The Daughterhood Page 5

  So Mary Troy perched on that moped is the image that pops up on my screen when she rings. ‘Sorry to ring you at work, love, I know you’re very busy but I just wanted to ask you something . . .’ I nearly always answer the phone to my mother, particularly since she got sick. I answer unless I’m training, on a phone call or in the middle of a really important meeting. She doesn’t ring just for the sake of it and when she rings it’s normally for a reason. We talk every day, usually midmorning, around 11am, and then at some stage in the evening. Sometimes if she rings me at work and I’m on a deadline, I’m conscious that I’m pushing her off the phone. ‘Sorry, but I can’t talk to you now, is everything all right?’ ‘Yes, just wanted to ask you . . .’ and before she gets to the end of her sentence she has been cut off by me at 90 miles an hour, ‘CallyoubackassoonasIcan!’ She doesn’t stand a chance. Later I do call her back, ‘Sorry I was too busy to talk to you . . .’ and we carry on as normal. The last time I got annoyed was when I had to reorder her mobile oxygen machine for our trip to the Arctic. There seemed like five million phone calls to make to get it sorted – the hire company, her doctor, the heart doctor, the health insurer, the delivery company, the airline to give them the model number. On and on they went. I needed a spreadsheet to manage all the different forms and various tasks that it took to finally hire it for a week. I expressed my frustration to her when she rang me for the umpteenth time to tell me, ‘And don’t forget you also have to ring the something or other.’ ‘This is a total pain in the head,’ I blurted down the phone. ‘It’s only a bloody machine and we only need it for a week.’ I was totally exasperated.

  ‘But my mother is totally out of sync with my life, especially at work,’ a friend said to me recently. ‘She rings me at the most awkward times. She knows I’m busy and when I tell her I can’t talk to her because I’m busy, she then asks me what I’m doing that has me so busy? It’s so annoying.’

  Mothers don’t stand a chance with their daughters in our busyness. In talking to our daughters at the monthly meetings, it became clear that outside of those relationships where mental illness or dementia played a part, mothers in later life simply have more time to invest in their daughters than their daughters have to invest in them. This fact alone is a common cause of tension and severe button pushing. Janice, a friend of mine, has regular minor set-tos with her mother, usually on the phone, when Janice feels her mother is being far too curious and concerned about the minutiae of her and her daughter’s life.

  ‘So, where are you going for lunch tomorrow?’ she’ll enquire. Or ‘Do you think you better send that form back for the girl’s music lessons?’ Innocuous comments like this set Janice ridiculously on edge; it’s the mother equivalent of the sound of scraped fingernails across a chalk board. ‘I veer constantly between annoyance that my mother is keeping tabs on me, to gratitude that my mother could be bothered to mention these things. I mean, who else, apart from her, would really care?’ Janice told me. Newsflash: our mothers tend to be motherly. They can’t help it. And yet we can often resent this expression of something that is as natural to them as their morning cup of tea.

  Too often they are up against the clock from the moment they get a ring tone or knock on our door to say hello. The skill involved in them getting the words out quickly before we cut them off is an art in itself. They are in a race against time – and it gets worse, so often the conversation starts with an apology.

  ‘Sorry, hope you don’t mind me calling you . . .’ ‘Hi, love, is it OK if I call in – I won’t stay long . . .’ And so on. Let’s face it, with our busy lives, our mothers are often terrified of encroaching on us. Often I’ll be with a friend when the phone rings and is left unanswered. I’ll say, ‘Take that if you have to.’ ‘No, it’s OK, it’s only my mother,’ is the regular response. ‘I’ll ring her later.’ ‘Only my mother’ – I often wonder how do so many mothers get to that only status? How does it happen that they end up there? In our early years, it is us ringing them – we are the ones coming home for the home-cooked food, getting our laundry done, and the support that comes with it. As the years pass, we gradually ring less and visit less, as we carve out our own place in the world. And then, finally, they are reduced to ‘It’s only my mother’? Are our mothers really so annoying that our reactions are justified, or are we really so busy that we just can’t take that call?

  Of course there are mothers who drive their daughters crazy and ring and call in at the most inappropriate times, and, of course, there are many others who don’t listen to their daughters when they tell them that the best time to ring or visit is at lunchtime or weekends or when the children are in bed. But most of us don’t tell them, we don’t give them a steer or even a hint of what might work better because we are afraid of offending them. Instead we get annoyed or cut them short and we let them keep doing it again and again. The cycle continues. From talking with daughters, I’ve found that setting acceptable boundaries between them and their mothers is a constant frustration.

  But how to stop ourselves from feeling guilty when we are simply too tired to answer the phone to our own mothers? School runs, days at the office, making dinners, getting children to their various after-school activities and meeting deadlines: the last thing I need is a call from my mother.

  To change a recurring situation which only makes you feel bad needs a solution. I’m a great believer in strategies – they set clear objectives, they have desired outcomes and there are steps set out to achieve those outcomes. Yes, I know this sounds drastic but there is no reason why we can’t apply a strategy to our personal lives and, in this case, to our relationships with our mother.

  Let’s say the overall objective is to make sure you and your mother are clear on when it is most suitable for her to call or visit. And you would like to achieve this objective without you feeling guilty or your mother feeling dismissed or brushed aside. How do you do this? Tell her. Simply tell her and agree a solution that works for you both. Have the conversation.

  Describe the situation to her – ‘Mum, you know when you ring me at work or call into the house unexpectedly . . .’ What does it do to you? – ‘It puts me under pressure and . . .’ What are the consequences? – ‘It means that I fall behind in my work . . .’ or ‘I spend the rest of the day catching up with what I need to do in the house.’ What’s the solution? – ‘How about we agree a time that it would be suitable to call and you agree to phone to set up a time for a visit?’ While this may sound harsh or business-like, it is in fact about protecting your mother, so that when she does call or visit, you have time to be with her and she does not feel rushed or dismissed.

  I’ve used this technique in both my work and with my mother. Soon after she became sick and after a few weeks of increasingly regular phone calls from her, I realised that I was snapping at her when she called. The moped that I used to love popping up on my phone became a source of anxiety. In our busy lives, full of work, home, friends, commitments, children and lovers, somehow the room for our mothers gradually decreases until we reach a point where we have to make a conscious decision to make time for her. In order to protect her from feeling bruised and to manage my own stress, I realised that it was in both of our interests to sit down and talk about what would work best for us with regards to our daily phone calls.

  Busy daughters I’ve spoken to who have navigated this tricky territory successfully say that setting some ground rules in a gentle, compassionate way can often result in less frequent impromptu visits or calls, and ease the pressure on both parties. It’s also worth remembering that daughters are not the only ones with full lives – mothers are busy people, too.

  SOPHIE: THE DAUGHTER OF MADNESS

  I’m not a person who writes to newspapers. I’m a person who keeps herself to herself. I would describe myself as a private person. Discreet. Self-sufficient. I have a small circle of friends and we don’t sit up all night baring our souls to each other. We meet for lunch. We go hiking in the Dublin mountains. My f
riends are people who, when bad things happen, get on with life. They are stoic. I am stoic. Or at least I try to be.

  I don’t talk with my friends about my mother. I have two women who are my closest friends. One of their mothers has been dead for a long time. The other gets on incredibly well with hers. So that’s not what we talk about when we meet up. I’d feel I would be boring people, even my close friends, by going on about my mother. People don’t know how to respond when I tell them about her. I’ve learnt to give carefully prepared, ambiguous responses over the years. So I just don’t talk about it. I like to talk to my friends about positive things. Plans we are making. Happy events that have happened. The kind of things I’d be saying about my mother would be a total buzzkill. My teenage daughter Jo taught me that word. But that’s exactly what it would be – buzzkill.

  I don’t know why I wrote in about my mother. It was one of those things that you do sometimes, without thinking. If I had given it much thought I would have stopped myself. I dashed off the email quickly and I didn’t expect to hear anything back. I think now I did it as a sort of mark in the sand. A little flag planted in the world to say, ‘I’m here’ and my Motherstory has made me sad my whole life and I think it always will.

  This is the email I sent:

  Hi Róisín

  I read your note with interest. I have never been close to my mother. I am now in my early thirties and the mother of a fifteen-year-old. My mother is in her mid-seventies and suffers with depression. There have always been issues throughout my childhood. She had a difficult life. Our lack of relationship has deeply affected how I feel about myself and saddens me greatly at times.

  I have learned to accept that you can’t change what went before. It has taken me a long time to get to that point. But before it is too late I would like to see if we can make amends to each other in some way.

  I think it would help us both so I would be keen to be involved in this research study. I’m a single mother and I run a small architect’s firm in Clontarf. I think being involved would help my daughter, too, as she picks up on my sadness. I am willing to try anything that might help us heal a bit and show each other what we don’t seem to be able to show: that we love each other, deep down, underneath it all.

  As I grow older I am reflecting on my life more. And I can’t help comparing my healthy, loving relationship with my own daughter. It makes me think what a shame it is that things couldn’t be different between me and my mother.

  Sophie

  I planted the flag, made my mark in the sand and I forgot about it. I can’t even say I felt a sense of unburdening. It was just something I did and, if anything, it was a little embarrassing. I went on with my life.

  I don’t know why I agreed to this. I’m sitting around a table with a group of admittedly friendly-looking strangers. There is chilli and some sort of roulade and lots of wine. I think I can smell garlic bread. Possibly home made. I had thought it was an academic paper of some kind that was being researched. But no. It’s a book. My life is going to be material for a book. Or at least a version of my life. How can the full story of anyone’s life ever be told?

  I’m going to try to stop resisting. The woman called Maeve who talks about hiding from her mother makes me laugh but the happy ease of some of the daughters’ connections with their mothers gives me a yearning in my heart that I don’t like. Listening to them is difficult. It’s a reminder of everything that has been missing from my life. I take a big sip of wine to get rid of the feeling, a sensation like indigestion or heartburn. The wine doesn’t work. I feel isolated and alone and like I don’t belong. But then another woman begins to talk about her mother with a distinct absence of affection in her voice. She makes no apology for the cold way she talks about the woman who reared her. I recognise this mother. I can relax now. This is my world.

  When it’s my turn, and I try to start my story, I can’t speak. This is a shock to me. The women are patient; I can see in their eyes that they know this is a painful experience. I try using a whisper instead. That works. Whispering helps me get the first words out. For so long when I was younger I was mortified about my family situation: the constant embarrassment that comes with having a mother who has manic depression. The phone calls from people saying your mother is wandering around the main street and can you come and get her? Calls from the hospital saying she has just been admitted and can you bring in her things? Eventually I get beyond the whisper; I get through the embarrassment barrier. I start to speak.

  The first thing I tell this group of strangers is that my mother is not a bad person. I need them to know that at the outset. My mother is kind and my mother is good and the reason I am here is not because she is a horrible, mean figure, but because she is a person who lacks any capacity for motherhood. As a child I would go to other people’s houses and be amazed by the bog-standard, common-or-garden mothering being carried out there. I saw my friends from school being fussed over and smiled at and told off. I saw heads being ruffled affectionately and help being given with homework. I witnessed classic childhood rows about eating your greens and sneaky hugs being given by mothers to children who pretended to resist before melting into their marshmallow embraces.

  I saw all this and I’d go home wondering why I didn’t have a mother like that. A mother with treats in her apron pocket and funny pet names for her children. I’d wonder why something as seemingly straightforward as a hug (it was hardly rocket science – I witnessed hundreds of hugs being given and received in other people’s homes) was in short supply where I lived. I spent my childhood wondering. It was years before I found out.

  I know my mother didn’t have a good relationship with her own mother. My grandmother was full of charisma, by all accounts, but she was also mean and controlling. Sometimes my mother would tell me stories about Gran and they were never loving or affectionate. My mother escaped the house she grew up in and married a man who was full of charisma, everybody said it, but who was also mean and controlling. The pattern of my mother’s life continued. He was an entrepreneur who got rich with one investment before losing it all on another. The cycle continued for years and gave us children (I have two older sisters) a rollercoaster kind of life. We moved a lot. My mother and father fought a lot. They had what I know now was a toxic relationship. My mother had a lot to put up with.

  When I was eleven my father moved away very suddenly to England. He still lives between there and Ireland. My older sisters were put into boarding school and I was left in the house with a mother who wasn’t really a mother. I know that now. I had a mother who didn’t know how to give a hug. I mean, she actually couldn’t put her arms in a hug shape. She just couldn’t do it. We laugh about it now. I had a mother who wandered around the house in her swimming togs saying, ‘Are you happy, darling? Oh, it’s so wonderful to be happy’ while in floods of tears. I had a mother who was prone to becoming strange and unresponsive and when that happened I had to ring an ambulance and I didn’t know when she was coming back and if she did come back God knows what kind of state she’d be in.

  By the time I was a teenager I remember thinking it was odd and probably not normal and that, perhaps, I shouldn’t have been left in that situation on my own. One night in particular stands out in my memory. I was fourteen. My mother was in bed, catatonic, although I didn’t know the word for the state she was in then. She kept saying she wanted to die. That her life was not worth living. I didn’t know what to do, so I just kept talking to her:

  ‘It will be all right, Mum. You have everything to live for. We need you; we love you. What about us?’ I spent the night on the bed beside her, afraid to sleep in case she was gone when I woke up.

  There were people I could have called but some kind of family code told me not to involve anybody and to keep this to ourselves. The next day some relatives arrived unannounced and insisted on going upstairs to see her.

  My mother was crying. She had soiled herself in the bed. They stood at her bedroom door looking in, talk
ing about what had happened as though she wasn’t there. It was the indignity of it, I remember feeling. She didn’t even like those relatives. And what use was I as a daughter when I had not been able to protect her from this.

  ‘Are you happy, darling?’

  No.

  I’m fourteen and lost and happiness doesn’t come into it, if anybody really wants to know.

  Later I found out that my mother had depression. Much later. But for years I didn’t have a clue. And her depression has since been rebranded. She now has what the doctors call a bipolar condition. It means that she has spent years in and out of psychiatric institutions, a revolving door of medication and not much more, as far as I can see. And I have my own daughter, my sweet Jo, to think of now. I feel the responsibility of motherhood so keenly that I can’t understand the lack of it in my own mother.

  There is something to be grateful for, perhaps. My own childhood has shaped the kind of mother I am now. In a good way.

  At every stage of motherhood I ask myself questions: ‘What would I have wanted at that age?’ ‘What would I have needed?’ And the big answer, the one that has guided me always, is the need for a mother who made me feel secure, who made me feel cherished and nurtured. What I craved as a child was a mother who would have killed for me. I never felt that security growing up, or anything close to it. I never knew what it was to be protected and championed. And yet somehow I broke the cycle and Jo, my daughter, knows and enjoys and often takes for granted the kind of security I never had. And that’s how it should be.

  The counsellor I see now talks about looking at life through the rear-view mirror, as though driving a car and watching your life pass by, reeling past the scenes and moments and images. The idea of this exercise is to look back on life, all that pain and confusion and dysfunction, and then decide to move forward. I don’t ever wish to be glib about what happened, or minimise it, but it’s about acknowledging the past and then putting the foot on the accelerator. It’s about moving on.