It took a move to Greece with my 85-year-old mother for us to finally make peace

What is it about mothers and daughters? It’s not that relationships between mothers and sons can’t be complicated and tricky – monstrous or idealised mothers rear up in the heads and work of writers and artists including Patrick White, Hemingway, Samuel Beckett and Andy Warhol – but there’s something specific about the relationship between a daughter and her mother.

Susan Johnson and her mother on Kythera, 2019.

Both have female bodies, and I can’t tell you how many women friends have told me how hard it was to learn that their body and their mother’s body were two bodies, and not one.

My own much-loved mother, Barbara, with whom I had a complicated and tricky relationship, never really understood that my body wasn’t an extension of hers. She poked me in the stomach to point out my belly fat, or told me I was much too old to wear a bikini. She clearly felt an ownership over my body that she did not feel over my brothers’ bodies.

It wasn’t that Mum was being mean to me, it was that she thought my body belonged to her, even if she would never have said this in those exact words. It was instinctual, reaching out to poke me, or patting me on the back and telling me to stand up straight; a deeply unconscious act. She was like a mother cat obliged to lick her kittens.

And I found it hard not to think of my body as a kind of doppelgänger of hers, too. She told me that when she gave birth to me in Brisbane at 22, she missed her mother in Sydney so much that her “milk dried up” by the time I was three months old. When my first son was three months, my breast milk began to dry up too, as if my body was under instructions or an enchantment.

She poked me in the stomach to point out my belly fat, or told me I was much too old to wear a bikini.

I was always too fat, or too thin, for my mother. I was looking “porky”, or growing skinny, and she said everyone knew that skinny women look older than nicely rounded ones as they age. “Do yourself a favour and cut your hair,” she might say to me. Or “You’re not going out wearing that are you?” My best friend, Emma, had a very difficult mother, who once said to her when she was 16: “You’re pretty. But not as pretty as I was when I was your age.”

It’s not always competition or envy or thwarted ambitions in a mother’s complicated relationship with a daughter. It’s much deeper than that, a sort of over-identification with a new female birthed by your own female body.

I remember walking with my parents when I was about 11, and Mum saying proudly to Dad, “Susie’s eggs are coming down soon. Look at her! I always wanted a daughter more beautiful than me.” I didn’t know if I was a chicken or a specimen, but I was certainly something demonstrable to my mother, some evidence made visible. She was my template, my guardian, my guide to being a woman. I thought she knew everything.

By the time I knew what ovaries were – and how they could get me into trouble – Mum and I were at loggerheads. She was suddenly my jailer: when I wanted to wear a see-through top to a party, she wouldn’t let me; when I wanted to meet my boyfriend, she made me stay home.

We hardly talked for a couple of years, from when I was about 13 to 16. I thought I was fighting for myself, for my personhood, and she thought she was fighting the world to save me from its dangers. Sometimes I refused to speak to her for weeks: it pains me to remember that she once broke down and begged me to talk to her.

It’s not always competition or envy or thwarted ambitions in a mother’s complicated relationship with a daughter. It’s much deeper than that.

And then, of course, I was humbled by motherhood. I was much older than she was when I had my first son (38) and the shock of two sons within two years (plus serious birth complications) knocked me right off my smarty-pants pedestal. Mum was there every step of the way: she loved babies, knew all about them, and once again taught me everything a female needed to know.

By the time my dad died, Mum and I were as close as could be. She moved to be near me in Brisbane and we spoke every day on the phone. When my sons left home within a year of each other, and the newspaper where I worked offered voluntary redundancies, I thought about whether I could live as a full-time writer.

It was then I remembered the glories of the Greek island where I had lived as a young woman. Could I live more cheaply there? What about Mum? She was 85: I couldn’t leave her.

On a whim I asked her if she would consider coming with me to live on Kythera, a small island above Crete and below the Peloponnese. “Why not?” she replied in a blink. “I’ll be close enough to heaven if my time is up. It won’t matter if I die because I’ll be in paradise anyway.”

And that’s how we ended up on a Greek island: two women of non-Greek origin, aged 64 and 85. And that’s how we ended up playing out, yet again, the mother-daughter dynamic and how I discovered – finally – that we were two bodies, and not one.

Mum lived with me on that Greek island for the best part of a year, while I stayed for two. When I came home, I wrote a memoir about our time, mainly composed from the journals I kept.

If, on Kythera, Mum still told me that I couldn’t go out wearing what I had on because everyone could see what I had for breakfast, well, she also packed up her life to come with me, an act of bravery not many 85-year-old women would choose.

And what wouldn’t I give now to have my doppelgänger with me in this world, telling me to hold my belly in.

Aphrodite’s Breath: A Mother and Daughter’s Greek Island Adventure (Allen & Unwin) by Susan Johnson is out now.

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