‘this wonderful girl’ or ‘that darling girl’ who faced furious right wingers waving crucifixes. And that’s all wonderful, really. My mother was part of something incredibly important at a time when women couldn’t control their fertility and were prevented from achieving all that they should, and so on and so forth, but - I can’t believe I’m admitting this finally, even if it is only on paper - I find it insanely irritating. I HATE IT! Because ‘girl’ implies sweetness, innocence and a hint of gentleness.
My mother is about as girlish as a Hell’s Angel.
She is tough - had to be tough. So stop with the ‘girls’
thing, please. Let everyone else see the gritty person underneath and stop saving it just for me.
She can do the girlish thing, all right. This involves smiling at people (mainly men) and fluttering her
eyelashes - she was never one of the bra-burning feminists.
She’s the more modern variety, the kind who want red lipstick and push-up bosoms to go with their financial equality in the workplace.
With me, Number Two Daughter, she gives the smiling and fluttering a miss. I get instructions on where I’m going wrong in life: not wearing my hair the correct way, having middle-aged spread (‘So ageing, Charlotte,’ she murmurs), and doing what she considers a menial job are chief on the list. Ideally, I should be ruthlessly running my own company instead of standing at a counter in a department store selling hope in pretty bottles to women. The ideal me would also credit my mother with all my success, along the lines of ‘She taught me everything I know.’
Iseult, my older sister and Number One Daughter, who is beautiful, clever and successful, does not get instructions on where she’s going wrong. She gets compliments and her newspaper clippings kept. Iseult is a playwright. She’s written three plays, two of which were wonderfully received, and there’s talk of one of them going to Broadway. Iseult’s plays are her work-in-progress. My mother considers Iseult to be her best work and has a folder of Iseult’s triumphs since her first play was performed: her favourite is the article in a Galway paper where a famous person and their mother talk about their relationship and Iseult said, along with the obligatory ‘my mother taught me everything I know’, that our mother was always so glamorous that our boyfriends fancied her more than either of us.
I can’t quite remember this myself, but my mother has taken the story and run with it. Not only was she personally responsible for female emancipation in our historically embattled country, she sees herself as a dead ringer for Mrs Robinson in The Graduate.
Now that sounds like carping. It’s not poor Iseult’s fault,’
don’t get me wrong, God, no. It’s just the way things are
in our family, and families are weird, aren’t they? Ours is no weirder than anybody else’s probably: I’m just bad at dealing with it all. I should know better at my age. I’m nearly forty, have a wonderful son, wonderful husband, can’t complain about any of that. It’s just my mother: she drives me nuts. And that’s not normal, is it?
Charlie had never kept a diary before, she’d simply never had the inclination. Iseult was the writer in the family and Charlie liked keeping her own thoughts to herself. But a gratitude journal: now that was a different proposition. She’d heard a woman on the radio talking about a gratitude journal, where you wrote down all the things you were grateful for.
Eventually, some alchemy was supposed to take place and the act of writing about being grateful somehow made you actually grateful. That’s how she’d started out at Christmas.
I’m grateful for today when I watched Mikey at football practice and he was so happy, joyful…
… Brendan took me to dinner last night in the Chinese place on the hill and it was wonderful. There was no special occasion; he just thought it would be nice to do
My mother is about as girlish as a Hell’s Angel.
She is tough - had to be tough. So stop with the ‘girls’
thing, please. Let everyone else see the gritty person underneath and stop saving it just for me.
She can do the girlish thing, all right. This involves smiling at people (mainly men) and fluttering her
eyelashes - she was never one of the bra-burning feminists.
She’s the more modern variety, the kind who want red lipstick and push-up bosoms to go with their financial equality in the workplace.
With me, Number Two Daughter, she gives the smiling and fluttering a miss. I get instructions on where I’m going wrong in life: not wearing my hair the correct way, having middle-aged spread (‘So ageing, Charlotte,’ she murmurs), and doing what she considers a menial job are chief on the list. Ideally, I should be ruthlessly running my own company instead of standing at a counter in a department store selling hope in pretty bottles to women. The ideal me would also credit my mother with all my success, along the lines of ‘She taught me everything I know.’
Iseult, my older sister and Number One Daughter, who is beautiful, clever and successful, does not get instructions on where she’s going wrong. She gets compliments and her newspaper clippings kept. Iseult is a playwright. She’s written three plays, two of which were wonderfully received, and there’s talk of one of them going to Broadway. Iseult’s plays are her work-in-progress. My mother considers Iseult to be her best work and has a folder of Iseult’s triumphs since her first play was performed: her favourite is the article in a Galway paper where a famous person and their mother talk about their relationship and Iseult said, along with the obligatory ‘my mother taught me everything I know’, that our mother was always so glamorous that our boyfriends fancied her more than either of us.
I can’t quite remember this myself, but my mother has taken the story and run with it. Not only was she personally responsible for female emancipation in our historically embattled country, she sees herself as a dead ringer for Mrs Robinson in The Graduate.
Now that sounds like carping. It’s not poor Iseult’s fault,’
don’t get me wrong, God, no. It’s just the way things are
in our family, and families are weird, aren’t they? Ours is no weirder than anybody else’s probably: I’m just bad at dealing with it all. I should know better at my age. I’m nearly forty, have a wonderful son, wonderful husband, can’t complain about any of that. It’s just my mother: she drives me nuts. And that’s not normal, is it?
Charlie had never kept a diary before, she’d simply never had the inclination. Iseult was the writer in the family and Charlie liked keeping her own thoughts to herself. But a gratitude journal: now that was a different proposition. She’d heard a woman on the radio talking about a gratitude journal, where you wrote down all the things you were grateful for.
Eventually, some alchemy was supposed to take place and the act of writing about being grateful somehow made you actually grateful. That’s how she’d started out at Christmas.
I’m grateful for today when I watched Mikey at football practice and he was so happy, joyful…
… Brendan took me to dinner last night in the Chinese place on the hill and it was wonderful. There was no special occasion; he just thought it would be nice to do
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