The Daughterhood Page 9

  Apparently, this had crossed her mind but she’d dismissed the idea because when Rukhsana gave it to her she said, ‘I thought they were your colours.’ And so my mother thought it couldn’t be nightwear because who cares what colours you wore in bed?

  I looked at the label. Then I did a bit of Googling and found a pair of pyjama bottoms in the same jolly-hued flower print. By the time I found the ‘dress’ which was actually a ‘chemise de nuit’ I was rolling on the floor, incapacitated with the laughing and the fact that she’d spent all Christmas day in a nightdress. When she got over the shock she joined in. We were laughing so hard at one point I actually thought we were going to have to trouble the ambulance service for a few minutes on Christmas night. On the plus side, she didn’t have to change going to bed that night.

  3. We are quite fond of our food. After the first Daughterhood meeting I had signed up to talk less and listen to my mother more. I took her to lunch the other day to do a bit of quality listening. We ended up in a restaurant called Cleaver East. It’s a restaurant where you have to order several tapas-sized tasting dishes and they come in the order the kitchen decides. There are no starters or main courses. You order your tiny dishes and you take your chances.

  I’m not exaggerating when I say that my mother and I sat in that restaurant for twenty minutes deciding whether to stay or leave. Our dilemma? Would we be left hungry after our lunch? The idea was unbearable. When they said ravioli, how many ravioli did they mean? When the menu said deconstructed hake and chips, how big a piece of hake did the chef have in mind? We had the waitress demented. In the end we stayed. I can highly recommend it. We were stuffed.

  4. We love Barry Manilow. And Gilbert O’Sullivan. (What? What’s your point? Legends, both of them. End of.) Gilbert O’Sullivan, singer of such classics as ‘Alone Again Naturally’, is a great Irishman from Waterford. When I was a teenager Mum took me to see him once. He was starring in the musical story of his life in the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin. Afterwards she bought me a book with the sheet music and lyrics of his most famous songs and we queued down a little lane to get backstage so that he could sign the book. When we got there I was shaking. Gilbert was lovely to me. I sang his songs all the way home. Years later I would write a column about him, when he brought out an album called The Berry Vest. It was a pun on the Very Best. Gilbert loves puns. Anyway, I wrote this column saying there should be a statue commemorating him in his home town of Waterford and how everyone should stop trying to be so cool pretending to like Radiohead and just go out and buy The Berry Vest immediately.

  My mother wrote Gilbert O’Sullivan a letter enclosing the column. Except she didn’t know his address so she just wrote Gilbert O’Sullivan, Jersey Island, the way children just write Santa, The North Pole. Sure enough a few weeks later I got a beautiful letter from Gilbert responding to my column. When I wrote a book he sent flowers to the launch. And every time he comes to Ireland to play, he gives me tickets. All thanks to my mother.

  5. I wish I didn’t have this in common with her but we both dye our hair. One abiding childhood memory I have of my mother is her walking around the house with a see-through plastic bag, like something you’d carry sandwiches in, on her head. Underneath the clear plastic, her hair was plastered with an unnatural-looking shade of brown gunk, which would sometimes splash on to her cheeks, giving her a sort of mad scientist appearance. It was Clairol’s Nice ‘n’ Easy and she was covering up the grey that had begun to creep in during her early thirties. She got the stuff in McAuliffe’s, the local chemist. I remember as a child how the women on the packets of hair dye always looked so happy. As someone who regularly gets unnatural gunk put on her own hair to cover up the grey, I now recognise the true nature of those delirious facial expressions: relief. I grew my grey roots out for a while recently, just to see how far I could go. I even began to like it a bit. I felt – and I know it’s ridiculous – brave. I’ve got roots and you’re gonna hear them roar, or something. But I knew it was time to take action when I noticed my aforementioned teenage niece staring at the space just above my forehead. ‘Are you looking at my grey roots?’ I asked. ‘Might be,’ she said. Luckily I had an appointment that afternoon to stem the advancing grey tide.

  ‘When did you stop dyeing your hair?’ I asked my mother the other day. She was surprisingly specific in her answer. She stopped applying her own Clairol at the age of fifty-four because a woman she met complimented her hair, admiring ‘that purple tinge’. From then on she let Christian, her hairdresser, take care of it. At around age sixty-five she asked Christian to leave a sort of transitional streak of grey at the front, which she thought looked cool at the time, but when she looks back at photos now she’s not so sure. And then, at age seventy, she decided to stop playing the dyeing game altogether. ‘By that stage I reckoned there was no use pretending. Everybody knew I was old anyway,’ she says, grey and proud now, and still cool.

  As I write it all down, I’m cheered by how alike we are and how much, even if it’s just dyeing our hair, we have in common. But I wish I was like my mother in so many more important ways. I wish I was more thoughtful, more organised, more generous, more caring, more naturally happy, less of a grump, and wiser. Maybe I will be one day. For some of us, Becoming Our Mothers would be a very good thing indeed.

  GRACE: THE GRIEVING-HER-AS-SHE-LIVES DAUGHTER

  Sitting around the table at the first Daughterhood meeting, feeling a bit shy, I begin talking by telling them about the car. That is where I spend a lot of time with my mother these days. We go for long drives, me taking the wheel and my mother in the passenger seat complimenting me, her only daughter, for being such a good driver.

  ‘You must know all the roads in Kildare,’ she’ll say and I will smile and reply, ‘Thanks very much, I do.’ And a few minutes later Mum will comment on my driving again, ‘You must know all the roads; you are such a good driver.’ And I will smile and thank her. And this exchange might happen ten or fifty more times during the course of the outing.

  Afterwards I will drive her back home, bring her safely into the house and get back in the car to drive home to Dublin. I will sit in the car. And I will cry. Heaving sobs. Fat exasperated tears. Cars are great for crying. They are little grief portals. There are windows so you can see and be seen, and yet it feels like being in your own little world. I cry a lot in the car.

  It was my friend Ruby who told me about the message in The Irish Times. I was at a low ebb when I responded.

  Dear Róisín

  I am grieving for my mother but she is not yet dead. We never had the difficult relationship you mentioned so there is no way to improve it. But what we had, the wonderful mother–daughter friendship, is gone. It is never coming back. But I am finding a way to cope with the loss and trying to be there for my father. I’m not sure my story will fit in but I’d like to be part of your friend’s project.

  Grace

  Growing up, I could tell my mother anything. She was one of those mothers. She got it from her own mother, Granny Nolan, who was the person on the street who used to counsel all the girls in their village in Co. Kildare. All those girls who said their mothers didn’t understand them could go and be understood by Granny Nolan. That was back in the days when girls ‘got into trouble’ and disappeared off the street for ever, sent to England or sometimes worse. So growing up, my mother always said, probably because she’d heard her own mother saying it so often, ‘You know, you can tell me anything.’ And I did. Sometimes more than my mother wanted to know. And I always knew I was lucky in this. I had friends who couldn’t tell their mothers anything and kept their lives private. My mother wanted the same relationship with me that she’d had with her own mother. She made a conscious effort to create that intimacy, that sense of trust. I know how lucky I was.

  Now, of course, there were things I didn’t tell her in my teenage years, things she found out about and was annoyed about but, as I got older, if I had problems, it didn’t matter what they were, I’d head ho
me and I knew she’d listen and that she would never judge.

  I’m in my early twenties and it’s off again with my on-again, off-again boyfriend. This time the off is permanent. I am heartbroken. It feels as though the world might end.

  I remember getting the bus all the way back to the house where I grew up, where my mother kept the bedroom exactly as I left it. I know however rotten I’m feeling – and emotionally I feel battered, as though my heart has gone ten rounds with Katie Taylor – I know I will feel better around my mother. I am more like my father, pragmatic and logical and a bit tough. My mother is soft and romantic and warm. I am drawn to the house and to her warmth like a little lost moth to a flame.

  I get to the house and she makes me tea. We sit at the kitchen table. I take out a packet of Silk Cut Purple, even though I know that, in spite of all my openness, the one thing I have hidden from my mother is my twenty-a-day habit. I can’t be bothered to hide it now, though, and she doesn’t say anything as I fish a saucer from the cupboard to use as an ashtray.

  I light up the first of several and I tell her all the latest gory details. Some are a bit shocking but I know, here in this space, where the black-and-white lino sparkles and the peonies on the windowsill are freshly cut, I am safe. I tell her everything and my mother arranges her face to appear as though she’s heard it all before when I know for a fact she has not heard anything like this. Her life has been comparatively sheltered.

  She lets me talk it out. She listens. Makes the right noises. Squeezes my hand. At one point she says, ‘Here, have another cigarette, love,’ and I know it might sound strange but that moment sums up my love for my mother, her love for me. ‘Here, have another cigarette, love,’ she says and I emerge from my emotional gloom long enough to celebrate the fact that my mother is encouraging me to smoke. That she can see it’s soothing me through this nightmare break-up. This is love, I remember thinking, this is unconditional love.

  I enjoy convalescing in my mother’s house. I am minded, cared for, soothed back to emotional health. My mother takes me shopping. Cooks my favourite comfort foods. She offers the classic Mammy support. And she has always been like this. All my life. Always understanding, never judgemental. When I made mistakes she never asked questions like, ‘What are you doing with your life?’ My friends are asked those questions by their mothers. I was never told what I should do. I was allowed to be myself with all my flaws. Both of my parents are very loving, supportive people. My mother was born to be a mother. She just knew how it should be done. She made it her life’s work. I’m lucky. I know. Lucky.

  I started to notice something was wrong around six years ago. I remember talking to a close friend at work, at the time I worked in a bank, and confiding to her that, ‘I think there’s something wrong with my mother.’ It was difficult to explain. She was saying silly things, telling stories that had no context. Always kind and caring, these attributes became exaggerated and, for the first time in my life, irritating.

  When I’d call over she’d want me to sit down but it wasn’t enough that I would be sitting on the kitchen chair, she wanted me to be lying on the sofa, she wanted this exaggerated version of comfort. Or she’d make sandwiches and tea, even when I said I didn’t want them. But my brother and I really started to worry when my mother started telling the same stories about her childhood again and again.

  At work the colleague I confided in said, ‘You know all those things you think you’ll do with your mother one day? Well, do them now.’ So I took her to New York. We stayed in the Plaza, went ice skating in Central Park, ate watery hot dogs on street corners and trawled the galleries and museums. We talked a lot. One day, strolling along the High Line, the long, narrow park in Manhattan which used to be a stretch of disused railroad, I suggested to her that maybe she needed a hobby, more activities in her life, that maybe that would curb the strange behaviour. It was a wonderful trip. And my colleague was right. Our relationship is unrecognisable now but we’ll always have New York.

  Back home I signed us up for art classes in a gallery in the local town hall but, while my mum loved drawing, she found it difficult to follow the instructions of the teacher. And I became protective of her, afraid that the curious glances and comments of the other students would upset her. We stopped the classes after a few weeks.

  It was difficult to get her to the doctor but eventually we did, admittedly by stealth. After days of tests we had a diagnosis. It was Alzheimer’s. That is when we found out it had been my mother’s biggest fear since childhood. After the diagnosis I went into the blackest pit of depression. I was convinced I had Alzheimer’s myself. I thought I was losing my mind. I went through a list of every terrible thing that could have happened to my mother and always, always, Alzheimer’s came out on top. At the time I had a friend whose mother was dying of cancer, who had gone through such a prolonged and terrible leave-taking, and I remember thinking maybe that would be preferable. I was numb most of this time. I completely shut down.

  I don’t tell my mother much any more. When I do her responses are stilted and rehearsed, as though dragged from somewhere years ago when she knew how to make conversation. They are a hopeful stab at the to and fro of regular Alzheimer’s-free mother–daughter chat. I go from wanting to be a good daughter and to be there for my dad, who is still a devoted husband and is now also my mother’s full-time carer, to being resentful that this is happening to me at a time in my life when I should be so happy. I am planning a wedding. I’m at such a hopeful, joyful time of my life, a time that my mother, before she got ill, would have been so enthusiastic about. The irony is I’ve never been that interested in wedding dresses or any of that. There is no bridezilla in me. But my mother has been talking to me about these things since I was a little girl. She would have loved to be properly involved. She would have been so thrilled to be organising dress fittings and flower arrangements. This was her dream for me.

  I feel guilty. I try to see her every week but there are weeks when I just can’t face it, and then what I call the double guilt spiral takes over. I want to be a good daughter but it’s difficult. There are times, if I’m really honest, when I can’t face going to see her. But then I know my mother is degenerating and I should be a better person when I am with her and that I will regret it when she goes.

  I am ambushed constantly by sadness. I’ll be sitting in a café and somebody will sit down with an older woman, someone who is obviously her mother, and they’ll laugh together, talk over each other, dying to get the news out, to catch up. Sitting with my own coffee, observing the scene, I will suddenly be stunned, as though hit over the head, by the reality that I will never have that with my mother again. I’ll never have that closeness, that friendship, that beautiful intimacy with her again.

  I swallow the guilt down when I’m with her. I try to find ways to distract her from the endlessly repeated stories and the conversations that come from nowhere and have no context and no full stops. One day in town, frustrated and feeling like I wanted to escape, I brought my mother into the art and hobby shop. I spent a small fortune on paper and charcoals and took her to St Stephen’s Green to draw the ducks. It was exactly what we needed. There we were, mother and daughter sketching away furiously in the park, laughing together, enjoying each other. We probably looked like two unhinged crackpots but it’s one of my most treasured recent memories. I don’t know how much more of that memory-making is left.

  I always come back to the car. It is the perfect place to cry. To express the sorrow at what we’ve lost and the constant guilt that I’m not being nice enough or kind enough or patient enough. Never enough. I want to work on acceptance. Acceptance of what’s happened. Of how I’m doing my best. Of the cards life has dealt my mother.

  I am grieving my mother even though she is not yet dead. I look at Mum and I feel the same love I felt for her as a child and as a bolshie teenager and a heartbroken adult. My mother is different, unrecognisably so. But the love is the same.

  Reflections o
n the Grieving-Her-As-She-Lives Daughter

  When I – Natasha – sat on that bench outside the hospital, I was confronted with the unthinkable realisation that my mother will die. Having a sick mother forces all of us to face up to the fact that our mothers will be gone one day. (Not just yet, though. Please, not yet.)

  My mother’s prognosis was bleak and time was not on her side. The complications that both lupus and pulmonary hypertension were causing meant that the doctors had to do a very fine balancing act between the right course of treatment and the medicine they were prescribing for her. Of course I knew that she’d go some day, but her death wasn’t imminent. She was in great health, really, in mind and spirit. So until I sat on that bench I hadn’t given it a great deal of thought.

  After the initial paralysing fear set in, the day-to-day realities and practicalities of having a sick mother took over. The in and out of hospital, the up and down spirals of her condition, the adjustments to her life and ours as a family, with regard to how much she can manage on her own. Planning her time in Dublin at my sister Sorcha’s and her visits to my house.

  The heroine in all of this is my mother. We call her Miracle Mary. Despite the initial very pessimistic prognosis and an onslaught of medical setbacks, she remains strong willed and stoic throughout it all. I have watched her as she struggles to accept her condition. ‘I keep forgetting that I’m sick,’ she says. ‘Then when I have to take my pile of tablets I’m reminded of the fact.’ Her pile of tablets and the excellent care she’s getting from her doctors is both slowing down the effect of the lupus on her organs and managing her pulmonary hypertension.