A few years ago, in a bid to lose weight, I commandeered someone close to me as my own personal Fat Fighters leader. It was less humiliating than going to a public meeting and less expensive too, especially as the woman I engaged (free gratis) in this capacity was my mother.
Every week I would jog around the corner to her house in Dublin where I would weigh myself and she would write the results in chalk on a small black board. My mother Ann, a Londoner who came to Ireland more than 50 years ago after meeting my Irish dad, would then hide the board behind the TV in case my younger sister, who she lived with, figured out what was going on. Exposing our cosy little arrangement was not an option: my little sister would accuse my mother of enabling me and then I would accuse my sister of being interfering and my mother would be upset and she'd have to stop being my Fat Fighters leader and I'd never shift this pesky weight. I was, to my shame, 41 at the time, and a mother of two daughters myself.
I look back on this episode as a watershed moment in my relationship with my mother - a time when I began to come of age as a daughter.
This was partly prompted by a call from my friend Natasha. Her own mother Mary had recently contracted a progressive illness called lupus. The prognosis was not good. For the first time in her life, Natasha was contemplating the notion that her mother was going to die, and sooner than she had thought. She was panic-stricken, and in the midst of this panic a period of self-scrutiny began. Had she been a good enough daughter? Did her mother know how much she really loved her? Had she done all the things with her mother that she wanted to do, before it was too late?
Natasha had been talking to other friends about this, and found that the conversations became familiar - all of our peers were asking themselves the same questions. So we began working together on a book - The Daughterhood – in a bid to explore the good, the bad and the guilty of mother-daughter relationships. All of us who still have our mums will eventually have a front-row seat at the mother of all funerals, and Natasha and I wanted to do something that would help us stand at the graveside with no regrets, or fewer of them, anyway.
We held monthly meetings - a kind of Daughter's Anonymous - in order to get under the guilt-gnarled fingernails of this most complex, infuriating, joyous and messy of relationships. "Do you have a mother?" we asked, "and do you want to improve this relationship before it's too late?" We were overwhelmed by the response. More than 100 daughters poured their hearts out about their mothers, their emails dripping with guilt and resentment and shame and in many cases, relief at naming something society tells us is taboo: "I don't like my mother," confessed some. And others stated: "I will be glad when she dies."
Types of daughters emerged as the meetings went on around Natasha's kitchen table. There was the Busy Daughter, a woman who had a habit of hiding behind the sofa when her mother called at inopportune times. The Becoming-My-Mother Daughter did exactly what she said on the tin. And then there were more painful relationships: The Daughter of Narcissism, who had been chastised, undermined and manipulated by her mother all of her life. The Reluctant Daughter told us her biggest fear was not that her mother would die but that her mother would outlive her, and stop her from enjoying a life free from her.
We gave each other homework, except we called it 'motherwork'. I was The Dependent Daughter, so my motherwork was to become less dependent and more dependable. As part of this process I began to view my mother more as a woman in her own right, rather than just a walking, talking security blanket/weight loss assistant. When you are lucky enough to have a great relationship with your mother, there is nobody more interested in you than she is. This fact encourages a certain amount of daughterly self-indulgence.
During our monthly meeting I began reassessing the relationship: my mother had championed me, bankrolled me, praised me and encouraged me all of my life. My father became ill with schizophrenia and took his own life when I was eight. She was left, alone and in poverty, with eight children who ranged in age from one to 15. She is the strongest woman I know but she is 75 now, with macular degeneration in her eyes and the beginnings of arthritis in her knees. She deserved much more from me than our surreptitious Fat Fighters encounters.
Oscar Wilde said: "All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his." All I know is that becoming like my mother would be the opposite of a tragedy. It would be a triumph. But I also know I am one of the lucky ones. Membership of The Daughterhood has made me ever more grateful for that.
The Daughterhood, by RóisÃn Ingle and Natasha Fennell, is out now.