Plates fell, hair was pulled and throats were raw with yelling. It was the teenage years. With Mother's Day on Sunday, Orla Tinsleyoffers a personal perspective on the mother- daughter relationship

I used to think I was adopted. In my early teens, while strolling along Grafton Street, I looked around for possible birth mothers. My mother and I have never had a sparkling relationship.

When I tried the Marcia Brady thing, she was playing Morticia Addams, when she was Jackie Kennedy, I was Girl, Interrupted. We rarely found the equilibrium to keep us both afloat. When I was sinking I reached for any hand but hers, and I came to the conclusion, as only a wise 15-year-old can, that not everyone gets on with their mother.

At 15 and 16 a lot of girls I knew were sleeping around, getting high, drunk and passing out nightly. I didn't have the slightest desire to humiliate myself in such a manner as I respected myself and my parents. My mom didn't seem to realise that it could have been so much worse. We clashed regularly, plates fell, hair was pulled, doors slammed and throats were raw from our yelling. It baffled me. Your mother is the one person you're meant to have the strongest connection with, but for a while there, on a daily basis, we wanted to kill each other.

One thing that tweaked incessantly at my brain was her inability to understand me. It seems like typical teenage stuff, but there's a minor twist. I have cystic fibrosis, a long-term chronic illness, and sometimes when life goes too fast it can get you down. I had a penchant for spending time in my room when I was younger. Losing myself in Emily Dickinson or even my own writing was cathartic for me. I wasn't dwelling, I was dealing.

She called it "navel gazing". After countless clashes and an extensive period of "navel gazing", which to me was an attempt at starting a first novel and not a demonstration in morbid mulling, she took me to a psychologist "for a chat".

In the psychologist's office the tension creeped out like a detonated grenade. We left the place in silence. Somewhere between there and my house I ended up on a mucky road in the middle of nowhere watching the sun bounce off the car bonnet as she drove off. It was mostly my fault. There was a lone sheep in the field across from where I stood and I watched it. I imagined living in its field, eating grass all day. After 10 minutes, just as the tears were being snorted up my nose, she came back. In silence the door swung open, I glanced at the sheep and sat in like a folding-down box, exact and rigid. I knew I was learning a lesson, I just wasn't quite sure what it was. We drove home and didn't speak for the next two days.

Having an illness as a child was never really an issue. Being younger, while you question impulsively with stark curiosity, answers are more readily accepted than in later years. As a teenager, it becomes more difficult and anyone who says it doesn't is lying. Excess baggage had already accumulated and the desire to rebel was so fresh.

My revolt came one Sunday after I announced that the carnivorous life was not for me. I decided I wanted to be a vegetarian. Seeing those cows standing vacant and unassuming in the fields around our house set it off. Watching them chew on their grass as possible members of their family lay massacred on our sizzling hot plates made me want to hurl.

My life-altering decision was met with attempted straight faces that cracked into sniggering disbelief. I was told to "cop on" as the nutrition I needed daily was more important than any cow.

My mom, being a nurse, knew these things. I hated her for it. It seems so stupid now but, like most teenagers, I was convinced I knew everything, that I had everyone figured out. Years later I understood. My mother was not telling me what I couldn't do but merely showing me how much I could do, if I only had the courage to comprehend some limitations that I just couldn't fight.

IN HOSPITAL I see a lot of mothers in vulnerable positions, some nearing the end of their lives and others neurotically convinced that the end is nigh when it is quite clear they will live to see next week's episodes of Shortland Street.

I watch their children, now mostly fully grown adults, bring in their favourite things. Regular appearances are made by archaic hot-water bottles, fresh smelling editions of Woman's Way and the best grapes they can find. Some want more specific things, such as that toasted sandwich from Roly's Bistro or the pink Foxford woollen blanket they saw in Avoca. They want it and usually get it.

In a desperate attempt to make a loved one feel better, every need is pandered to, even the ridiculous. The clue to the severity of the ailment is usually whether they would rather have you driving half an hour to get that sandwich, or allow a lesser sandwich to suffice, while that half an hour is spent mulling over the mundane with you.

The more demanding are usually easy to spot. They're lying up clutching their hip, when in fact it's their toe that's broken. With a flash of a bedpan, their mobility miraculously increases. I've often empathised with the children and think perhaps I would be one of those standing in line in Avoca for that blanket, but that lady is not my mother. However willing I would be to fight off the Avoca-ites, she would never ask such a thing of me. She knows how much work it is on the other side, as a nurse and as a mother.

I found this out on a deeper level in May last year when the theatre group I'm part of set about exploring xenophobia and racism through physical theatre and minimal vocals. It was a project that spanned many months and we ended up doing an exchange programme to Italy. Unfortunately, a combination of the hard work, heat and cramped living conditions there meant I ended up in hospital and missed the performance of our work.

When I reached the A&E I was confident and cognisant of my surroundings. I was used to hospitals and this was, after all, a universal disease. My confidence was misplaced. After 20 minutes of tests a burly lady reminiscent of the Italian mamma character in the Dolmio ads came in. This nurse shattered my sense of control by performing a basic procedure wrongly and causing quite a bit of emotional and physical damage. While, unlike in Ireland, you could get a bed in Italy in under one hour, the quality of care from competent nursing staff was another matter.

My suspicions were confirmed as mamma waddled in, brown eyes dead and white gloves covering those stumpy fingers. The whispers of "tranquillo" began like some demented harpies. There she was, à la Norman Bates, leaning over me, arm raised, green needled syringe in hand (green translates as the biggest possible needle.) I pleaded, I pushed. They had me, I couldn't budge. So I played the insanity card.

I was worried about the possibility that, with oxygen saturation as detrimentally low as mine, at that moment that 10ml syringe could have put me into a coma or killed me. So I growled at them. Hardly a beastly growl, more the Cowardly Lion's feeble attempt to scare Toto before Dorothy slaps him on the nose and says: "Shame on you!"

"Why don't you pick on someone your own size?" And why didn't she? She fingered my arm for a vein, I calculated. She lunged towards me, and with one fell swoop I got it. I grabbed the needle and syringe, without injury, and shook it in sheer desperation at her: "No, no, no, no!" My voice took on Italian nuances in a ridiculous attempt to communicate. I wasn't going to hurt her. She grabbed the syringe and suddenly she knew how to speak English. Her wise words? "Why you go on holidays if you know you have this illness?" I looked at her, fraught with panic, and sobbed. She sighed, fed up with me, and left the room.

My knight in shining armour, Michaela, the director of the Italian theatre group, assumed the role of protector. He communicated with my mom by phone, conversed with me and then translated to the nurses. My mom instructed and guided them, calmly and with a collected coolness that set me in awe of her. I had never really seen her in action before.

Two days later I was stable, in a specialised hospital and watched Italy win the World Cup in my own little room. The yelping howls of Italian throughout the ward was beautiful. Nurses whooped at me, forgetting themselves, and paraded with the Italian flag blazing on their backs. The noise kept me awake all night. I imagined the motorcyclists jetting by screaming "Italia", like when they won the semi-final and we'd jump and punch the air with them. It was the most beautiful sound, much like the excitement I felt when I knew my mom was coming. My mother wanted to fly over the minute I got ill, but as a matter of pride I kept putting her off. Eventually she decided to come anyway, which, typically, was the right decision.

The next morning she came to Florence, one of the most beautiful cities in the world. She passed the jewellery, the duomo and the gelati to get to me. At that time I was hauled up in a type of health-service Arcadia. The night before she came was like Christmas Eve. She met Michaela at the airport, an Italian man she had never met before, and after seeing me briefly, rushed, in this foreign land, on my demand to go and see the performance I was meant to be a part of.

The stereotypical role of mother is, in relation to children, to give birth and then mind them until they are brassy and big enough to tend for themselves. When offspring are old enough to do this is debatable. I know some 30-year-olds who still can't take responsibility for themselves and some 13-year-olds who are so organised that I just can't be around them.

But whether manic or morally moulded, finding your place in life is never smooth; apparently some of the most interesting people never do find their place. Mothers are there as clandestine conveyers of wisdom to help you along the way. It seems the older you get, the more you need their advice and ability to pull you in when you are skiing off-piste, oblivious to the avalanche about to topple you.

Sometimes being consumed by the avalanche is no harm, it makes you appreciate those who shovel you out; those close to you who break their backs trying to get you out of that avalanche and manage it just before your toes fall off.

MY PROBLEM WITH my mom was not that she didn't understand me. My problem was that she understood too much about me. Being a nurse she knew more than I did, especially about the medical side of me. She knew the dangers, the possibilities, the probable outcomes before I did. She knew not just because she was a nurse, but because she was my mother and she'd been watching from a most difficult position, with two juxtaposing viewpoints, from day one.

I've heard fellow colleagues talk of her as "the best nurse they've ever worked with" and I constantly run into people who praise her, including former patients, friends or relatives of them, or even doctors who recognise the second name, even though their hospitals are miles apart.

We used to practise attempted murder on a daily basis, now we're only up for it every few months. Maybe I'm calming down or growing up, but amid the banging doors and mascara smears I remember the most vital thing - I have a mother, she is mine. That keeps me afloat.

This is an edited extract from Mum's the Word, a collection of true tales of motherhood by Irish women in aid of cystic-fibrosis research in Dublin's Tallaght hospital. It will be published in the autumn by New Island