The Daughterhood Read online

  I started to dish out the chilli and I placed a Dictaphone on the table in front of me. We had decided we were going to record the meetings so that we could get the stories transcribed for the book. When I listened back to the transcription of my introduction I could hear how emotional I was talking about my own mother and about what we were embarking on:

  ‘I know it might feel a bit weird to talk about our mothers as a group like this but I hope we will get used to it; I’m used to it already because I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. The intent is important. And the commitment. We are all here because we want to do something with our mothers and to think more consciously about our relationships. Nothing is right and nothing is wrong and that’s the whole point about it. And if there’s only one thing you get at the end of all of this for yourselves and for your mothers that one thing will be worth it. Some of it might not be easy for us and we need to be prepared for that, too. We will meet every month for six months. That’s all I’m asking. A commitment of six months and whatever comes out of it will be good enough.’

  After I spoke, each daughter took their turn and that became the structure for all the meetings that followed. Maeve was funny about wanting more intimacy with her mother and yet keeping her at arm’s length. From Sophie we heard the story of her mother’s mental illness and from Lily we learned about what it was like to have a narcissistic mother. Cathy told us about her fear of becoming her mother; Grace about her mother who had Alzheimer’s. Róisín described how close she was to her mother but was honest about her daughterly failings. ‘I keep promising myself I won’t talk too much about myself when I meet my mother, but I always do. I find myself endlessly fascinating in her company,’ she said with a laugh.

  After everyone had spoken and the plates were cleared, I passed around a list of ‘things’ that people might like to do with their mothers over the course of the six months we were planning to meet. Listen more. Be patient. Bite your tongue. Travel with her. Stop being her doctor. That kind of thing. We were all talk at the beginning, thinking it would simply be a matter of ticking off dinner parties and lunch dates, iPad lessons and shopping trips. We talked about what we needed to do and doubts were expressed about whether we would come up to scratch in The Daughterhood stakes. We laughed and groaned as we ticked the boxes that seemed most appropriate to our situation.

  We had shared so much with each other that by the time the women got up to leave they no longer felt like strangers. Some of the daughters had told the stories of their mothers for the first time. There were damp scrunched-up pieces of kitchen paper dotted about the table, the evidence of the tears that had been shed. I made a mental note to provide a box of proper tissues at our next meeting.

  Róisín and I had a post mortem after the first Daughterhood meeting. It was the first of many post mortems. It was clear that, as daughters, we all had very different back stories and challenges. There are many types of daughters, just as there are many types of mothers, and that first meeting had thrown this variety into sharp relief.

  As we got to know each other better over the next couple of meetings, we figured out each of our biggest challenges and began to understand how we saw ourselves as daughters. We came up with titles for us all, for the kind of daughters we were, at this time in our lives anyway. Clearly, being master multi-taskers, we daughters have the ability to switch from one daughter label to another depending on what stage we are at and what is going on in our lives. As you will see, there’s a little a bit of each daughter in all of us.

  5: MEET THE DAUGHTERS

  MAEVE: THE BUSY DAUGHTER

  My mother has a pink, almost disco neon coat. She wears it through winter and summer. It’s water resistant and has a fleece lining which is attached by a zip, so you can remove it depending on the weather. ‘A coat for all seasons,’ she says. ‘You know me, Maeve, frugal fanny.’ And she IS a frugal fanny. It’s one of the things I really like about her. She pickles things in the summer, cucumbers, say, or baby beetroot, and fills up her old dilapidated walk-in larder with jars. In the winter, you can’t leave her house without at least three of the jars rattling about in your handbag. My mother is constantly prepared for a nuclear emergency. When The End comes you want to be in my mother’s house. In my mother’s larder, specifically, which smells of vanilla and vinegar and pickles of every shape, provenance and size.

  She never thinks anything she makes is good enough, though. She’ll shout after you, ‘They’re probably awful but you could give them to the cat.’ This is something that infuriates me about my mother. This idea that what she makes, potentially prize-winning grub, if you ask me, isn’t up to scratch. She’s kind of lived her life like that. Apologising for her existence. It drives me mad.

  I like her pink coat. I like it because it’s bright and therefore visible through my glass door from about twenty paces. If I miss the clang, scrape and squeak of my rusty old gate, which I could easily do being engrossed in some software bug or other, some tricky techie conundrum, I won’t miss the flash of pink through my glass front door. And when I see the flash of pink I have two choices.

  Option A: Answer the door to my mother and give up precious hours of my day to chat about the minutiae of my life and hers, when I should be earning a crust. (I should point out that I answer the door quite a lot in these situations. I’m not a complete monster.)

  And then there’s Option B: Hide. (Sometimes I hide.)

  It’s interesting, I think, that the morning I read the notice in The Irish Times I was hiding. My mother had long gone, leaving, I was to discover later, a Kilner jar of pickled red peppers on the doorstep, but I was sitting behind my sofa feeling guilty. I was having my usual conversation with myself after I’ve hidden from my mother. ‘Would it have killed you to answer the door and just have a chat with her? Could you not have had a coffee break? What are you doing hiding from your mother?’ In the time I spent giving out to myself about hiding from my mother I could have had two cups of coffee with her and discussed the entire plot of The Archers and/or Coronation Street.

  The magazine was on the floor beside me, and I’d picked it up, just flicking through, and the thing at the bottom of the column on page three caught my eye. If you would like to improve your relationship with your mother before it’s too late, then send an email to . . . I can’t say I thought that deeply about it at the time. Later, though, at dinner with Tony my husband, it must have come back into my mind because I asked him what he thought of my relationship with my mother. He laughed, which I remember thinking was interesting. ‘Well, you’re not as close as some daughters are to their mothers. You are not in each other’s pockets,’ he said after thinking about it for a few minutes. ‘But it’s hardly a relationship that needs saving.’ Tony didn’t want to talk about it much beyond that. I think there was football on the telly and I was pulling an all-nighter for work. But it got me thinking. And that night I sent Róisín an email:

  Dear Róisín

  About my mother. The main thing is I hide from her when she calls to my house but it’s not my fault it’s hers. She knows I’m busy working and that I’m self-employed but she still calls around without prior arrangement at the drop of a hat. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve told her not to do it, she still does. She sometimes brings food. It’s only when I’m writing this that I see how ludicrous it sounds. My mother calls around with nutritious vittles and I hide from her. Of course, this is not the whole story. There is more, if you want to hear it. It’s only when reading the bit at the bottom of your column that I realised that while we are close and spend a lot of time together my relationship with my mother isn’t what I’d like it to be. For various reasons. And that I would like to improve it. I’m not sure if you need more dramatic stories than this one but if you think it would help I’d like to get involved with whatever it is you are organising.

  Yours truly and feeling a tiny bit silly,

  Maeve

  I left my mobile phone number at th
e bottom of the mail but I didn’t expect to hear back. Anyway, just the act of sending the email and naming something I had spent years shying away from was liberating. There was a lot more I could have said but I held back. I resolved to carry on happily ignoring the ‘problem’. I had to put it in inverted commas because I wasn’t even sure it was a ‘problem’. I remember idly wondering if anybody else had answered the email and what kinds of stories other daughters had to tell. And then I forgot all about it. Until I got the call from Róisín. I listened to her talk about mothers and daughters and I remember laughing a bit. I felt understood, or something. But I didn’t say yes right away. I told her I’d think about it. I needed to think about it.

  I’m thirteen. My father is working abroad in Singapore and my two younger brothers, my mum and I are in Dublin. We don’t see my dad much. We used to travel with him everywhere. Dubai. Singapore. Australia. New Zealand. He was a salesman. Technology mostly. Gadgets and gizmos, he used to call it. I ended up in pretty much the same game.

  We moved back to Dublin because my mum wanted to mind her mother. My nana, who lived on her own, had been ‘failing’, as my mother put it, for years. It made me think about living as a kind of failing. Every day failing a little bit more. Death being the ultimate failure. Cheery, eh?

  So I’m thirteen and I’m standing in the hall, trying to get my little brother, Ciaran, to put on his football boots. It’s a sunny day and Mum wants us to go outside where there’s a patch of green and a makeshift football pitch. The posts have graffiti on them. ‘Timmo fancies Sinead’, ‘U2 Foreva’, ‘Slug was here’, that kind of thing. Ciaran is not playing ball in terms of putting on his boots. So I’m shouting at him when the phone rings. My mum shushes me. The thing about being the eldest is you are always ‘in charge’. You have to do the right thing at all times. People expect stuff from you. You’re to act older and wiser than you are and you’re not to mind. I feel a bit resentful of this. These are my mother’s children, not mine. Why isn’t she putting on his boots? I’d like to go out to the patch of grass myself and hang around with Timmo and see if he might fancy me instead of Sinead but, no, I’m wrestling with my little brother while my mum shushes me on the phone.

  ‘Keep it down,’ she hisses, and I look at her and I know something’s wrong. Under normal circumstances she’s got ruddy cheeks, the cheeks of a farmer, I always think. Her dad was a cattle farmer; her mother milked cows and kept hens. She has the cheeks of a farmer’s daughter, I suppose. But they were pale then as she stood there on the phone, her apron splashed with red bits from the strawberry jam she was making.

  ‘What? When? Who was with him?’ she is saying. She has the phone, one of those old, black, sturdy-looking things with a coiled lead attached, in her right hand and she puts the other hand up to her face, to her mouth, as she listens. When she takes the hand away all you can see is a bright red jam patch. And when she puts down the phone to tell me Dad has had a brain haemorrhage in a restaurant on the twentieth floor of some big hotel and he’s dead, all I can think about is that smear of jam.

  I’m sad. I think so anyway. I don’t exactly miss him because I haven’t seen him for three and a half months. I think what I miss is something I don’t know yet that is lost. His body is flown back. He is buried in the cemetery I walk past on the way to school. My mother makes mountains of sandwiches which she tells everyone who crams into our tiny kitchen are ‘awful, terrible, the worst I’ve ever made’. They are delicious. I take six – they are tiny – and go up to my room with the Atari my dad sent me for Christmas and I play Pong until I fall asleep. I wake up with an imprint from the keyboard on my face. In my dream I was in a vat of strawberry jam, trying to escape but never getting my head above the sweet-smelling gunk. I haven’t eaten strawberry jam since.

  I grow up. It happens in a blur of housework and homework and child-minding. And my relationship with my mother becomes workmanlike. We are in business together. We are in the business of running a household together. There is no man of the house. He is not coming back.

  Snapshots: I’m thirteen and a half and bringing my two brothers to school every day while my mother grieves for her mother who died two months after my dad. I’m fourteen and, since my nana has died, my mother says she feels so alone and wonders whether death is stalking our family. I’m fifteen and helping my mother decide whether to paint the garden shed or knock it down. We take an axe to it and make a sandpit for the boys. I’m sixteen and my mother and I have family meetings, with yellow legal pads where we write things down, finances, holidays, as though my mother and I are co-parents, co-workers, not mother and daughter.

  No, scratch that, we aren’t co-workers. We aren’t co-anything. My mother is the boss. A strict boss. With high expectations of her most senior employee. Me. And I love her, I do, but sometimes I don’t feel connected to her the way I imagine a daughter should. I’m seventeen and I cannot wait to get out of the house. My mother is constantly trying to keep up appearances. She worries all the time. Where are us children going? Who with? When will we be back? Death is still stalking us, she imagines. That’s what it seems like anyway but I don’t ask her because, although we live together, we are on separate continents in terms of our understanding of each other. She makes gourmet dinners but takes the joy out of it by telling us how she could have done it so much better. She wonders about night classes, even going so far as to circle the ads in the newspaper. She never goes to a night class, though. Her life is small. Our lives are small. But one day I will be older and I will live a big life and I cannot wait.

  And now I’m grown up, living a medium-sized life. I’m married. And sometimes I hide from my mother and her superior pickles and preserves. But I want more than this. She is only sixty. I am only thirty-seven. We still have so much time left together, I hope.

  I want, I suppose, more intimacy and the kind of deep connection I know is possible. Being older, I can see that we are more alike in personality than I ever thought we were. We laugh at the same things, even if I can’t admit to my friends I love Mrs Brown’s Boys. We get stressed over the same kinds of issues (from choosing furniture to form filling) and we have the same almost scary perfectionist streak. Hers is about pickles and mine about my work. I enjoy her company and the time we spend together is easy and enriching. For both of us, I think.

  And yet, I don’t have a completely authentic relationship with my mother. Even when I’m not hiding from her there are times when I don’t let her in. She wants to know more about my relationship with Tony; she’d love to hear about my issues with work. I don’t want to tell her because, when I do, she gets unduly worried.

  I think this need for more connection and intimacy, and wanting to make more time for her, is the reason why, suddenly, here I am agreeing to meet up with other daughters who want to improve their relationships with their mothers. ‘Strangers,’ I can hear my mother’s voice in my head. ‘What would you want to do that for?’ As she often does, the woman in my head has a point.

  But I go to that first meeting. I remember it because it was lashing rain. And freezing, even for a February night. If you were the kind of person who looked for signs in the weather it would have felt ominous, but as soon as I stepped into Natasha’s house with the candles and the smell of good food and the smiling, nervous-looking faces of the other daughters, I felt like it would be fine. Grand. Everyone at The Daughterhood says it, we kind of marvel about it, but that first night, although I was nervous, too, was a revelation. That feeling of everyone being there with their very different stories but wanting the same thing. I think someone joked about it a few meetings later in a corny way, calling it a ‘circle of belonging’, but it definitely had that vibe.

  That night I talked about my mother for longer than I ever had before. We all did, I think. We ate, and some of us drank and smoked. We circled our ‘things’ on Natasha’s list. I seemed to circle everything. But one thing stood out for me – travel with her. Every time I had been away with my mother b
efore, it had ended in disaster. If she irritated me at home, that irritation seemed to multiply when we travelled to foreign shores. I wanted to go away with my mother and for it not to be a holiday from hell. I put that at the top of the list as, punch drunk from hearing what everyone had to say, we stumbled out into the still-freezing, rain-soaked night. I don’t know what everyone else was thinking but this is what I thought:

  Who would have thought that a good night out could be had just chatting about our mothers?

  But it happened. Apart from anything else, it was a bloody great night out. I was less keen on the thought of what I had to do now – focusing on my relationship, getting my hands dirty with my mother, as Natasha put it. But I’d signed up to this Daughterhood now and so, apparently, I had work to do.

  Reflections on the Busy Daughter

  When I – Natasha – get a call from my mother, a picture pops up on my mobile phone of her on a moped. This photo was taken on a family holiday in Portugal. We hired this little moped, well it’s not really a moped, it’s one of those mobile things that people use to get around from A to B when they can’t walk that far. We hired it for her so she could come down the hilly path to the beach with us for swims. ‘I can’t believe you put that photo on your phone,’ she says to me when I show it to her; ‘my hair looks wild and I look so old.’ But I don’t care; I love it.

  That little vehicle was her saviour on holiday as it conserved her energy for a swim. She was very weak at the time but determined to swim every day. The waves could be fierce depending on the winds and I would link one arm through hers and my eighty-year-old aunt, her sister Margaret, would link hers through my other arm and the three of us would head for the water. Like my mother, Margaret is a great swimmer but these waves were so strong they could knock you over. We stood in the water as I balanced both of them on either arm and laughed and screamed like children as the force of the waves swept towards us. The moped was then revved up and my mother scooted back up the hill again.