – mothers have tended to be more invested in their children than men. ‘Older women were socialised from an early age to view themselves as mothers and the maternal identity enhances their investment in their children.’ And, meanwhile, daughters were, in many cases, brought up to invest in generations above and below them. ‘From childhood on, girls are taught to remain close to their mothers, while boys are encouraged to establish independence from their parents.’

  There is a common arc to the mother–daughter relationship. It starts out mirroring many of the characteristics of an intense love affair. Róisín told me once how her twins lie in bed with her sometimes, early in the morning, when as a general rule she is not looking or feeling her best. They see miles past her matted hair and morning breath and last night’s make-up. They see something else, something she can’t see. They tell her she is beautiful. ‘Mummy is so pretty,’ they say, appraising her, heads to one side, as though she is some kind of work of art. Róisín’s instinct is to tell them to stop talking rubbish but instead she smiles and soaks it in. They really mean what they say so she honours that and lets the purest love she’s ever known wash over her. Then she brushes her teeth.

  Every day she sees the joy on their faces when she praises them for writing a word or pouring milk into their cereal without slopping it all over the place or saying please and thank you. She also sees the dark, bleak expressions when she has to be sterner with them. Being a mother has given her direct experience of how from the very beginning, mothers have the power to influence how daughters feel about themselves, good, bad and indifferent.

  As teenagers, in many cases we rebel and reject the intense bond, as we start negotiating the world on our own terms. We get older, we experience more of life, we may have children and our view of our mother expands. The ideal is that we begin to see our mothers as individuals in their own right. Women with needs and feelings and desires. We begin to respond to them in a more equal way. This development can take longer in some than others. I know from talking to Róisín that she feels she hasn’t moved in this direction enough.

  Another study by Fingerman shows that, while many aspects of the relationship change as daughters become middle-aged, certain emotional qualities remain constant. ‘Mothers continue to influence the way their daughters feel about themselves. Years after daughters are grown, daughters feel guilty and ashamed when their mothers criticise them and feel happy when their mothers are proud of them.’

  Our research gave weight to what we had already learned anecdotally and from our own experience: an in-depth conversation about daughters and their mothers was well worth having. So we decided to cast the interrogation net a bit wider. If we were really going to get under the guilt-gnarled fingernails of daughterhood, we needed to find out what other daughters were feeling and see if they were willing to share their stories. It was Róisín who suggested putting out a call to the daughters of ageing mothers across Ireland. It was one way to take the temperature of the nation’s mothers and daughters. The worst that could happen was that nobody would reply and I’d have to face the fact that nobody was interested in talking about their mothers after all. So I told her to go for it.

  This is what I – Róisín – wrote at the bottom of my newspaper column: If you are a woman and you would like to improve your relationship with your mother before it’s too late then send an email to . . .

  The response was immediate and forceful. It seemed we had tapped into decades of daughter-related strife. We received nearly 100 emails from women all over Ireland, some of them pages long. Many were speaking about their mothers for the first time, which made us think about all the other daughters struggling with the same issues but afraid even to put their thoughts down in an email for fear of voicing what might be considered ‘undaughterly’ emotions.

  The emails dripped with guilt and resentment and worry and bitterness and regret and joy and sadness. Natasha and I sat at her kitchen table one night, a glass of wine by our sides, reading through them. We laughed. We cried. We got a bit drunk. We sobered up. When we had finished reading, we were overwhelmed with compassion for these women who had spilled out their innermost thoughts about their mothers. Many women wrote about the difficulty of being a dutiful daughter to a difficult mother, especially when there was illness, whether mental or physical. The stories were different but what they all had in common was various levels of angst about the relationship and a desire, in most cases, to make it better before it was too late.

  We felt like we were reading the outpourings of an underground, long-silenced and desperately vulnerable community. Most of these women mentioned the taboo nature of what they were saying, especially where the relationships with their mothers was at breaking point. When we put out the call, we never imagined we would be tapping into that level of heartache and anguish. It made us think again about what we were trying to do.

  Not long afterwards, we were back in Natasha’s kitchen reading through the emails again. We had developed an easy friendship from the start and these nights, sitting around talking about our mothers, didn’t feel like work. My book club was on the following night and so I had half an eye on my laptop and the other on the doorstopper of a book I hadn’t yet finished reading. As I flicked through Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, I told Natasha about how without membership of the book club, I’d find it hard to get around to reading any books at all.

  ‘The book club forces me to read at least one book a month,’ I said. ‘I have to find the time to do it because I know at some point I’m going to have to turn up in somebody’s house and talk about it. I also know from bitter experience that it’s very hard to bluff about a book you haven’t read, even if you have skim-read a book called How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard.’ Natasha thought I was joking about the book but I wasn’t. One mischievous member chose it for our book club last year. Obviously, most of us didn’t bother to read it and that gathering turned out to be one of the most stimulating meetings in book club history.

  I put down The Goldfinch to read out a particularly heartbreaking email from a daughter who was considering severing all ties with her mother.

  ‘Imagine,’ said Natasha when I was finished. ‘Imagine if there was a club where instead of discussing books, daughters sat around discussing their problems with their mothers.’ It was a joke, really. But, as soon as she said it, we both knew she had hit on something.

  When we thought about it, we realised most of the women we knew were members of themed clubs. We all had diaries filled with weekly or monthly appointments where we gathered to drink or eat but mostly to talk. If some self-improvement happened along the way, all the better. Book clubs. Cake clubs. Supper clubs. Running clubs. Wine-tasting clubs. Clothes-swapping clubs.

  What about a daughters’ club? What better way to figure out how to improve our relationships with our mothers than with a bunch of women toiling away at the coalface of daughterly life? I suppose, to all intents and purposes, Natasha and I were already in a sort of daughters’ club. A very small one. We talked about little else these days.

  A daughters’ club? It seemed almost too obvious but I – Natasha – knew that now t
he idea had been put on the table we would have to at least have a go at setting one up. Every club needs members and the first task was to persuade some daughters to get on board with the idea. We arranged to meet with a few of the women who had responded to Róisín’s column. We wanted to find out a bit more about them and see if they’d actually be interested in membership of our club. A lot of them were. Although we probably shouldn’t have been, having had such a positive response to the column, we were still surprised that there was such an appetite for sharing mother stories. We had long conversations with the women on the phone. We arranged to meet some of them in cafés, some in my office and, in one instance, in a train station when Róisín was on her way to Belfast for work.

  Most of the daughters we spoke to really liked the idea of a support group but we would be asking for quite a lot from them. Reading a book a month is one thing, opening up to a bunch of strangers about the cracks in a relationship that society says should be the most joyful in your life was something else. With monthly meetings as our structure, we were asking for a serious time commitment before you even got into the nitty gritty of working on mother–daughter relations. It was a commitment that some women simply couldn’t give.

  These reluctant daughters varied from Jane, whose mother was so critical and negative towards her that she stopped going home for weekends, to Molly, whose mother kept constant tabs on her even though she had left home years earlier. And then there was Sally. Her story stuck with me. She and her two young children had returned from living abroad. They had temporarily moved in with Sally’s mother while the family got settled. Sally had separated from her husband and her mother seemed to blame Sally for the breakdown of the marriage. At forty-two she felt that she was capable of knowing why her marriage hadn’t worked out without her mother interfering in the way that she did.

  ‘My mother made me feel terrible about leaving Ireland and I felt guilty about taking the children as I knew she’d miss them,’ she told me. ‘Now that I’m home and have separated from my husband she makes me feel even worse. She keeps saying she is concerned about the children but I think she is slightly ashamed that her daughter has separated. She and Dad were married for forty years and marriage is for life, as far as she is concerned. It is going to take me a very long time to convince her that this is better for everyone.’ Just when Sally needed her mother’s support the most, her mother seemed incapable of giving it.

  I had huge sympathy for Sally, as she was stuck in a situation where she had to rely on her mother whilst sensing her disapproval on a daily basis. When I phoned her after she had eventually moved into her own house, she told me she had only seen her mother once in the last three weeks. In a way, she needed a daughter’s club more than anyone, but she was conflicted about being part of a daughter experiment.

  Meanwhile, Jane was the youngest of five and had been sent away to boarding school at the age of twelve. She came to me as a client to be trained for an important presentation she was giving to her board of directors. She told me she lacked confidence when it came to speaking in public and I reassured her that this was the case for most of the world’s population. We got talking about where her lack of self-belief came from and out came her Motherstory.

  ‘My mother thought I was useless at everything when I was a child, so she sent me to boarding school in the hope it would sort me out,’ she told me. ‘I was constantly compared to my two older and more intelligent brothers and I began to believe that I wasn’t as smart or as worthwhile as them. My mother’s negativity would drain your blood. I have worked very hard to get to where I am in my career but she never ever praises me or tells me that I’m doing well. And here I am at thirty-six still seeking her approval. I have confronted her on numerous occasions about it and it always ends up in a row.’

  Jane had recently started seeing a counsellor in the hope of resolving the conflict with her mother. I told her about our project and asked whether she thought it would help her. At first she said she would love to be a part of such a gathering. A week later she told me, with regret, she didn’t think she could commit. She was too scared her mother would find out.

  This was one of the main obstacles preventing many of the women we met from joining our group. They felt disloyal talking about their relationship with their mothers, even in cases where mothers had clearly failed their daughters. We were learning more and more all the time about the depth and complexity of the mother–daughter relationship. If any other person treated these women the way they were being treated by their mothers they would have walked away. But the mother relationship was not something they felt they could walk away from. They didn’t feel it was an option, even though the relationship was causing them pain.

  While lots of the women were happy to talk about their mothers at length, most were not prepared to go on the record using their real names. ‘I don’t even talk about this to my best friends,’ was a common response. So we decided the daughters would have to be anonymous. But even when we told them their identities would be disguised, many were still reluctant. The daughters with difficult relationships were not surprisingly the most wary of committing but those were the daughters that we knew we needed to hear from most.

  Thankfully for every woman who felt they couldn’t make the commitment, there were many others who were keen to get involved. By the end of our search we could have set up three groups but we decided, being amateurs, to keep it to one. The women who came on board for the first group were enthusiastic, if a little nervous, about sharing the trials of wanting to be a better daughter.

  Our plan was to swap stories from the trenches and motivate each other to greater daughterly heights. This was our question:

  What would happen when a group of daughters set out to fix, improve and challenge a relationship that had been left to its own devices for years?

  We weren’t sure but we guessed there would be as much laughter as there were tears. And wine. There would definitely be wine.

  4: THE DAUGHTERHOOD

  I – Natasha – am a candle person. I light them at breakfast, which shows you how devoted I am to a little flicker on my table. Róisín knows the drill when she comes round to mine now. The candles have to happen before the conversation can flow. I lit more than usual the night we gathered for our first meeting of daughters. We had decided on a name for our group. Mothers have a widely used description for their status – motherhood. According to my dictionary, ‘Motherhood is the state or experience of having and raising a child. Giving birth to and raising a child is an example of motherhood.’ So, Daughterhood is the state or experience of being a daughter, a female child. And that state is exactly what we had come together to explore. We had started The Daughterhood and now the first members were about to walk through my door.

  There was chilli warming in the oven and wine on the table. Part of me was excited but another part of me was terrified. I didn’t know these women. What if it turned out to be a terrible idea? I remember calming myself down by thinking about all the other people, strangers, who were meeting in the city that night and the reasons they were all getting together – Bridge clubs. Zumba classes. Yogalates (whatever that was).

  And while it was true that there might not be another meeting of daughters who wanted to talk about their mothers going on anywhere else, that didn’t matter. When we have a passion or a problem, I reassured myself, it’s natural to want to spend time with other people with whom we have that thing in common. I thought about all the AA meetings happening around the city that night. This felt like D A. Daughters Anonymous. The doorbell went. I lit another candle for luck, took a breath and opened the door.

  Part of my day job involves running confidence courses but I felt quite anxious that evening. As the women arrived, they looked shyly at each other, sat at my kitchen table, and waited for something to happen. I tried not to think about the fact that we had no guarantee anything would.

  There were seven of us, including Róisín and myself, at the
beginning. In time this would grow to nine. Two women came to join us in unexpected ways and you’ll hear about them later. That night, though, I looked around my table and tried to exude the air of somebody who knew exactly what they were doing. Dark-haired Maeve said no to the wine, and I remember Lily, in her bright red jumper, looked pale as a ghost. I could see how anxious she was. Sophie, with her jet-black hair and lapis lazuli necklace, was very still and quiet and I wondered if she was contemplating a dash to the door. Róisín was chatting to Grace who was all red lipstick and smiles and banter and, if you looked more closely, a bit teary eyed. Cathy, who looked obviously nervous, took another gulp of red wine. I was the facilitator, managing the proceedings, like a conductor trying to organise an orchestra at their first rehearsal. We were a rookie orchestra, of course. We didn’t know the notes to play but we were willing to give it a try and that was the main thing.

  We were seven very different women with, it might have seemed on the surface, not much in common. Here in my kitchen our differences didn’t seem so obvious. We wanted to talk about our mothers. We wanted to listen to other daughters talking about their mothers. And so the evening began. As the rain lashed and wind howled outside, we went around the table listening to each other tell their Motherstories in the glow of the candles. It felt natural. I was so relieved.

  I started the ball rolling by introducing the concept of The Daughterhood and what I hoped it would achieve. I told the daughters about my own mother and how her illness led to a period of self-scrutiny about myself as a daughter. I told them how Róisín had come on board. I told them that The Daughterhood was all about improving our relationships with our mothers before it was too late. I asked them to commit to six meetings over six months. I said I didn’t have a magic wand but if only one positive thing came out of the six meetings in terms of their mother relationships then that would be a success.