Words by Lauren Keegan
I have always been fascinated by the mother-daughter relationship. I am a daughter, and I am a mother to two daughters. As a perinatal psychologist, working with expectant and new parents, I work from a relational model. This means I examine past and present relationships with self, parents, intimate relationships, and the mother-infant relationship. These relationships are complex and layered and so often foreshadowed by generations past. This approach translates into my fiction, too.
Clinically, I help mothers navigate the life-changing transition from being a dependent (a daughter) to mothering a dependent. Expectant and new mothers face a pivotal point when they separate from their own mother while forming a new identity as a mother to their infant. This transformation does not happen overnight.
As mothers, we may project our hopes and dreams onto our children, be triggered by wounds of our past, we miscue, and we make mistakes. There is a lot to be learnt about ourselves within these relationships and so much growth to be had. It can get messy, and boundaries become blurred.
When I sit down with a new client, I ask them about their history, their backstory. Our earliest experiences with our parents lay the foundation for all future relationships. In those early years we learn how to survive in relation to others. We learn how to get our emotional needs met:
Can I depend on others?
Is it safe to voice my needs?
Do I feel accepted for who I am?
I want to understand what, from the past, may be getting in the way of feeling content in the present.
In fiction, when I’m crafting characters, I take the same approach as I do in my clinical practice. In my debut novel, All the Bees in the Hollows, a grieving mother and daughter who have a strained relationship must find a way to work together to survive. When I set out to write about the mother-daughter relationship, I could not think about where the characters were going or what would happen in the story until I’d figured out what happened before the moment we meet them on the page.
Here, I’m not talking about their personality development, their likes and dislikes or their physical appearance. I’m thinking about how they are in relation to others. What happens when they feel threatened? Do they withdraw from loved ones, or do they seek them out? Can they clearly express their needs, or do they have to make things really big to be seen and heard? Or conversely, do they prefer to be invisible?
When we meet my two protagonists, mother Maryté and daughter Austėja, they have both experienced a significant loss. While their grief is shared, the way they grieve and express their emotions is different. Maryté channels all her energy into beekeeping. She finds comfort in the structure and predictability of the profession. With the bees, she knows exactly where she stands. She pushes down her emotions, because allowing them to overwhelm her would lead to feeling out of control. The irony is, when we suppress our emotions, they find a way out anyway. As Maryté soon learns.
In Maryté’s backstory, she lost her own father when she was a young person and her mother, consumed by grief, cut herself off from her daughter, making her emotionally unavailable at a time when Maryté needed her most. So Maryté learns to rely on no one but herself. She won’t let herself lose control of her emotions, let the grief overwhelm her, like her mother did. She wants to be a strong presence for her daughters. She hopes to do things differently, but as parents we must do more than ‘hope’ to do things differently. Maryte winds up emotionally withdrawing from her daughter Austėja, hence repeating a pattern she’d tried to avoid.
Austėja experiences Maryté as cold. Impenetrable. But Maryté is not unfeeling. In fact, she feels deeply, only she has learnt how to hide it. It’s too scary, unsettling, for those feelings to surface.
Austėja, however, wears her heart on her sleeve. She wants to talk about the loss, but she fears upsetting others. So, she turns away from her family to the forest. To her friend, Jonas. Just like her mother, she becomes independent and tries not to burden others. She fears she can never live up to her mother’s expectations and so she actively pushes against them.
There is a turning point in the story when Maryté finally lets down her guard and she becomes vulnerable (the one thing she feared!), but this allows her to connect with her daughter on a deeper level. Mothering is tough; it can be scary, but there is a lot of room for growth. Maryté learns that she must step back to make space for her daughter to step forward.
It is in these everyday relationships, like mothers and daughters, that writers can create tension and conflict on the page. Even if the character is unlikeable, through nuanced backstory we can create empathy in the reader. Off the page, I explore conflict and tension in the mother-daughter relationship in the therapeutic space. Helping women understand past generations while supporting healthy relational change in future generations.
I am fortunate to have the opportunity to explore the bond between mothers and daughters in fiction and in real life.
All the Bees in the Hollows, out now.
