I never considered myself a particularly maternal person. As a child, I played with my pets and my stuffed animals rather than dolls. I thought maybe I’d become a vet instead of a parent, although I realise these aren’t mutually exclusive categories.
I went through my adolescence and my early 20s telling pretty much anyone who would listen that I wasn’t interested in having children. My co-workers at one job, mostly older women, would say things like, One of these days, honey, you’re gonna come in here and you’re gonna have a baby on your hip. And we’re gonna tell you we told you so. That’s just your biological clock.
I was vaguely insulted by this. What was this biological clock, anyway? People talked about it like my empty uterus were a ticking time bomb that if left unattended would explode into unfulfilled womanhood, and it would be really terrible.
I went to my doctor and said, I want to do something about this. I don’t want to have a child, ever. I want to have my tubes tied. And he looked me up and down – I was about 22 – and he said, you come back here every year and tell me the same thing for 10 years, and maybe I’ll consider it. I was angry at this power he was trying to exert over my choices and I went away in a huff.
But fast forward several years. Everything was happy, everything was good. I had nice friends, great holidays, lovely dinners, regular visits to the theatre. At the same time, it had all started to feel a little bit same-y, like there were something that I wanted to grow and develop. I wanted to be a bit out of control. I wanted something to feel incomplete, everything to play for.
Still, I wasn’t entirely sure, and my partner definitely wasn’t sure. When I showed him the stick with the double line on it, he said shit and went back to sleep.
But then she arrived, and I learned through experience the meaning of maternal ambivalence. I was utterly fascinated with her, especially when she began to speak. I’d often transcribe her because she was hilarious, and I publicised these chats on Facebook to my friends, these dialogues that my daughter and I engaged in, until she reached the age where she felt she was being commodified in some sort of way and protested, at which point I ceased operations.
But even at that point, when she was railing against my use of her on social media - me and my mini me, aren’t we cute and isn’t she clever - she still looked at me with love and openness, still responded to me in the same way she always had, her mummy.
And then she reached secondary school. Something radically altered, extremely rapidly, dizzyingly quickly. For me this transformation was a kind of death, a grief, because the receding from me and from so many former aspects of herself was so striking.
I didn’t know what to do with myself. I cried to every friend and indeed some shopkeepers up and down my high road about my dilemma. Everyone would say things like you need to just kind of back off, maybe be a little less involved, care a little less.
And I’m there thinking, care a little bit less? Care a little bit less? What does that MEAN? I have NO idea what that looks like in practice.
In this fugue state, I purchased a very expensive cat with sapphire eyes and huge ears that looked like they had been outlined in Sharpie. I bought many accessories for her, including a pet sling, placing this creature in the sling and carrying it around, warm and sleepy against my belly.
My daughter, who by now liked to regard me with an annoyance that sometimes tipped over into revulsion, looked at me like I was ridiculous, like I was ageing into this insane cat lady that she could barely bear to look at. She would go dead flat behind the eyes, shake her head, slouch out of the room.
And now she goes into her bedroom in 2023 and comes out in various incarnations from the mid 1990s, as though the space beyond that door were not a bedroom but a time machine. At one point she was emerging like Cher from Clueless, in kneesocks and tartan skirts. Then she was appearing as Kurt Cobain, white-rimmed sunglasses and grunge flannel. Now she’s like one of the Ramones, never without an impenetrable curtain of hair in front of her face.
If I told her I was the same when I was a teenager, which she is true, she might stop…but then again maybe not, because she’d only see what I was trying to do. The other night she’d just come out of the shower and crawled into bed with me to watch a programme on my phone, and with a towel around her head, there was her face, the whole of her lovely face. I could barely watch the programme, so preoccupied was I with trying to be surreptitious about gazing at the whole of her face. The moment was brief and fleeting and nostalgic, like an encounter with a ghost.
And she goes out. Sometimes she comes home from school and goes out again without even saying hello. She slings a tote bag over her shoulder with whatever she carries around with her and goes off down the street, bound for her friend’s or the mall or central London, and I’m hovering at the door watching her go, suppressing the urge to call after her, do you still love me?
This is pathetic, and I hate even looking at myself going through this thing. What happened to this mother who was so cool, who was so preoccupied with preserving herself, her own stuff, I may be a mum but I’m a lot more too? Did I treat her in her younger years with too much nonchalance, as though she were not the centre of my world? Is this my punishment? Is this her revenge?
The aching, the craving for her, I can’t even begin to describe it to you. Her nonchalance and distancing is all the more painful for its being intermittent and unpredictable. Sometimes it’s like looking in the mirror and seeing your reflection looking back at you, and suddenly it says, actually no, I’ve decided you’re kind of an asshole, I can’t be bothered with you and walks off.
Except the thing is, she’s not my reflection. She’s not my mini-me. She’s not some version of me. She’s her.
I think about my own mother, waiting up for me in the living room when I was getting home too late as a teenager - not by much, but by enough to get into trouble. I always thought, why is she so angry? Why is she so mad at me?
But what if she wasn’t mad at me? Maybe she just missed me. Maybe she was simply frustrated in her desire to continue to be close to me, and I didn’t understand that. I didn’t realise what it was about.
I think about moments like a time when my daughter was only little. She was with my folks who were visiting us, walking together down a London street.
She saw me coming from a long way off – I was coming home from work. She dropped everything she had, threw her arms open. She called me by the only name she had for me, which was mummy, and she ran into my arms.
This story was originally told onstage in May of 2022 at The Moth in London. The theme that night was Cravings.
She will come back. Just like you did. And yes, the more space you give her, the sooner it might happen. I had an AMAZING conversation with my almost 20-year old about a month ago. So many times he commented about my ‘good point’, ‘you’re probably right’, ‘hadn’t thought of that’. I was BRILLIANT! Whereas the last six years I’ve been a complete idiot, knowing nothing about anything. In that moment though, he had come to me, not the other way around. She knows you’re there when she needs you, just like you always knew the same about your mom.