Mothers and Daughters
This article first appeared in the Minden Times in January 2024.
In so many of the memoirs I read about caring for parents with dementia, the adult daughters talk about discovering their mothers in the course of the conversations that caregiving entails. Or enables. Or requires. And in so doing, the daughters have enriched their understanding of themselves. Elizabeth Hay in All Things Consoled parses the family dynamics. Jann Arden in Feeding My Mother begins to understand the complexities and cost of being responsible for the daily care of others, begins to comprehend why, or maybe how, her mother hung in with an abusive alcoholic husband for many years, including his late dry years where dementia took over making him a curmudgeon, a reality that Jann needs to accommodate as part of caregiving.
I’ve previously suggested inter-generational conversations should be part of the aging agenda, independent of caregiving responsibilities. There’s a rhythm to relationships between parent and child. In infancy and early childhood it’s total dependence, when the parent’s life is determined by the child’s needs. This is followed by a decade or two of the struggle for independence, when the parent is hopelessly useless except when they’re not. Then come the adult years when paths diverge in every which way – geographically, philosophically, psychologically, sociologically. Then the relationship is tipped by events or circumstances into the later years, when to some extent the adult child must pay attention to the wellbeing of the parent. (Or not: that happens.)
The Wren, The Wren by Booker prize winner and Irish novelist Anne Enright, published 2023, exemplifies what can be learned from investigating family relationships. It is a brilliantly written, head-spinning foray into all that is involved in relationships, the spine of which is the mother-daughter relationship between Nell, probably a Millennial, as she leaves the home of Carmel, her always-single mother, to make her way in the world. Add Carmel’s perspective, as she recreates her life around the absence of her daughter, in the context of her mother, Terry, beguiled into marriage by the beautiful words of a penniless Irish poet who became a national treasure, while visiting occasionally and unpredictably the responsibilities of husband and father. Phil the poet, such is the power of his thumbprint, becomes a stand-in for the impact of patriarchy on relationships. (As mostly manifest in sex, which we can’t go into here.)
Patriarchy is omnipresent in relationships. Male-female relationships for sure although not exclusively. But mother-daughter relationships are different. Phil the poet left when Carmel was 12, explaining to the world that his wife became ill (she ‘lost’ a breast) and the relationship didn’t survive. Carmel absorbs into her bones the unreliability of men and refuses to build her life on one. When Nell is born, conceived by a transient man of Carmel’s choosing, ‘she did not give it to any man. That would be like holding it out at arm’s length and dropping it right there, on to the concrete…[T]his baby was hers and hers alone.’ Nell embraces the absence of men by falling hopelessly in love with a psychologically and physically abusive man. Eventually, fleeing the tentacles of addiction to his narcissism and unreliability, she bumps into a guy who allows her to (re)discover the part of her that climbed into her mother’s bed on a Sunday morning and talked about stuff, sees her old guy as a reincarnation of her grandfather without the patina of poetry, and brings her new guy home to meet her mom.
Almost all the details of these women’s relationship journeys ring bells for me, in my life and those of my mother and my daughters and a host of women confidants. Fathers who drop babies on to the concrete. Obsession masquerading as love. Lust justifying its categorization as a Deadly Sin. Women filling an absence with approximate reincarnations. Women talking about stuff before they progress to having sex. Or maybe talking instead of having sex.
But mostly what resonates is the tyranny of the mother-daughter tie. For better or worse. We cannot choose our mother and we cannot choose our daughters, but we are beholden to the connection. And we are all complex creatures living in times that move swiftly, which is why it behooves us to find out as much as we can about who our mothers/daughters are, the forces in life that shaped them as they form and reform, the twists and turns of their struggle with the many faces of patriarchy.
I imagine that something similar might be in place for fathers and sons but I cannot speak to it, although I recently read a memoir that was a lovely peek (pique?) into that world: The Home Stretch: a father, a son and the things they never talk about by George Ilsley, published 2020. More, perhaps, another time.
