The Daughterhood Read online

  When I’d confessed about my mother – being the daughter of madness still feels shameful no matter how much you know it shouldn’t – I told the group about my As Good As It Gets moments. I had one a few weeks ago. My mother shares the same birthday as my daughter, who had just turned fifteen. I decided to organise a family outing. My father couldn’t come and I didn’t push it. So it was just us three women out in a fancy restaurant, chatting, laughing, enjoying being waited on. It felt like something approaching a normal family event. As Good As It Gets, you see. I remember thinking, as my daughter laughed at something my mother had said, that, yes, my mother is a bit of a daisy, she’s not the mother I might have wanted or needed, but sitting here now looking at my mother and daughter smiling at each other, this is something good. I cling to these moments. I want to create more of them. My plan is to build a memory bank for my daughter that is not all sadness and hurt, because even though I worked hard to give my daughter what I never had, I know Jo has picked up on my pain and anxiety over the years.

  Lately I have been able to step back and look at my mother more clearly. I see a tormented person who is never at peace. A woman wracked with anxiety and guilt. A woman who can’t hug. When the mood between us is less fraught, more peaceable, I will sometimes put my arms around my mother and her arms will stay limply by her sides as they always do. And I’ll attempt a joke. Hey, you know what a hug is? It’s when you put your arms around another person. Bears do it a lot. And toddlers. And on good days my mother might smile back at me and I think of that as her hugging me with her mouth.

  Then things deteriorated. The last time I saw her I could see something was off kilter. I asked her, ‘Hey, Mam, what’s wrong?’ She seemed a little bit dull. Her energy was low. She said she hadn’t slept and said she’d run out of sleeping tablets but the chemist wouldn’t give her any. She was confused.

  And then she had a nervous breakdown, which was a mental manifestation of the depression but, because of her age, it was physical, too. And it took five days to get her in for treatment. In those five days she was catatonic. I’d call over and she’d be sitting on the steps in her nightdress. She’d have been there for hours. The house was cold and she was walking around half dressed. And when this happens, you are beyond being upset or even crying about it any more. Seeing anybody in that state is distressing but when it’s your mother, it is unbearable. I’d speak to her, even though she wasn’t listening, or couldn’t listen. I’d say, ‘Come on, Mam, let’s try and get you dressed.’ And then I’d help her get dressed and she’d lose control of her bodily functions and suddenly she’s going to the loo on the stairs.

  My father, home again from England and reluctantly minding her, couldn’t cope. One night he got so frustrated that he put my mother into the car and called over to my house. ‘Your mother’s in the car,’ he said. And I told him my daughter was there, in the house, curled up on the sofa with a cup of tea watching Friends. ‘What do you want me to do? I don’t want her to see her granny like this. I don’t want her to be exposed to what I was exposed to through all my childhood.’

  I had to tell my daughter to go upstairs and I brought my mother into the house, she could barely walk, and I was just saying, ‘You’re not well, are you, Mam?’

  But the strangest thing is that, because we are not terribly close, because we’ve never had that mother–daughter bond, I didn’t feel like the person I was coaxing into the sitting room was my mother. I was looking at her and I was thinking, ‘You poor person. You poor stranger.’

  I know this is going to sound cold but I find it so difficult to access a sense that she is anything to do with me. Don’t get me wrong, I care. But I care in a way that I’d care for any vulnerable, hurting person. Eventually, we got her into a home. My sisters came over from Australia and London, and I let them do as much as they could for her. They were great. It gave me a break from the feelings of responsibility. In the home, they have family meetings, sort of interventions, and it was a relief that they were there. The consultant sat beside my mother explaining what was going on. ‘Your family are here,’ he said, talking about me and my sisters, ‘and they really care for you.’ And at the end of the consultant’s spiel my mother said: ‘Care for me? I don’t really know about that.’ I sat there with my sisters and I said, ‘Oh my God, where do you go with that?’ And the consultant said, ‘You go nowhere.’ Because they don’t talk about any of this stuff. They just make sure the drugs are topped up so they can send her back out in the world again.

  I went for a coffee with my mum after that incident, down to the miserable café where people are visiting the inmates and sitting not really talking or having awkward conversations. ‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘Mam, why did you say that?’ And she just smiled and said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. . .’ I told her how hurtful it was. The idea that she would think we don’t care about her. I got the impression that on one level she does think that and she’s not able to see the love that’s there. It goes back to her not being able to hug. She doesn’t have it in her.

  They asked me at The Daughterhood meeting about her dying. Someone, I think it was Natasha, said, ‘If your mother was going to die in thirty days and you were asking yourself, “What do I need to do before she dies?”, what would you do?’

  My answer? I think I’d just try to accept her. Accept this woman who is a nice woman, but who hasn’t been a great parent. She is kind and in her own way she has always done her best. I would keep in touch with her more. Maybe phone her every day. At the moment I don’t see either of my parents for weeks on end, they are just not part of my life. I don’t think there will be any final closure with her. There is no wrapping things up in a neat bow. I get the feeling she is always suspicious of me in some way, that she questions my motives. That’s the feeling I get and it is so hurtful. What did I do to deserve that? What did I do?

  I’ve tried to talk to my mother. I have said, ‘Mam, I know you did the best you could at the time.’ I say this more for myself than for her. When I first went to counselling seven years ago it was through fear. The fear that I wouldn’t be able parent my daughter properly. That I would fail to mother her because I had not been mothered. I was scared that the pattern would be repeated. That I would not be able to love my daughter as fiercely as a child needs to be loved. But somehow I figured out how to be a mother. I broke the cycle. I am sitting here at this table of strangers not as a betrayal of my mother but as another step on the road to acceptance and forgiveness. And somewhere in all of that, there is love.

  Reflections on the Daughter of Madness

  When I – Róisín – put the call out for daughters who wanted to improve their relationships with their mothers, I expected to hear stories about all kinds of mother–daughter dilemmas. What Natasha and I found most devastating in the responses, though, was the amount of women with mothers who had suffered for decades through some kind of mental illness. These daughters wrote long, detailed emails full of despair, anger and frustration. ‘She has spent her entire life hurting me and, while I have adopted different strategies to overcome this, she still has the power to hurt me like no other human can,’ wrote one woman. ‘This will end when she dies.’

  The emails from daughters with mentally ill mothers spoke of the emotional carnage wreaked on families: ‘I never realised how much of an impact a mental illness has on the whole family. Even my father’s family and her own sisters do not speak to her, due to her behaviour,’ one woman wrote.

  ‘I had no relationship with my mother growing up,’ wrote another. ‘I found out when my father died that she is bipolar and always has been, which explains the “absent mother” of my childhood and the difficulties I have connecting with her now.’

  One woman explained the challenge of caring for or about a mother who, because of her mental condition, gave the impression all her life of not caring for her very much at all: ‘I will be denied the opportunity to grieve for my mother because I never felt I had one.’

  What
all these women had in common was a feeling of not fitting in, compared to their friends who all appeared to have ‘normal’ mothers, who did ‘normal mother things’. They also spoke of their reluctance to talk openly about their mothers because of the way people tended to respond. In her book from 2007, Daughters of Madness: Growing Up and Older with a Mentally Ill Mother, psychotherapist Susan Nathiel explored this. ‘Telling someone that there’s a mental illness in your family and watching the reaction is not for the fainthearted,’ she wrote. ‘Telling them that it is your mother who is mentally ill certainly ups the ante.’

  As the daughter of a father with schizophrenia I have some understanding of this; although, as I was eight when he died, my exposure to his illness was minimal. For years I used my father’s illness as a way to mark me out as different. It was a weapon I threw into conversations, before anybody could find out or use his mental instability against me. I pretended for a long time that I didn’t care how he had died or what kind of mental state he was in. It was immaturity, I think, and the fact that, as a family, we hadn’t really collectively grieved my father. We got on with things. We had to.

  As an older and slightly more mature person, when I’ve confided details of my father’s illness – the electric shock therapy, his long stays in institutions, his suicide attempts – I have often been asked: is it genetic? And being someone who has experience of self-destructive behaviour with both alcohol and food as a coping mechanism for darker emotional undercurrents, you can’t help sometimes wondering yourself. There is a shadow cast by mental illness in a family and the daughters who wrote in told us all about the dark nature of that shadow.

  Natasha and I embarked on this project because we wanted to help daughters improve their relationships with their mothers by telling our stories and theirs. Neither of us is an expert in the area of mental health, so the following astute assessment by psychotherapist Susan Nathiel, who is an expert in that area and has personal experience of growing up with a mentally ill mother, is worth including here:

  ‘No mother is perfect, obviously,’ she told an interviewer once. ‘But a child’s sense of the world and her place in it, and her place in her own body and mind, is formed in the web of interaction with the mother, hour to hour and day to day and year to year.

  ‘For a young child, “how mother is” and “how women are” can be one and the same. So, if mother is volatile, mean, depressed or neglectful, this can be confusing to the daughter. Being a woman may seem to be a bad thing, so a girl may do her best to be not-like-her-mother. Many women I interviewed said they didn’t really know how to be a “woman” – they didn’t admire their mother, or want to be anything like her. It was very hard to separate what was the illness, what was the person, and what was the woman. So if a girl doesn’t want to be anything like her mother, where does she find a role model? “Being a woman” is something we learn most easily by identifying with a woman we want to emulate – it’s not something we naturally know how to be.’

  There is more discussion now than ever before about mental health, more articles being written and more celebrities ‘coming out’ about their own struggles. And yet, for women with mothers who are different and who are unable to mother properly because of their mental condition, the stigma is still all-pervasive.

  A daughter looks for a role model in her mother, a way to make sense of herself and of the world and, when that is absent, what’s left for daughters like Sophie are a lot of unanswered questions. Susan Nathiel describes in her book the kinds of questions that gnaw at women of mentally ill mothers as they grow up:

  Is it my fault? Will she ever be able to love me? And is this going to happen to me?

  Women in their forties and fifties grew up at a time when that stigma was far worse than it is now – an era when mental illness was not discussed on radio shows and in newspaper articles. Like Sophie, these women were often alone in trying to answer these questions and figure out the puzzle of their very different mothers.

  LILY: THE DAUGHTER OF NARCISSISM

  I don’t buy the newspaper every day but I buy it on Saturdays. It feels like a bit of a luxury, a weekend treat. I buy The Irish Times and the Guardian and I’ll flick through them all week. That Saturday morning I was in the sitting room with the papers. The place needed a good tidy up but I wasn’t in the mood. My friends with children are always talking about not having time to sit and read a newspaper from cover to cover, so I really appreciate the fact that I can. It’s one of the perks of being child-free. I hate the term childless. It sounds somehow lacking. Child-free suits me better. I feel free. I am, I think, happy. At least, I’m more contented than I have been in a long time, despite everything.

  My husband Rob was out playing golf, I think, and my black cat Billy was curled up at the other end of my green sofa. It was a sunny day – I remember because I’d just put washing out on the line and I was using a pink peg as a clip to keep the hair out of my eyes as I read.

  For the past three years I had been in counselling with regard to my mother. So when I read that bit about ‘improving your relationship with your mother’ it struck a chord. I knew immediately that the improving part wouldn’t apply to me. My relationship was not going to be improved. All the counselling I’d undertaken was about accepting that. I had read two books about narcissism by that stage. I knew exactly, as much as anyone can, what I was dealing with when it came to my mother. I also knew my Motherstory was not going to have a happy ending.

  We venerate mothers not just in Ireland but all over the world. And I think that’s right, I really do. But when you have a mother who doesn’t live up to that saintly ideal, who doesn’t even come close, you can end up feeling very alone. Not all mothers are benevolent beings. I’ve lived with the loneliness of that knowledge for years. Not just the feeling of having a mother who wasn’t quite right but of being what my mother made me feel, the wrong kind of daughter.

  I spent decades wondering what was wrong with me. Wondering why nothing I ever did was right. Beating myself up, hearing my mother’s negative voice in my head: ‘You are too fat. You are stupid. You will never find a man to marry you. You are a bad daughter.’

  The counselling helped a lot. Realising, with my counsellor’s help, that my mother was not well, that she was a narcissist, and that she has suffered with it all her life. Or rather, I have suffered with it. And my father. I realised that it was not my fault and that realisation changed my life. But it doesn’t mean I can forgive.

  I find it difficult to develop compassion for my mother, even though I know all that she’s lost because of her condition. She lost me, her only child. She lost out on the joy of a loving relationship instead of the controlling one she had with my father. She lost out on friends and fun and the simple joy of being alive. But maybe she doesn’t know any of this and maybe her ignorance is a kind of bliss.

  I feel lucky that I got help but I had always thought there must be other people like me, who felt as alone in this as I did. So when I saw the call for daughters who wanted to explore their relationship with their mothers, I wasn’t just thinking of myself. I was thinking of other lonely daughters and how my story might help them to feel less alone.

  My friends say I ramble and I probably rambled in the email I sent to Natasha and Róisín but it spilled out of me. Here it is:

  Dear Róisín

  All my life I’ve had a tortured relationship with my mother. She has narcissistic personality disorder but I only realised this as a result of three years of counselling. It gave me some of the skills I needed to deal with her. We’d had no proper contact since my dad died two years ago. Now I’m in touch with her sporadically.

  For a long time I felt so alone with all of this; I felt that somehow I deserved what happened to me in my relationship with my mother. I felt I’d been a bad daughter. I felt I’d disappointed my parents. Counselling helped me to understand and reading other stories (albeit American ones) helped me to realise I wasn’t alone in what I had p
reviously thought was a unique situation. I’m writing to you because I’m hoping someone might read my story and recognise they are not alone.

  For a long time, I was scared even to contemplate becoming a mother myself. I was scared I would turn out like her. Because not every mother is made to be a mother. I know that from bitter experience.

  I’m trying to rebuild my relationship with her. I will try any suggestions you may have. Will we ever be friends, a proper mother and daughter, love each other as we should? I don’t believe so. A lot has happened in our lives to damage the love and respect and trust we should have in each other. I’m not suggesting we’re a lost cause – therefore not suitable for your project – but I am being realistic.

  Thank you for doing this. It’s a taboo subject to consider our mothers anything but perfect. We joke about it. We say ‘nobody can do guilt like an Irish mother’ and joking is fine but sometimes it’s not. Some daughters suffer physical abuse and others, like me, are mentally and emotionally abused. Either way, it’s very hard for us to recover and become happy people again. I’ve come a long way down this road. But the myth needs to be broken.

  Lily

  It always seems to be lashing when I go to Natasha’s house. That first night I was a bag of nerves. I got there early; I wanted to settle in before everyone else came. Natasha and Róisín were there, and I felt welcome and warm coming in out of the rain. But I was uncomfortable, too. I felt I knew Róisín through her writing but I didn’t really know her, if you know what I mean, and I’d only spoken to Natasha on the phone. The others started to arrive. Maeve and Sophie, Cathy and Grace. Somebody joked it was like AA or WeightWatchers, or something, and I didn’t take offence, although I could have. My weight was always an issue with me and my mother.