The Women We Keep Close – Jennifer Oaten
My daughter has been in Canada for nearly a year. My son left for Japan a few months later. Our home, for the first time in a long time, is empty. On Sunday, we will speak on screens, across long lines of time zones, and it will be lovely. It will also not be the same as either of them walking through the door.
Their absence has set me thinking, and not really about Sunday. It has me thinking about how different family looks now from the family I grew up in, and how different it looks now from the family I raised, when the house was full and noisy and the years felt as if they would always be that way.
Growing Up Inside a Circle of Women
I grew up in Margaret River. After school, I would walk to my Granny’s place in town, sit at her kitchen table, then head to ballet. My Nan was not babysitting. She was just there, the way the neighbours who knew your name were there, the way the aunties who were not really your aunties were there. My mother was not raising me on her own. She was raising me alongside other women, and I learned what it was to be a woman by watching all of them.
I think about that now, because I am not sure all of our daughters in Perth are growing up the same way
A Different Shape of Family
Family in the city is often the opposite shape, tighter at the centre, the nuclear unit, our four walls, our routines, our weekends. Thinner at the edges. We know our own families well. Many of us barely know our neighbours. The aunts and grandmothers who used to live around the corner now live a flight away.
The casual presence of other women in a daughter’s daily life, women who shape her without trying to, has narrowed. Often, it has narrowed to one. That is a great deal of weight for one mother to carry.
Family is not only what we are born into. Some of us have strong families nearby. For others, family is far away, or complicated, or no longer here. For many mothers, the wider circle around their daughter is built rather than inherited.
It is the friends you made at the mother’s group or when your children started school. It is the family who moved to Perth from the same town you came from. It is the woman whose husband knew your husband for thirty years before you ever met. These circles are not lesser for being built. Often, they go deeper because they have been chosen.
It is one of the reasons I have such admiration for our country families and our boarding mothers. They are still raising their daughters inside a wider circle. The girls who live in Bertrand, Catherine, Sylvester and Ursula Houses are surrounded by boarding staff who care for them like aunts, by older boarders who become buddies and big sisters who take them on leave, by a community of women who teach them, in a hundred small daily ways, what it is to belong to each other. The country mothers who send their daughters here, often hundreds of kilometres from home, are trusting that wider circle. They know what it does, because most of them grew up inside one.
This week is Boarding Week at the College, and on Thursday, our boarders led a whole-school assembly. It is one of my favourite assemblies, because it is the day the rest of the school sees, in person, what these girls live every day.
What Daughters Absorb Without Being Taught
Girls learn how to be women less from what their mothers say than from what their mothers do. They watch how we speak about ourselves and how we treat our friends. They notice how we handle disappointment, and whether we apologise when we get it wrong. They watch what we tolerate and what we do not. And they watch how the women around their mother treat their mother.
An Australian Institute of Family Studies report drawing on Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children found that maternal warmth, alongside consistency and a low frequency of hostility, has a significant positive effect on children’s social and emotional wellbeing. It is not perfect parenting, or the absence of conflict, that protects a daughter. It is the felt sense of being known and accepted by her mother that does the quiet work.
Most mothers already know, the way our daughters come to value themselves is shaped, by more than anything else, by feeling valued by us. It happens in small daily moments. The look up from the kitchen bench when she walks in. The interest in her friend group, even when we cannot remember which girl is which. The willingness to put down our own phone when she starts to talk about her art piece or the book she is reading.
What is harder now is that we are often the only model our daughters see up close. Which means the women we choose to keep close, and the way our daughters watch us be loved by them, matters very much.
What You Can Do at Home
Knowing this can feel like a great deal of pressure. It does not need to be. The small things, done often, matter most.
Watch Your Self-Talk
Your daughter is listening to how you speak about yourself, far more than to how you speak about her. Speaking about your own body, your own ageing, your own work with kindness gives her permission to do the same.
Widen the Circle
If your family of origin is far away, complicated, or no longer here, the women you choose to keep close will become her wider family. Make those friendships visible. Invite the friend who knows you well to dinner. Let your daughter see you being known and loved by other women.
How You Repair Matters
Daughters learn as much from how we recover from getting it wrong as from getting it right. Apologise when you need to, in front of her. Let her see how it is done.
Notice Who She Is Watching
In the absence of the village, our daughters are looking elsewhere for models of womanhood, often online. Pay attention to who she is following and what they are teaching her. The women in her real life need to be more present to her than the ones on her phone.
A Quiet Thank You
I will think about all of this on Sunday, when I am speaking to my children on screens. My daughter is coming home soon, although my son will be away for a while. I will think about my own mother, who passed away a few years ago, and about the women who raised me alongside her in Margaret River and in boarding.
I will think about the women who have stood beside me as I have raised my own children. I will think about our boarders, whose mothers will also be celebrating Mother’s Day at a distance, and about the wider Mercy community of women that has held this College for nearly ninety years.
Mother’s Day is not really about a single day, or a card, or a gift. It is about noticing the women we belong to, and being thankful for them, while we still can. So this Sunday, perhaps the question worth sitting with is not what we will give our mothers, or what our daughters will give us. It is who is in the wider circle around our daughter, and whether she knows them well enough to feel held by them.
To every mother, grandmother, aunt, godmother, boarding mother and chosen mother in our community, thank you. The work you do is quieter than you think, more important than you think and lasts longer than you know.
Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers and mother figures in our Santa Maria College community.
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Author: Santa Maria College
Santa Maria College is a vibrant girls school with a growing local presence and reputation. Our Mission is to educate young Mercy women who act with courage and compassion to enrich our world. Santa Maria College is located in Attadale in Western Australia, 16 km from the Perth CBD. We offer a Catholic education for girls in Years 5 – 12 and have 1300 students, including 152 boarders.
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