Mothers and daughters

Or how you try and avoid making the same mistakes but sometimes do

I love my mum. There I’ve said it. Nonetheless when I was growing up our relationship was tempestuous. If we’d been having a romantic relationship it would have been that couple in a restaurant, one suddenly standing and tipping a glass of wine over the others’ head. Then shouting. Then suddenly making up again- the outside world invisible.

We fought. Mum doesn’t remember it but I do. We had fights that went on for what felt like hours. I slammed doors, and she slammed them, and on a rare occasion there might be a slap. Once I slapped her full on the face. I must have been about nine or ten. She infuriated me. I infuriated her. I reserved a special kind of hurtful comment for my mother. I had a very specific eye roll that I only used when she said something I disapproved of (which on balance was pretty much everything). I am sure there is some complex reason why mothers and daughters rub one another up in a certain way. I haven’t looked into it but I know it’s common.

I don’t feel traumatised, I am not complaining, but the problem is that all this has obviously impacted on my own parenting style. When you’re younger many of your childhood demons lay dormant, curled up, and you don’t understand why you behave in certain predictable ways - like being too needy, grasping, seeking validation from the wrong people. Certainly this was the case with me. I just kept making the same mistakes and getting knocked back, and trying to impress those who didn’t care.

Then when you have kids you find that those things that were taking a nap wake up. They come up in strange ways.

My eldest daughter is spirited. She’s energetic. She’s full on. She can’t stop moving. She dances. Jumps around whilst she’s talking. She grabs your phone and runs off with it, and slams the door behind her. In the garden she throws a ball at my chest as she bounces on the trampoline, and asks me five hundred different questions.

What happens to a body when it gets hot? What happens if you get too close to the sun? At what point do you melt? What happens when you melt? Do you disintegrate? Or do you just go to sleep? How long can you survive in extreme heat? What kind of heat is tolerable? Can you sleep on the sun?

I tell her I don’t know the answer but I am pretty sure you can’t get too close to the sun or you will just shrivel up. You won’t feel anything. Just one minute alive and the next a piece of bacon. It might even feel good for a millisecond when you get that first wave of heat hitting your face.

Just one more ball she shouts. Throw it one more time.

It is always one more.

She also sulks often. Rolls her eyes. She carries grudges.

She is also the person I love the most (aside from my other daughter who I try and love equally).

This weekend she has gone away on a Brownie camp, and I feel a sense of calm that I rarely feel but I also feel sad. Like she isn’t coming back. Like all the bad parenting is flashing before my eyes. I’ve looked forward to this moment, the time without her because we’ve had a run of fighting and arguments. I said to her yesterday that I was looking forward to it, and then took it back and embraced her and told her that I was sorry.

We fought about whether she should take a swimming costume or not. I had a detailed list of all the things she’d need on this trip, and a swimming costume was not one of them. I got swept away in an anger that I only really experience when I’m with her.

‘Tawny owl said we might swim,’ she said sitting calmly on the chair in her bedroom, her younger sister trying to stretch the hoover plug as far as she possibly could across the floor, and then jumping over it before it got sucked back into the machine again.

‘No there definitely won’t be any swimming,’ I said, ‘They wouldn’t be able to take you all swimming and they’d have told us about it because they'd have had to get our permission.’

The Brownie instructions had been extensive. Six documents which I’d read on my laptop whilst trying to write up a complicated client document. It had felt like a university application.

‘Well SHE said we might go swimming and so I’m taking my swimming costume.’

The room was in chaos with piles of clothes, a sheet, pillowcases, towels, and a giant wash bag (crammed with a cleanser and toner she’d pinched from the cupboard where I hide my nice stuff because my kids like to take my nice stuff and empty it into the bath).

‘You’re definitely not swimming so we won’t be packing a swimming costume,’ I said.

I could feel the anger rising, like an animal crawling in my stomach and intent on exiting out the top of my head. Would I be able to talk it back down? Would I be able to stop? I tried to remember the technique. Walk away. Breathe. Don’t say anything. I walked out of the room and my daughter followed me.

‘We are definitely going swimming so I am taking it anyway and I don’t care what you say!’

She looked at me with curiosity. She could sense I was about to explode. She could feel it like a cheetah sitting up and sniffing the air as the wind direction shifts. The mess was worse in my bedroom. Someone had left a red felt tip with the lid off on the duvet cover, and it had bled all over the place so it looked like someone had used the duvet to stem the flow of their guts oozing out.

‘YOU ARE NOT GOING SWIMMING AND YOU ARE NOT TAKING A SWIMMING COSTUME!’ I spat.

Sometimes the anger flares up so quickly that it surprises myself. I can’t stop it you see. The animal won’t have it. It has to roar and say all the shit that needs to be said, and it could be a pair of pants left in leggings, balled up and thrown behind the TV or it could be this. This swimming costume.

WHICH IS NOT ON THE LIST AND SO WILL NOT BE PUT IN THE SUITCASE.

My daughter looks at me. Her expression now is one of quiet boredom. The more angry I become, the more detached her expression. It makes it worse, far worse than meeting me with her anger. I start in on the rant. It is the rant that I always do - I could actually have it printed on my arm as a tattoo, but of course I don’t need to because I know it by heart. It would also not be a particularly motivational tattoo either. I do everything. I am always the one who does everything. I have to clean and work and do it all. It’s not fair. I am sick of it.

I am unsure now what the swimming costume has to do with this narrative of injustice and woe, but I ‘m in the zone, and it has to reach its peak, and then it will subside.

‘I’ll be glad when you’re away,’ I say, immediately regretting it but somehow wanting to say something even more hurtful.

And here’s the thing. This is why we clash. We clash because I cannot control her. I know the things that are good and bad for her, but I cannot make her do anything. She will do what she wants. She is infuriating. She is going to be the death of me. This wild, crazy person. I march to the Londis and the guy behind the counter asks me if I’m having a nice summer.

‘It sucks,’ I say honestly, ‘I hate everyone.’

I don’t think he hears because he shrugs. I consider buying one of the attractively packaged vapes behind him (reminding me of alcopops when I was a student and their child-like flavours) and vaping furiously in the park. I am sober but I want a bottle of Jack Daniels. To climb on the back of a Harley, and zoom off to somewhere completely inappropriate. I want my family to worry where I am. When I return I will have the tattoo of all the injustices on my arm, and they will gasp and finally realise how superhuman I really am.

‘I always vacuum you know,’ my partner had said as I’d stormed out the door, perhaps recognising that the swimming costume wasn't the underlying problem.

As I walked back home the guilt arrived. It was like a drug come down. Full of remorse. Oh how stupid. And just when she needed reassurance and kindness. I got back in and the family were waiting. I went into ‘happy, okay, functioning mum mode’ (I’m very good at this) and started up the stairs.

‘So shall we put your swimming costume in anyway?’ I said cheerily, ‘I mean you’re probably not going swimming but just in case.’

My daughter wrapped her arms around me. I hugged her back. Her face was sweaty. I remembered that I’d always been the same. From about age nine onwards until I hit my teens. Always sweaty. Why?

It was because of this bubbling life force inside of me. I can sleep on the sun and I will do it. Just you see!

As we hung in the air, not moving, I remembered the times when she’d fall asleep in my lap, how she was the most beautiful creature in those moments, how I’d been content but had also felt the uneasy tug. This moment is good but the next might be different. That kind of thing.

‘I didn’t mean it about not missing you. I’m sorry I shouted. I’m just super tired.,’ I said.

She hugged me in the way she’d hugged me on the weekday mornings, when she’d been a toddler, and I’d returned to work full-time, when I’d dropped her at the childminder, and then I’d cried and immediately called my mum on the phone.

‘I can’t bear it,’ I’d said, my voice catching, ‘I miss her. I hate leaving her. I can’t do it.’

‘It’ll pass. That’s the thing darling. It’s never easy. It’s going to be hard but she’ll be okay. You both will.’

This circle from mother to daughter to mother to daughter. The fights are never about swimming costumes. Or the pants left behind the TV.

I want you to remember how much I love you. This moment here as we clutch each other like two bodies flung together on the fairground waltzers. It feels delirious and yet so infuriating.

You’ll write a poem about it one day.