IT IS A TRUTH universally acknowledged that a woman will eventually have to concede; admit to; and give into the awful mind-numbing terror that she has turned into her mother, writes Daisy Cummins.
The sooner we come to terms with this phenomenon, the better. For it is as inevitable as the southwards slide of body parts with increasing age, as inevitable as the sunrise in the morning and the capricious Irish weather.
Women will deny this vehemently. The more vehemently they deny it, the more like their mothers they undoubtedly are. There's a certain amount of dignity to be had in just giving in, admitting defeat.
My mother was a major embarrassment to me for a large part of my life. She wore flowing Laura Ashley dresses all year round and people habitually thought she might be pregnant. She wore a lot of make-up. She couldn't go anywhere without huge over-size sunglasses. She was surgically attached to a series of capacious black bags, in which she lost everything. She had an obsession with curtains hanging straight and couldn't rest in a room where they might be a little askew. She had a tendency to clean the house zealously once a month from top to bottom in some kind of mad pre-menstrual ritual where she would take to defrosting the fridge at 3am with the hairdryer.
It was one evening when I found myself unable to sit still until I had adjusted the curtains that it hit me. I tried to deny it, laugh it off. I even, a little rebelliously, left the curtains so they hung haphazardly. I forced myself to sit down. On my hands. But I couldn't do it, a swell of something rose within me and I could not, for the life of me, co-exist in a room where the curtains weren't hanging straight. And as I adjusted them and my heart rate returned to normal, I had to acknowledge the first signs of mother metamorphosis. From that moment on, it was a losing battle.
My handbags are getting bigger. They might not be black, but for the amount of things I lose in them, they might as well be. I deliberately don't acknowledge where I am in my cycle when the impulse comes to clean the house from top to bottom, albeit never as zealously as my mother did (she was a Kerry woman).
My mother would take an hour to get to the point of a story she was telling, meandering off onto side roads and down lanes of thought that invariably had nothing to do with the primary topic of conversation. So now when I find myself saying self-deprecatingly, to make a long story longer, I get that all too sickeningly familiar jolt of recognition.
My god-daughter Lola is 18-months-old. If you ask her to do the belly dance, she will pull up her top, proudly display her belly and do a completely instinctive manoeuvre that I, after a belly dance class, hadn't come close to mastering. Apparently, her mother was well known up and down her road for doing exactly the same thing when she was a child. Okay, I know that we're moving more into an area of inherited genetic traits. But isn't it bad enough to inherit genetics without inheriting the behaviour too? Behaviour we witnessed growing up and responded to scathingly, saying, "I'm never going to do that/be like that/act like that. Well ladies, I'm sorry, but there's just no avoiding it". Behavioural or genetic. Nature or nurture.
So I've decided that a kind of reverse psychology is in order. A bit like saying that you're older than you are, so people marvel at how young you look. We need to embrace the traits and annoying habits that belonged to our mothers, which seem determined to follow us like a bad smell. It's only by embracing them that we'll diminish them, because the minute you try to repress something, it is transformed into the mother (sorry) of all impulses.
So for instance, my curtains obsession might get so bad that I would be compelled to start fixing other people's curtains (although, worryingly, it's not been unheard of). My long-winded stories would get so windy, winding and tedious, that I'd be left sitting on my own in bars, the audience long gone. I'd start craving flowing Laura Ashley dresses and blue Mary Quant eyeshadow. Why not choose to embrace the things you find yourself doing that are exactly like your mother and laugh at them? Chuckle at them lovingly, if a little fearfully - in doing so, you will be pulled back from the brink, regaining at least an illusion of control. I promise.
Daisy Cummins' new novel under the pseudonym Abby Green, The Mediterranean Billionaire's Blackmail Bargain, Mills and Boon, is out in July