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Chapter 3: Being My Mother’s Daughter
It’s still a great sadness to me that I never had a close relationship with my mother.
I don’t know when I started being angry with her. I only know that I seemed to spend a lot of my adult life living in the tension between being irritated with and upset by her yet, at the same time, wanting her approval. And it was the hurtful things that coated the inside of my brain – the kind things would never get a purchase on that coating and would slide away and be forgotten.
I do remember that my mother always looked good, always smart and she always wore makeup. I used to watch her in the kitchen ‘doing her face’. She was fair skinned and wore rouge to give her face some colour, a red paste she rubbed into her cheeks while her mouth twisted to one side to make the skin more taut. I would dart from one side to the other, watching and giggling. I never saw her in trousers my whole life and she never wore flat shoes but she always had her hair done and stood tall. She looked stately, right up to when she had her stroke. More than one person remarked on how like Queen Elizabeth II she was, which secretly delighted Mum. She was known when she was young as something of a beauty. I still have her two favourite photos of herself as a young woman. As she got older, she stood them up in frames in her lounge, where she could see them because she hated how she looked as an old woman.
I attribute my own desire to look good, even if in the house on my own, to my mother’s example.
My mother had had a daughter before me. Her first born died within an hour of her birth. Patricia had been born at home. My mother refused to give birth in hospital as she had been there for antenatal appointments and had been made to sit outside the delivery ward, where she could hear the women screaming and had insisted on a home birth instead. Patricia turned in the birthing process and which then became a breech birth. I can’t even imagine the pain. The cord got twisted around the baby’s neck and she choked and only managed to breathe for an hour. Apparently, my mother was in bed for three weeks and didn’t even go to Patricia’s funeral. I knew I had a sister who had died. If it ever came up in conversation, I would glibly say, “Oh yes, I have a sister, but she died when she was only an hour old.” It sounded dramatic to me and even glamorous, in a weird sort of way. I never really understood how painful it must have been until I had my first born, Emily.
Mum was the first person to visit me in hospital, after my husband. I looked at my little perfect baby lying next to me and was suddenly overwhelmed by the terror of losing her. In that second, I had a small inkling of what it must have been like for my mother to lose Patricia. I tried to say this to Mum when she came in, but she dismissed it and concentrated on Emily and how beautiful she was. We never spoke about it. Mum never really spoke about any of her feelings. She carried the pain of Patricia’s death for 50 years, for her whole life in fact, without ever speaking about it. When her youngest son, Andrew, was killed in a car accident when he was 29 years old my father was trying to tell her that he was in Heaven and Patricia would look after him and she said, “Why would Patricia do me any favours? It’s my fault that she died. I lost my first and I’ve lost my last.”
If she had never really got over losing Patricia, she definitely never got over Andrew’s death. We begged her to go to bereavement counselling, “What’s the point?” she would say, “It’ll only make me cry.” I don’t think it was uncommon for women, especially of her generation (she was born in 1915), to not talk about their feelings. If you were Catholic, you would suffer and offer it up to God. The Catholic Church does a fine training in martyrdom.
My father had at least one affair I knew about. I’m sure Mum knew too. She was a teacher at Dad’s school, unmarried, glamorous. Mum used to spit her name out if ever she came up in conversations – ‘Agnes Redmond’. She would snarl and sneer. Of course, she never talked to me about my father. Perhaps she wanted to leave my dad more than once but she didn’t, of course, because people didn’t do that. No doubt that is why she never understood me leaving my husband. As far as she was concerned, you married and you stayed married. I could never talk to her about my feelings either.
I guess she must have learned to suppress her feelings from her mother. But I was very different. I was a friendly little soul – always smiling – with blonde wavy hair and was always very talkative – to anybody. Everyone said I looked just like Princess Anne (my mother and I made a right royal pair!). I think my mother wondered a lot about what Patricia would have been like because I obviously wasn’t turning into the daughter she wanted, the daughter she hoped Patricia would have been. Later, when I worked and ran my own company and left the Catholic Church, and then my husband, it’s possible she was jealous. I had made choices for my life that she felt weren’t available to her. Maybe we weren’t so very different after all. My husband used to say, had she been born 50 years later, she would have been a feminist. “I certainly would not!” she would reply, indignant.
I am in no doubt that I got my strength and determination from my mother.
She was one strong woman. She didn’t marry until she was 26 years old, which was late in those days. My father pursued her relentlessly. He came from a family of market traders and his father George was small and always wore a raincoat. My mother’s father, James, was the mill manager at the local mill. He was tall and held himself as stiffly as his starched white collar. He always wore a waistcoat. Men used to doff their caps to him when they saw him. I think her parents always looked down on my father, so my mother was brought up to see people as ‘more thans’ and ‘less thans’. She saw everyone in those terms. “She’s common,” was the reason given about more than one girl who my mother thought wasn’t fit to be my friend. I’m sure her parents didn’t want her to marry my dad, but she must have held out.
She was a teacher all her life. In fact, she was one of the first women of her generation to become a teacher and was much-loved as one for 40 years. Of course, she had to leave teaching as soon as she became pregnant, but she always went back to it as soon as she could. Yet, being one of the first role models of her generation as a professional working mother didn’t make her sympathetic in the least to my career choices as a working mother myself.
She had some rare talents, including a beautiful soprano voice, even in her 80s. She always regretted that she wasn’t able to train her voice but her mother wouldn’t pay for it. Instead, she learned to play the piano and got the highest qualification one could. In her 70s, she started practising again and took the playing exams again to prove to herself she could still do it. She was also a fine tennis player. The men at the tennis club always wanted her to play with them because she was as good as any man. I remember watching her on Saturday afternoons in the bathroom as she rubbed tanning lotion into each of her legs to cover the ghostly whiteness. The lotion had a distinct smell which spoke to me of hot sunny days and the thwack of tennis balls.
Mum had strong views on many things and didn’t have a problem voicing them. In 1975, when the UK was voting on whether to stay in the common market, she was out campaigning against it and getting people to sign petitions. One evening my father arrived home from a meeting to find our front room full of strangers who had turned up at the door to sign her petition. I am sure she would have been out campaigning for Brexit if she had been alive. She was a Daily Express reader and very right wing. She believed everything she read in that paper. Once, when my own daughters were young and my parents were visiting, we were all watching BBC News together. As it was July 14, the newsreader commented on Bastille Day and ended the news with an ‘au revoir’. My mother and father nearly had heart attacks on the spot.
“What is the BBC doing speaking French for God’s sake?” Mum screamed in shock.
“The bloody French sold us down the river in the war. They’re all bastards,” Dad exclaimed.
“Language, George,” commented Mum.
“Listen to this, girls. This is what racism sounds like,” I warned.
As I was growing up, my mother wielded a lot of power over me.
Feisty though I was as a child, I was usually under my mother’s control.
I didn’t have friends round to the house, no one did in those days. My school friends didn’t live close by, so I never saw them outside school hours. I was only 12 when the swinging sixties began and so a large chunk of the decade of free love passed me by. I was 17 before I started going out in the evenings. I came across a holiday photo from when I was 15 – I had my school blazer on for goodness sake! What makes a teenage girl, who is lusting after every boy she sees, wear a school blazer on holiday? As my mother was a terrible snob and overly concerned with what other people thought, maybe she hoped that people would recognise the blazer as being from a girls’ grammar school. Or maybe she just had no idea how teenagers dressed. To be fair, I didn’t either! And how did I agree to it anyway? I’m even smiling in the photo.
My liberation began when I went to college. Although it was a Catholic college with lots of nuns there, they weren’t strict at all. I began to live my own life. I still didn’t wear jeans, though. They were banned at home and I didn’t start wearing them until I was married. But, bit by bit, I managed to move away from my mother’s orbit. Yet, she was still able to insist that I have a graduation photo taken. I had been crying all morning after a row with her, so I deliberately look sullen and unsmiling in the photo. It would actually have been a lovely photo if I had smiled.
She disapproved of many of my views. “Who did you get that daft idea from?” she’d say and never credited me with thinking about anything for myself. So, of course, I stopped telling her things. I started to hate her right-wing views and the more I became alienated from the Catholic Church, the more I became alienated from her too. Yet, she was a very kind woman in many ways. She was very involved in the parish and ran the choir at church and played the organ. She was still taking food parcels to ‘my old people’ – who were younger than her – well into her 80s. She walked up the hill, in all weather, to attend daily Mass and read at church. She was reading the epistle the day before she had her stroke. And during the four years I was away at college, she wrote to me every single week, even if the letter was only to tell me she had nothing to tell me!
She lived for 10 years after my father died. By this time, I was married with daughters of my own and living over 100 miles away. I think I had disappointed her in many ways: I had refused to have a traditional wedding; I had married someone she didn’t particularly like who was left-wing and anti-Catholic; I had moved to London straight after I married, then travelled abroad with my husband and lived in a van for a year; I had decided then that, after seven years teaching, I didn’t want to teach my whole life and left my job with no other job lined up; I had insisted that she didn’t buy my daughters girly presents but gender neutral ones; I was in constant conflict with the local parish priest.
On just about everything possible, my mother and I differed in our views.
I would phone her weekly, more out of duty more than desire. When my daughters think of me and my mother, they think of me sitting in my kitchen next to the boiler speaking to her on the phone, my head in my hands and the phone at my ear, looking pained and strained.
This wasn’t the relationship I wanted with her and I did make efforts to improve things. We had a nice exchange of long letters where I found out things about her life I hadn’t known. It was one month after this exchange when I thought things were finally improving between us that I travelled for four hours to see her on her birthday – two hours there and two hours back – and took her lots of small gifts I had put great thought into. I mentioned while I was there that I was starting a Catholic feminist group in my small town. The week after, I got a long letter from her beginning, “My dearest Geraldine. Since you visited, I can’t stop thinking about you and…”
In my head, I had read the lines, “How lovely it was to see you and how thoughtful for you to drive all that way and bring me such lovely gifts.” What she actually wrote was: “…and worrying about your daft idea of starting a Catholic feminist group. For goodness sake, Geraldine, please drop the idea.” She gave a defence of the hierarchy of the Church, then continued: “You have to look after: 1) your husband; 2) your children; 3) your house; 4) your job. In that order and, of course, your own health, to be able to cope with everything.”
I leant against the unit in the kitchen where I was reading the letter, devastated. Why could she never accept my views and my desires? The lovely exchange we had had only one month before was wiped out. It always seemed like I was bending over backwards to understand her point of view and she made no effort to understand mine.
I remember taking her to Canada to see her brother, who she loved and lived there. I was going to stay for three weeks and then my sister-in-law was going to come out for the following three weeks to bring her home. I got us a business class ticket on Air India, as it was cheap. But, of course, they served curry on the plane and my mother wanted potatoes, so she didn’t eat anything. She told me on the flight about her best friend Gladys, whose grown-up daughter Judith took her out for lunch every week. She would often tell me about how often Gladys saw Judith. I always replied that if I didn’t live 100 miles away, I would be able to do that too. She would say, “Oh, I realise that, but I was just telling you about Gladys and Judith.” Then she said, “Judith is taking Gladys away to Llandudno for a few days for a holiday.”
I said, “Your daughter is taking you to Canada for three weeks to see your beloved brother.”
Mum replied, “Ah, but it’s not the seaside.”
When we arrived in Toronto, Mum pointed to her bag coming off the carousel. Foolishly, I never checked it, so we didn’t realise we had the wrong bag until we were boarding the coach to take us to our hotel. I was less than pleased, not altogether sympathetic to the situation and not a bit compassionate towards her. We had to rush back through the airport and beg them to let us into the baggage area again. Mum was panting and distressed. I was mean. I’m not proud of how I was that day.
There were many examples of how I was hurt by something she said. When I did eventually take her to Llandudno for a few days, we had our usual kind of conversation as we were inspecting our bedroom. Always seeking her approval, even when in my 40s, I said, “Do you like my new haircut?”
She said, “It’s shorter than you usually have. I prefer it longer,” closely followed by, “Those trousers make your stomach look fat.”
I turned to her, exasperated, and said, “Is there anything about me you like?”
At this, she flung her arms round my neck and said, “I adore you.”
She held onto me tightly and I teared up. And it’s clear from her letters that she had reached out to me too, but we could never seem to bridge the gap between us.
Any expressions of love from her have clearly been buried beneath years of my anger which served to erase memories of her that would have allowed me to see her in a kinder light.
After my younger brother died, Mum’s thoughts always seemed to be about him. I phoned her and said I wanted to come and talk to her. When I arrived we sat in her front room. My father was in the corner making his rug with his coloured strands of wool laid out in colour-coordinated bands on the arm of his chair. My mother and I sat in separate chairs. The gas fire was full on, so your shins were burned but as soon as you went to the back of the room you froze to death. Dad asked if we wanted him to leave and I asked him to stay in case we forgot any important part of the conversation we were going to have.
Mum clearly wasn’t going to say anything, so I started, “Mum, I don’t feel good about our relationship. I will never understand your pain at losing Andrew, but you still have three children who are alive. You have me and I’m here, but you never seem to see me. You’re not interested in my work and you criticise me about how I live my life: for being away from home too often, not looking after my husband enough, spending too much time on things unconnected to my family, being too old to dye my hair, working so hard I neglect my children… the list is endless. I can’t seem to do anything right. Why aren’t you interested in me and my life? That’s all I want but you never see me.” I said everything that was on my mind and through it all Mum never looked at me but stared ahead at the switched-off TV.
When I finished, she said, “I think I am critical of you working because my view is that you should be home with your children, to be there at least when they come home from school. My mother was always there for me.”
I had a sudden flash of insight. “But you weren’t there for me when I was a child! John and I had to come home from school to an empty, cold house, sometimes having run home all the way through the rain and then had to set a fire with paper spills and coal and try and get some warmth into the room.”
My mother denied this. “That’s not true,” she protested. “I was there for you.”
I appealed to my father, “Dad, help me out here. Was she there or not?”
My father was very good with numbers (he was a maths teacher). He worked out that she had returned to teaching until she had Andrew, and she had had Andrew when I was 10 years old so, when I was seven and eight, I had indeed been coming home to an empty house. Thank goodness my father was there to confirm this.
“So,” I continued, “you seem to have skipped a generation and you are judging me by your mother’s behaviour, not your own.”
Was she just guilty about how she had ‘neglected’ her own children and projected it onto me? Maybe. I left the lounge to take a phone call in the hall and I heard my father say, “So, do you think that is going to make any difference, then, to how you two get on?”
My mother replied frostily, “Well, if it doesn’t, I don’t know what will.”
It didn’t.
The last time I tried to communicate honestly with her was when I was explaining to her why I was separating from my husband, Martin. I was now approaching 50 years of age. There were just the two of us sitting in my lounge. I opened my heart to her about my marriage and my ordination as an interfaith minister. She was looking at me the whole time and I thought, My goodness, she is really listening to me! After I finished speaking, she said, “You know when I used to come and see you at college, the principal would tell me what a fine girl you were, how the other girls looked up to you and how you were a great president of the Students’ Union, how you were going to be an excellent teacher and what a great role model you were.” She paused, then continued, “What happened to you?”
My stomach lurched and I opened my arms wide. “I’m here, Mum,” I said simply. “I’m still here.”
That was the last time I tried to talk with her.
I dropped any expectations that day that anything would ever be any different.
But there came a day when things did become different. Our usual pattern was that she would criticise me and I would tell her that I was a wife, a mother and a businesswoman; that my family were happy; that my children were great; that they were all leading their own full lives, but my mother didn’t seem to listen. I was still caught between being irritated and angry with my mother, yet wanting her approval. I would regularly scream at her (in my head) to accept me as I was and stop wanting me to be different.
But one particular day, in my kitchen, a miracle happened. I suddenly realised that while I was screaming for my mother to accept me, I was not accepting my mother at all. Here she was, her 80 years of life, much of which I knew nothing about; her 80 years of disappointments and pain that she never talked about; and her best efforts at bringing up a daughter who had not lived up to her expectations. And I was wanting her to be a different kind of mother. I wanted her to change and be more supportive. I would complain, If only she would accept me as I am. Yet, in that moment, I realised that I was not at all as accepting of my mother. So, right then, in my kitchen, I accepted my mother exactly as she was, with her 80 years of pain, pleasure and efforts. I blessed her and loved her and vowed that I would never again expect my mum to be different – she was absolutely fine as she was. I felt wonderful and a great peace descended on me. I told no one what I had experienced and went about my business.
The next day the phone rang. It was my mother; this was very rare. She hardly ever phoned me on the grounds that, “I never know if you’re going to be there”. Here she was, on the phone.
“Hi Mum,” I said. “How are you?”
Mum said, “I remembered that you said you were working abroad this week. I just wondered how it had gone…”
Wow! I had to sit down. What had happened? What had happened was that I had changed my perception of my mother and changed the whole dynamic between us. Although my mother had not been told what my thought process had been, somehow, at some level, she had felt the energy of connection that I had created inside of myself and responded to it. I hadn’t done it in order to change my mother. I didn’t even know that would happen. I did it to bring some peace to my heart. But, by choosing peace and practising acceptance, I brought about a change in the relationship, which wasn’t dependent on my mother changing. Of course, I had to do this many times!
On my annual visit to see my friend Mary in the US, there would always be a point at which I would say, “I have to talk to you about my mother. She’s driving me crazy.” But there came a time when, sitting in Mary’s car in a car park, waiting in the heat while she did a quick visit to the grocery store, I had a huge insight about my mother. I often wondered why I had chosen her as my mother (I believe that children choose their parents). What was her purpose in my life? Suddenly, out of the heat, in that car in the car park came my answer – she was there to give me the opportunity to choose peace in every moment – and usually I blew it. This helped me enormously from then on. Each time my mother said something critical, and I could feel the irritation building inside my body, I would stop and breathe and say to myself, “Thanks, Mum. I’m not going there. I’m choosing peace. Thanks for the reminder.” Of course, I had to do that many times too!
After she had her stroke, everything changed. She was discharged from hospital and was in a nursing home for a year before she died. She had a feeding tube in her stomach and she couldn’t speak. Once I was no longer waiting for her to say something to me that she wouldn’t say to me, all my irritation just fell away.
All there was left was a fierce love for her and a desire for her to be comfortable and treated with dignity.
I was living in Ireland by now and, as my brother John and his wife Wendy had borne the brunt of being on-hand to address my mother’s needs, I stepped up to do my bit. I checked out the best local nursing homes for her, I took care of her financial affairs and insisted on organising her funeral exactly as I knew she would want it. It took her stroke to remove the barriers between us but, by then, we had no time to enjoy a fruitful relationship.
At the funeral, many people came up to me and said things like, “Oh, you’re the wonderful Geraldine. Your mother always talked about you. You were such a good daughter to her.” I didn’t feel that I had been a good daughter at all. My daughter Amy, who heard these comments time after time, became increasingly annoyed. “So, why the bloody hell didn’t she tell you, then?” she fumed.
She probably did, in ways I never recognised. Sad that.
I’m sure she loved me, but never in the way I wanted. And the love that she undoubtably did give me, I didn’t value enough. I swore that my daughters would never feel that way about me. But the mother/ daughter relationship is complex and I’m not sure I entirely succeeded in that.
Photo
My mother on her 80th birthday.
Questions for Reflection
What are the best things about your mother that you remember? Would you say you were close? How do you want/did you want your relationship with your mother to be/to have been different? Do you have any regrets/guilt with regard to your mother?
A Blessing While You Reflect
May I always remember the reasons I have to be grateful for my mother
May I have compassion for the struggles that I never knew she had
May the love I have for her rise above any judgements I might have of her
May I live my best life as a tribute to the gift of life she gave me
May I always make room for her in my heart
