New Zealand author Megan Dunn has opened up on how having a daughter helped her appreciate her own late mother – and made her realise she’d “been a ratbag to her for so long”.
In a new episode of rova podcast Grey Areas with Petra Bagust, the writer spoke about how the process of writing her new memoir The Mermaid Chronicles: A Midlife Mer-moir helped her pore over her resistance and baggage around motherhood.
And it also taught her how significant her mother was in her own life.
“[My mum] became a grandmother, and I got to see her in that role and appreciate that I am lucky because my mum definitely bestowed me with unconditional love – and she bestowed Fern, my daughter, with that too,” Megan told Petra.
I came round, in time, to some of the richness and all of the great things that I got from her.
Megan says her mother took to the role of ‘Nana’ with gusto – especially as Fern is her only grandchild.
“She was just so over-the-top delighted to be a Nana, and she was just so in there. She totally thought ‘I'm going to get involved’ – she wasn’t waiting to be invited for involvement. That could have its perils, but actually she thought babies implied her involvement and she wanted to be there.
“I could see how much Fern thrived on that love, so I came to value what she did for me during those early sleepless years, which were really hard on me and my body. I came to think, ‘God, woman, all is forgiven. Why have I been a ratbag to you for so long?’”
Megan’s mother also provided the inspiration for another part of the memoir, which is about the tension of whether to hold onto or accept the loss of one’s youth and beauty.
She recounts a moment when she took her mother out for a beauty treatment, only for her mother to burst into tears because she’d “let herself go”.
“There are all these different meanings of that term ‘I've let myself go’, especially for women, you know, ‘Oh, she's let herself go’. That's a negative.
“But sometimes it's just, why can't you just let go? And you just need to let go of things, you need to surrender. There's this push-pull between these two modalities, and how we can actually use both against ourselves.
“It was painful to see [Mum] feeling that way – but also, you can age and not completely let yourself go. I don't say that as a judgement against my mother, more a care for her – that some people are just not in great positions to be caring for themselves as well as they need to be, for all sorts of reasons.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Petra and Megan discuss themes of self-acceptance, parenting, self-love, and the complexities of ageing amid impossible societal expectations.
Listen to the full episode of Grey Areas here.
