How my mother's cancer diagnosis changed my teenage years and adulthood
Joanna Fortune for Feelgood only
FOR psychotherapist Joanna Fortune and her sister – a public health nurse who’s soon to be married – the name has stuck: it’s still the Bad News Café, the place where Joanna as a 16-year-old broke the news to her sister, younger by 12 years, that their mum had breast cancer. “It was a café we’d never go to. It wasn’t particularly nice. I decided to go there because I didn’t want to spoil any place we liked with bad news,” says Joanna.
Altogether, she and her sister made three trips to the Bad News Café – their mother’s breast cancer recurred, and 27 years on she’s still fighting, winning against and living with the disease. But that bombshell diagnosis when Joanna was just midway through her teens primed her to take on early emotional responsibility and independence. “My mother might say I was always very independent and assertive. But it amplified. I became very self-sufficient. It probably comes out still, as in ‘I’ll do it, I’ll do it’.”
As a psychotherapist, Joanna knows that, developmentally, the mother/teen daughter relationship can sometimes feel like a battleground. “I certainly explored the boundaries of conflict – but my Mam getting sick brought me out of that way of relating with her. To see your mother vulnerable – this tower of strength you really rely on – I wanted to reassure and soothe her, not stress and worry her.”
Her mum’s illness marked a shift in the parent-teen relationship, with Joanna and her mother almost swapping care-giving roles. She recalls a “lovely public health nurse” visiting to change her mum’s dressings when she was undergoing radiotherapy. “She saw me watching and holding my Mam’s hand while she did it because it was painful. She asked if I wanted to be shown how to do it so I could do it when she wasn’t there.
Having her paternal grandmother, Maisie, and her aunt Anne living right next door to the family home in Kilcoole, Co Wicklow – where RTÉ’s Glenroe was filmed – helped minimise somewhat the impact of her mum’s cancer.
“My grandmother was very special in my life. She was a very strong maternal figure. I had my Mam and my Dad, and next door I had Maisie and Auntie Anne, so I grew up with lots of maternal influences around me. When Mam got sick and spent time in hospital, having them next door made things a lot more manageable. It was a great support.”
Growing up and sharing a back garden with their grandmother meant whenever Joanna got up to mischief, and into trouble, she could just hop over the wall and Granny Maisie would give her biscuits and Miwadi. “She’d say ‘it’s OK pet, don’t worry’. So I always associate orange Miwadi with her.”
It’s a great regret for Joanna – now aged 43 and a mother herself – that her grandmother never got to meet her daughter Maisie, who is three years old. "They’d have been each other’s biggest fans.”
She always knew, if she had a girl, she’d name her after her beloved grandmother, and after her death it was a way of honouring her legacy in Joanna’s life. “It gave me a beautiful reason to keep saying her name daily. A name is the first gift we give our children and I believe very meaningful and loaded with our hopes and wishes. Maisie’s second name is Ann after my Mam. I named her after two of the strongest women I’ve known, which was no accident – I admire strength and resilience and in naming her I maybe wanted to bestow that on her too.”
Little Maisie refers to her namesake as ‘the other Maisie’, she’s curious about her and Joanna loves talking about her and sharing her grandmother’s life with her daughter. She can’t say whether it’s nature or nurture, but Maisie has quite a few of her great-grandmother’s personality traits. “Like a love of being outdoors, a high pain threshold, never feeling the cold and an insistence on short sleeves regardless of the weather, her wonderful distinctive laugh and finding joy in everyday things.”
Joanna pinpoints exactly when she first got interested in psychology. Aged 16, she borrowed from the library in Bray. “I didn’t understand a word but I knew I wanted to. I was always interested in the feelings behind people’s behaviour.”
She did a degree in psychoanalytic psychotherapy and completed a post-grad in clinical psychotherapy. Her career has spanned 12 years in the NGO sector – she worked with the ISPCC, ran a women’s refuge and was on the board of directors of Women’s Aid. She also worked with children’s charity, To Children with Love – with children in orphanages in Russia – on programmes concerned with de-institutionalisation, psychological resilience and life-skills.
“I loved being part of their Mother and Baby programme, a parent-mentoring programme where experienced mothers mentored young mothers – women who, upon leaving State care, found themselves pregnant and alone. It nurtures and supports them to break that cycle: having been institutionalised themselves, they might otherwise give up their child for adoption, feeling they’d no choice.”
She credits the impact of her mother’s illness with nudging her towards a career that involves looking at the emotional impact of life events on individuals and relationships. She has worked with children who’ve endured some of the most difficult challenges life throws up – abandonment, domestic violence, abuse. She set up her psychotherapy clinic, Solamh, in 2010 in the height of the recession and is the only trainer and supervisor for theraplay practitioners in Ireland.
“I’m always struck by how children can do so much with so little, by the possibility of repair, even following terrible things. In my work, I’ve seen children blossom back into life when given the opportunity to have an attachment with a safe trusted adult.”
Since the third trimester of her pregnancy, she has backed away from some of the direct trauma and attachment work she had been doing.
The transition into parenthood was massive, she says. “The emotional onslaught of constant demands and needs, especially when they’re little. And I’m not Maisie’s psychotherapist – I’m her parent. I’m as susceptible to good and bad parenting days as anyone.”
She recalls being asked – pre-baby – if she had children. “I think behind that question was ‘do you get how hard this job is, how complex, how easy to get wrong?’ I honestly believe I did get it – but now I feel it.”
There’s no better way to discover your own issues/triggers, she says, than to become a parent. “I see it in small everyday occurrences, especially around food. Growing up, my Mam was strict about us eating what she’d prepared – eating all of it. I was picky and would go toe-to-toe with her about not eating my stew. She’d say if I didn’t, she’d send it to a child who’d be glad to have it. I was only too willing to fetch an envelope to post it off!
"One day when Maisie rejected her stew, I said ‘if you don’t eat it I’ll post it to a child who’ll be glad of it’. When I heard myself, I just laughed.”
Joanna knows she can only be the kind of parent she’d like to be if she takes care of herself. She loves the countryside, adult-to-adult conversation, catching up with friends – her female friendships are very important. A voracious reader and currently reading Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s , she also really needs yoga in her life.
And, of course, there’s Diarmuid, the Cork man she met in a Ranelagh pub. “I was with my friend and he was with his. We went on a date a few days later and that was it. Two years later we were married.”
That was five years ago now. They married in her favourite place: Powerscourt, on the birthday of one of her favourite people: her grandmother, Maisie. “She’d died a couple of months earlier – I’d been hoping she’d make it.”
She loves Diarmuid’s sense of calm, how reassuring he is, how deeply kind and caring. “He’s very balancing for me. I tend to take on too much, to over-commit – he’s great at flagging this pattern and pulling me out of that spiral. We’ve a lot of similarities – both one of five siblings, we share a love of books, film, current affairs. But we’re different too. He’s boundaried, structured, whereas I can at times be more hot-headed.”
- The parent-child relationship is the most powerful catalyst for change. We should strengthen and enhance it in as many playful, creative ways as we can. Shared joy is transformative in the lives of children, teens and adults.
- Conflict will emerge in teen stage of development – indeed conflict is a developmental stage. Key for parents is to learn to engage in the conflict calmly, creatively and to find ways to be playful with it.
- Be aware of your own triggers and issues and allow this information to inform, not impede connection/communication with your teenager.
- Difficult behaviour is never your – or your child’s – first choice. Your teenager’s not being difficult. They’re having difficulty expressing, processing and making sense of what they’re thinking and feeling about something.
- When we don’t see that our young person has a problem, but rather that they are the problem, we’re not attuning to what’s being ‘said’ in their behaviour. This leaves us vulnerable to reacting – rather than reflecting and responding.
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