The Daughterhood Read online

  They were calling it The Daughterhood. And that night I did feel a bit like I was at my first AA meeting. I was able to stand up and tell the truth about something I had struggled with my whole life. ‘Hi, I’m Lily and my mother was no good at being a mother.’

  The Daughterhood. Like a kind of secret society. I liked that. I lived with a strange kind of secret for most of my life. I don’t love my mother. I don’t even like her. Now here I was about to say it and explain why and I wondered what all these women would think. I wished I was drinking but I had the car outside so I just sipped my water and listened. Then it was my turn. ‘Just tell us your story,’ Natasha said. So I did.

  I have one good memory. There was one time when I felt like a daughter and she felt like my mother. A moment where I got a glimpse of what it was I saw my friends had. They would laugh with their mothers. They seemed close. I have just one memory of closeness. Sometimes I think that can’t be right but then I close my eyes and take a leap across the years with my mother. There are presents at birthdays and Christmas. There are Sunday dinners when I sit at our long dining table chewing beef and looking out the window at the garden. I’m not saying it’s a bad childhood. But it is an empty childhood. Something important is missing but I am only small and I don’t know that yet.

  We’re having a picnic on the beach. There are boiled eggs in Tupperware boxes and the lettuce is cold and crispy. My mother has made brown soda bread, and has put some mayonnaise in a small jar. We have a flask of tea. My dad is back at our restaurant, working in the kitchen. It’s just Mum and me. I’m eleven or maybe twelve. I’m an only child. My mother starts to talk about the kind of man I might like to marry one day. It’s an obsession with her – that I will find a man and settle down and that’s the most important thing as far as she’s concerned. I remember flinching, worrying that she was going to start talking about the swell around my bottom and hips and tummy again. I’ve read in a magazine that this is called puppy fat but my mother doesn’t believe in puppy fat. ‘You’re getting to be the size of a house and no man wants to look at that,’ is what she’d say. But this time, she doesn’t go there. ‘What kind of man would you like to marry?’ she is asking, and there’s something new, some kind of twinkle in her eye. ‘He’d have to make me laugh,’ I tell her. And then my mother laughs. And we sit smiling, thinking about this funny man who will one day come into my life. In my memory the sun is shining. The moment is light and fresh and full of promise. It feels like a new beginning. But now I see it as an ending. It was the only time I felt close to her. I suppose I should go back to the beginning. The parts I have pieced together. The view from where I stand now.

  My parents owned a restaurant. My mother and father were much older than the average new parents when I came along. She was forty-four and my dad was forty-eight. I only found this out later. I found out a lot of things later.

  Apparently, I was carried by my dad into the restaurant like a trophy, surprising all the customers in the middle of their lunch, held over his head in triumph, Lion King-style, when I arrived. I always had a good relationship with my father. When he was dying a few years ago and my mother was giving me her worst in the hospital, he gave me a big wink as if to say, ‘You and I know what she is saying is not true, don’t mind her, love.’ That was as much as he could do for me when I was growing up but it meant everything. I know he loved me.

  And I know I was a desperately wanted baby. But because I’ve never been able to have a straightforward conversation with my mother about it, I can only speculate about that desperation. Keeping up appearances was everything to my mother. She saw herself and my father as pillars of the community; people ‘of good standing’, as she always used to say. Being married but not having a child constituted a failure of some sort. It just didn’t look right. My mother was always saying ‘people will talk’ and I suspect she knew ‘people were talking’ about the fact that the Bradys didn’t have a child yet. The way she treated me all my life makes me think that my mother wasn’t maternal and yet she must have felt a social pressure to have a child. I was a box to be ticked. That’s what I think now anyway.

  Growing up I always felt different. And one day at school when I was about seven, a girl, I don’t remember her name, threw some words at me, the way girls do sometimes. ‘You’re adopted,’ she said. It sounded like an accusation. But I didn’t even know what the word meant. She might as well have said, ‘You’re a tomato.’

  But I did go home to my mother and tell her what had been said. Her response was to take me on a trip to London. The thrill of it! Nobody we knew had been to London. I see now it was supposed to be a distraction. And it worked. It was only a few years later, in biology class, that I got to wondering why I had blue eyes and my parents both had brown eyes. It didn’t make sense. I tried to bring it up with my mother but she would never allow the conversation to happen.

  So all through my childhood there was this undercurrent of not knowing. All I did know was that I was to be a good girl because ‘people will talk’ and we were ‘people of standing’ and every single thing I did reflected on my mother. If I was bad, that would look bad for her. So I was a good girl and I never rebelled and it was a relief to be sent to boarding school where the pressure was off and I could just be my anonymous self instead of having to deal with the expectations of my mother.

  After school I moved to Dublin and got a job in an ad agency. I felt free. I was learning about who I was without the pressure to be the woman my mother wanted me to be. I’d go home every weekend to help out in the pub, though. It was expected of me. The Good Daughter.

  Then my father became ill. He had a knee operation and my mother demanded I tell my new boss that I needed three months off to come and be with the family. It shows the kind of hold she had on me that I did go to my boss and ask for three months’ leave. He laughed at me. And then he said no. I was relieved. The thought of going home was like going backwards into a life I was desperate to escape.

  My life moved on. I stopped going home as regularly. I had a couple of relationships, even moved in with one man. My mother got in touch with him behind my back, told him that he was to ask me to marry him or forget about the relationship. I was mortified. A 27-year-old woman whose mother was trying to pull the strings of her life. I can laugh about it now. That relationship didn’t work out but not because of my mother. And then I met Rob. The man I’d described at that mother–daughter picnic, the one who could make me laugh. The man I wanted to marry. I didn’t want or seek my mother’s approval. I was stronger by then. Rob made me see that I was good enough as I was. I felt like a whole person for once, not damaged goods.

  I found out the truth about myself while sorting out the paperwork for my wedding ten years ago. I had to apply for my full birth certificate but it was taking longer than I expected. The registrar rang to ask whether there was any chance I might have been adopted. I remembered the accusation from the girl in school and the puzzle of my blue eyes in biology class and the unexpected treat of a trip to London and I said, ‘I might be.’

  Then there was the letter that turned up one day, an ordinary-looking piece of post. It was my adoption records. I felt sort of unhinged that morning. It was an out-of-body experience. But the overwhelming feeling was relief. I realised that undercurrent of not knowing was not in my imagination. It was confirmation of how dysfunctional and off kilter my upbringing was.

  Realising that the mother I had was an accident, not of birth, but of papers signed in a room in a convent away from prying eyes, shifted something in me. She could have taken any baby, is what I imagine. Any child. But she chose me. An accident. I was the casualty. Of course I confronted my mother. It was a damp squib of a confrontation. I asked her why she had never told me I was adopted and she replied that she thought I had always known. She said, and I remember being too astonished to respond, ‘I don’t know what you are making such a fuss about.’

  I tracked her down, my birth mother, as soon as I could
. It didn’t take long. She had her own family now, three children, but she said she’d be happy to meet. I was busy with the wedding preparations, though, and it felt like the beginning of the rest of my life. After a few letters, the correspondence with my birth mother fizzled out.

  In the meantime, I was growing closer to my husband’s mother. We are even closer now. She knows that I like a cup of tea straight after my dinner and which biscuits I prefer. (Fig rolls, if you’re asking.) She can sense when I’m down and offers just the right amount of support without being intrusive. I imagine this is what a normal mother–daughter relationship is. Finally, I can see what all the fuss is about. Sometimes, when my mother-in-law is preparing a tray with her scones and tea, making sure it’s just the way I like it, I drift off in a daydream where my mother-in-law is really my mother and there was just some document that went missing. A computer error. I only need to reboot and everything will be fine.

  My mother was cruel to me growing up. Always criticising my weight and my appearance. I remember watching The Help and understanding when Aibileen says: ‘Not a good road if Mama don’t think child is pretty.’ As a child, I knew never to step out of line with her. I remember knowing what I had to do to gain her approval. And if I did step out of line, kicking a stone along the pavement in her presence once, she would withdraw from me for days. I grew up in fear, desperately craving her love.

  As I became a young woman, I put on more weight and it’s been an issue ever since. I rebelled against her by not caring about what shape I was. I felt as long as I wasn’t conforming to her idea of beautiful, I was somehow more in control.

  A couple of years into my counselling, I had a clearer understanding that my mother was just not cut out for motherhood. As I began to understand, my contact with her became more intermittent. After my father died, I would barely see her. She got in touch about the blessing of the graves, an old custom carried out where we live and I went down but it was a fraught meeting. And now? I don’t know where she is. She sold the family home without telling me. Packed everything into a van and left. Well, nearly everything. A neighbour let me know and I went down with Rob, not believing. I peered through the windows and saw everything gone. A pile of my childhood toys was discarded by the mantelpiece. An old rag doll called Dottie. A battered wooden cot.

  I don’t know where my mother went. An old family friend knows. On his deathbed my father, knowing my mother’s difficulties and that our relationship was so fractured, asked him to look out for her. My father knew that I was OK, married, with someone looking out for me. But he worried that my mother, who had alienated so many people, would be left alone. He still cared.

  This family friend, Peter, he keeps in touch with me. He says my mother has sworn him to secrecy. He says he can’t tell me where she is but he did say she is living in sheltered housing. And that she is being tested for dementia. And that late at night the staff have reported back on nightmares she’s been having. ‘Lily, Lily,’ she calls out into the night. ‘Let me go, let me go. Don’t hurt me.’ And so, even though I don’t know where she is and I have no contact with her, she still manages to spread her poison and her lies. My aunt, my mother’s sister, told me recently that in despair she once begged my mother to find it in her heart to treat me the way a mother should. ‘Lily’s your only daughter,’ she told her. ‘A beautiful girl. You know you should be loving her; you should be telling her every day that she’s great.’ And my mother said to my aunt, ‘Oh, Lily? She has just been one big disappointment to me.’

  The women of The Daughterhood listen to my story. They ask me, tentatively, about the possibility of washing my hands of my mother. Whether this is now an option. Or was that too wicked a thought for any daughter to have? But I have had more wicked thoughts than that. The wickedest is that I wish she were dead. So that I could be free of her for ever.

  Yes, I know I have people who do love me – my friends, my husband, my mother-in-law – but I think there’s a motherchip in your brain and it doesn’t matter how many people tell you they love you, it’s just not the same. If your mother doesn’t love you, then you feel unlovable.

  And yet, walking away feels like a defeat. It feels like the final acceptance that I don’t really have a mother. A big part of me doesn’t want to accept that. I think I feel the rejection more keenly because I’m adopted. It’s an abusive relationship that I keep going back to. I want validation from her.

  Reflections on the Daughter of Narcissism

  I – Natasha – don’t know where I would be if my mother hadn’t accepted me for who I was from the very start. The late Maya Angelou wrote a lot about her own mother over the years and about the ballast she provided in her life. ‘She had my back, supported me,’ she once wrote. ‘This is the role of the mother . . . a mother is really important. Not just because she feeds and also loves and cuddles and even mollycoddles a child, but because in an interesting and maybe an eerie and unworldly way, she stands in the gap. She stands between the unknown and the known.’

  My mother always stood in that gap. As a child, I had many challenges. I was different from my siblings, in a way I’ll explain when I come to tell you my own story, but as I grew up she accepted me on so many other levels, too. She accepted the choices I’ve made with regard to my career, my love life and how I live my life. I’m confident that she approves most of the time and when she doubts me or doesn’t think much of something, she’ll hint at it. To be honest, all my big life decisions get thrashed out with her at some stage or another. I value her opinion. She doesn’t try and influence me but she does let me know what she thinks.

  We can feel accepted and loved by our mothers but it’s often the small things that affect us most. They stick; we carry them around with us. Why did she have to say that? What did she really mean? According to Deborah Tannens, author of You’re Wearing What? Conversations Between Mothers and Daughters, it’s the big three – hair, clothes and weight – that we critique each other most on while, at the same time, looking for approval and understanding.

  When I ask my mother, ‘How do I look?’ and she says, ‘You look fine, grand’, I know there’s something she’s not sure about. ‘Is that top a little loud?’ or ‘I prefer your hair back from your face.’ She is right. I’ve asked for her opinion and I want an honest answer. I don’t always like it and I don’t always take her advice, but the truth is I feel so much happier when she approves.

  I recently saw an interview with Whoopi Goldberg. She was talking about her mother. After her mother died she realised that she would never get a hug from anyone else who loved her as much as her mother had. A mother’s hug is the queen of hugs. Unconditional love is hard to compete with. It’s a forgiving kind of love. It lets you forget about the ‘Don’t like her’ bits. It is the purest kind of love. A love with no limitations, and with no terms or conditions attached. Isn’t that what a mother’s love is supposed to be?

  But if only life were that simple. If only all mothers could have that instinct for maternal, unconditional love. As I’m discovering more and more through The Daughterhood, some mothers are just not cut out for that work.

  Many of the women who wrote to us had stories that talked about ‘narcissistic’ mothers who treated them cruelly, in a manner that couldn’t be further from what society expects from a universally loving, nurturing and protective mother. Examples of narcissistic mothers can be found in the most familiar fairytales, from Snow White to Hansel and Gretel. But the fact they are mostly stepmothers in these stories and not mothers, suggests the possibility of psychological cruelty by biological mothers towards their children was taboo at the time the stories were written. That kind of cruelty and neglect had to be explored through stories about stepmothers not mothers. It turns out, not much has changed in that regard since Hans Christian Andersen was in business.

  Lily told us at the first Daughterhood meeting about a book that had been something of a lifeline for her: Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of N
arcissistic Mothers by Karys McBride. The author writes: ‘Narcissistic mothers tell their daughters that love is not unconditional. That it is given only when they behave in accordance with material expectation and whims. As adults these daughters have difficulty overcoming feelings of inadequacy, disappointment, emotional emptiness and sadness.’ It is a subtle kind of emotional neglect that was mentioned by many of the women who wrote into us.

  Róisín is Daily Features Editor of The Irish Times and part of her job involves editing an advice column written by Trish Murphy, a psychologist. While we were writing this book, a woman wrote into the column with a question that resonated with The Daughterhood.

  Q. I have just become aware of a document about narcissistic mothers that describes my mother perfectly. I am fifty, and it took me all these years to work out why I felt so bad about myself and how I kept self-punishing. I would have appreciated it if someone had pointed this out to me a long time ago.

  After my first marriage split up, someone very close tried to point it out to me, but I couldn’t quite get my head around it at the time because I was too confused by my mother’s crazy behaviour. Plus, I suppose there was a reluctance to believe that your primary carer could behave like that.

  My mother continually puts me down. She has favourites in the family and always took credit for any of my successes. She insinuates that I am unstable, oversensitive and ridiculous when I try to confront her about her behaviour. She is envious of me and has always criticised how I look and interfered in all my relationships, and she twists what I do and say into something undermining. My mother is selfish and self-absorbed to the extent that she will ruin any party or event to do with me and make it all about her.