The thing I love most about my daughter is that she's NOTHING like me! Ever look at your child and think: who DO they take after? A bemused (but proud) FRANCES HARDY certainly does 

By Frances Hardy for the Daily Mail

Published: 17:20 EST, 5 September 2014 | Updated: 03:42 EST, 6 September 2014

Before my daughter Amy was born, 23 years ago next week, I’d been certain I’d have a boy. So certain, in fact, that the nursery was painted ice blue. But here she was, my baby girl. Pink not blue. Nameless, as yet, but beloved.

That’s how she got her name: aimee means beloved in French. And as I held her, even on that first day of her new life, I felt the heft of her robust little body; the vigour in her legs. She’d been a kicker. I knew she’d be strong.

Love took an hour or so to flood in and when it did, it hit me like a drenching tide. I had to protect my baby; there was nothing I wouldn’t sacrifice for her. 

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Opposites: Frances Hardy says 'Amy’s strengths were my weaknesses. While I’m incapable of accomplishing even the most elementary of practical tasks, she grew to be strong, efficient, dexterous'

When you have a daughter you expect she will share your passions, inherit your traits. It is encoded in our genes and our culture: daughters turn into their mothers.

The assumption is irrational, but considered an incontrovertible truth. So I was certain Amy, my only child, would become a mini-me.

She would therefore be bookish and quiet; physically timorous and prone to writing reams of poetry, which I produced on an industrial scale at the kitchen table from the age of seven. She would certainly not be sporty. For although I had a fierce work ethic, in physical endeavour I was always an also-ran. 

Sports days were torture: I ran with tiny mincing steps — I still do — and always trailed in, ingloriously, last.

I was the klutz who fumbled every pass in netball; the girl who never even made the third 11 in hockey; the hapless swot so rubbish at sport she was a liability in every team and given special dispensation to spend double games in the art room. There I produced huge, impressionistic canvases which the headmaster dutifully displayed in the school hall.

But I was set for a seismic shock with Amy.

The mother says that at first, she clung to the idea that her daughter was more like her 

Touching video of mother and daughter from birth to adulthood

At first I thought nothing of her agility and energy as a baby. She walked at ten months and swiftly perfected a dizzying repertoire of stunts.

If I turned my back for an instant, she’d be scaling a bookcase or walking brazenly along the back of a sofa. She learned to dive out of her cot, to vault the stair gate. ‘I want to be a flying trapezel,’ she announced aged three, after a trip to the circus, and I could well believe she would.

‘Isn’t it exhausting being a mum?’ my then childless sister remarked after Amy stayed with her for a weekend, and spent a full two days on a bouncy castle.

I bought Amy books, piles of them, assuming that she would, given time, evolve into a child who sat and read, as I had done. But she didn’t. Instead she dismantled the vacuum cleaner and deftly rebuilt it again.

I should have bought her Meccano and a pile of bricks, if only I’d paused to acknowledge that she was an autonomous individual with talents and tastes that were not cloned from my own. But I didn’t.

I clung to the idea that she was like me, though clearer eyes would have seen she was nothing like her mother at all, physically or temperamentally.

That's my girl: Frances' rugby star daughter Amy uses her very unsporty mother for line-out practice (left) and shows off her athleticism (right) 

When she started school I still failed to grasp the incontrovertible truth: my daughter was as physically active as I was sedentary. Perversely, I enrolled her at a sedate little independent day school in Worthing, West Sussex, where they didn’t even have a playing field.

‘She won’t need one,’ I reassured myself. ‘She’ll soon turn into a bookworm.’

Amy’s strengths were my weaknesses. While I’m incapable of accomplishing even the most elementary of practical tasks, she grew to be strong, efficient, dexterous.

I loved my little girl with fierce and proud maternal passion, but I couldn’t fathom the scale of our differences.

‘Let’s go on a nature walk,’ I’d suggest brightly. Then I’d amble along footpaths pointing out red campion, bladderwort and harebells in hedgerows as my mum did with me.

Meanwhile, Amy scampered ahead like a dog off a leash, turning a quiet countryside ramble into an Army style assault course: she’d scale trees, leap over logs, stamp in puddles.

I soon abandoned the idea that she’d ever wear dresses, given her adventurous activities and preference for trousers.

Begrudgingly, I accepted hand-me-downs from friends who had boys rather than girls. When I leaf back through early photo albums, she is in a rag-tag assortment of tomboy jeans and sweatshirts.

Frances says 'everything I’d find terrifying, she found brilliant — that it was fast and physical, and demanded stamina, strength, deft footwork and impeccable hand-eye co-ordination'

‘She doesn’t look like you,’ an elderly aunt remarked when Amy was four. ‘Such lovely skin.’ Amy’s flawless olive-skin looks Mediterranean, like no one else in the family, not even her dad Patrick, a photographer.

So the truth crept up on me: my child was not a replica of me, neither should I expect her to be.

The realisation actually came as a relief. I need not impose on her my own hopes and aspirations. Instead I could just marvel at her individuality, at the wonderful girl who was growing before me.

After that, at parents’ evenings when her teachers told me she was good at science, I stopped assuming they’d confused her with another child and bought her a book on the Hadron Collider.

I trawl now through my old school reports and note my physics teacher’s faint praise: ‘Frances has no aptitude for this subject,’ he wrote, ‘but she tries hard.’ And then I marvel even more that my daughter is now studying for a Masters in Engineering at Bath University.

Frances pictured with her daughter, who she says 'deftly assembles flat-pack furniture and fixes dripping taps'

I failed my Maths O level three times, Amy was an A* Maths student.

And just as I’d accrued plaudits for essay writing, art and history, ranked along our shelves now are my daughter’s trophies for athletics, netball and rugby.

Ah, rugby. I suppose I should have seen it coming, but I failed to. ‘There’s a taster day for girls up at the club,’ Amy announced brightly one half term when she was 12. ‘Can I go?’

I felt a slight qualm. Rugby was a rough game, wasn’t it? (This much I knew, although I’d never watched a game in my life.)

‘Well I suppose so,’ I agreed doubtfully, figuring it would be a five-minute wonder: Amy would doubtless attend the taster and decide it wasn’t for her. But she didn’t. In fact, she found it her favourite sport yet.

Everything I’d find terrifying, she found brilliant — that it was fast and physical, and demanded stamina, strength, deft footwork and impeccable hand-eye co-ordination. Unaccountably, Amy had the requisite qualities. And soon she was hooked.

Just look at her now: Amy Wilson Hardy in action for England women's rugby team this year

She joined the girls’ section at our local Worthing Rugby Club and secured her place in the under-14s team. And so I found myself — to my unending incredulity — a rugby mum.

For the best part of a decade now, on match days, I’ve swathed myself in a floor length Puffa coat and stood on windy touchlines cheering on our girls.

I would never have imagined myself in this role — I’d seen myself applauding decorously at poetry recitals, enduring endless amateur concerts in fusty town halls — but I slowly warmed to it.

There were times when the pitches were so water-logged, both teams so drenched in mud, that neither side was distinguishable from the other. And my little mudlark would come home so caked and filthy that she had to rinse her kit five times in a bucket before I allowed it in the washing machine.

Training and playing consumed every Sunday and a portion of each week, too. Amy’s wonderful step-dad Iain, 58 — we’ve now been together 19 years — had won a Football Blue at Cambridge University. But he willingly switched his allegiance to rugby.

And as Amy rose through the ranks, first playing for Sussex County, then the South East Region, and then, when she was 14, winning her place in the England Development Squad, Iain assumed the role of unpaid taxi driver and unofficial coach.

The rugby star beating an opposition player at the IRB WSWS Amsterdam 7s at National Rugby Centre in Netherlands this May

Every Monday after work he’d schlep up from our home in West Sussex to Sunbury-on-Thames where Amy would train. He was tired, she was exhausted, but the deal was she kept up with her homework. And she honoured it.

And though she grew into a girly-girl — a teenager who loved make-up and dressing up, and who never appeared on a pitch without a lick of mascara — her passion for the game consumed her every waking moment.

There were boyfriends, but there was always a prerequisite: they had to share her commitment.

‘I can come out for a couple of hours, but I have to be back to watch Bath v Saracens,’ I’d hear her negotiate briskly. (Today her boyfriend Sam, 27, is, fortunately for him, a fellow enthusiast and gifted rugby player.)

Amy’s independent spirit, I knew by now, would always surprise, and generally delight me. As she grew through her teenage years, I began to cherish our differences. I had given her roots and wings. And she had taken flight.

She had an unerring capacity for originality, my girl; she was bold, brave and resourceful. And last year she won her first full rugby cap playing for England against South Africa in Colorado.

She scored a try. I was there watching, a tremor in my lip and tears blurring my eyes. I could not have been prouder, and I would never have wanted her to be anything but the brilliant girl I saw before me.

Frances describes Amy as 'a foreign creature to me with her gym-honed body, powerful thighs, taut biceps and rock-hard butt'

Then last week I took a call. ‘They’ve given me a contract,’ she said, and for a second I stalled.

What did she mean? ‘I’m going to be a professional rugby player,’ she clarified, and my whoop of joy was only slightly tinged with trepidation. (Rugby is still a rough game, isn’t it?) So now Amy, and 20 of her England team mates, have become a small piece of sporting history: they are the first women rugby players in the UK to be paid to play the game they love.

They play Sevens, a faster, more furious version of the traditional 15-a-side game. This season they’ll compete in the IRB Sevens World Series circuit and hope to qualify to play for Great Britain, for the first time, in the Rio Olympics in 2016.

And in between a punishing schedule of touring and training, Amy plans to finish her degree. My Amy, a potential Olympian? I’m pinching myself. Not because I don’t think she’s capable; not because she hasn’t got the grit, the willpower, the sheer strength of character to succeed, but because I’m still dazed by the absurdity of it. She’s my flesh and blood and I can’t even catch a ball.

‘How could you have produced a professional sportswoman?’ asked my old school friend Gill, incredulous recently. She, too, can’t quite take in the enormity of it.

But when I ask my mum if Amy and I share any qualities — I want her to be objective — she cites our shared tenacity and sense of purpose. She’s right. If I set my mind to a task, I never let go.

And, like me, Amy says setbacks are there to be overcome.

‘Never give up’ she has chalked on a board in her bedroom in Bath. It is the ethos that has guided us both.

I’ve grown to accept that rugby gives her huge pleasure, but also a measure of pain — she’s already mangled her tendons once and had foot surgery. Sometimes I feel dizzy thinking about the pace and rigour of her life: 6am starts, daily gym sessions, ice baths, weight training, and a strict alcohol-free diet of protein and complex carbs.

I couldn’t endure such self-denial. But then, I’m nothing like her.

Physically she’s now a foreign creature to me with her gym-honed body, powerful thighs, taut biceps and rock-hard butt. ‘Come here my little mummy and I’ll practise my lineout lift on you,’ she says when she comes home, launching me effortlessly into the air. This is the way mother-daughter relationships evolve. First we carry them then they lift us. We have also, almost by stealth, forged a strong, companionable bond.

I did not believe the adolescent Amy would ever sit patiently applying my make-up. ‘Less is more, mum!’ she says, tapping powder from a brush and buffing it over my crepey eyelids.

And so it has come full circle.

My daughter has taught me her own life lessons. She is still fearless and practical; her organisational skills are awesome.

She deftly assembles flat-pack furniture; she fixes dripping taps; she is punctual, reliable, resourceful and brave.

And I’ve stopped trying to fathom where these qualities came from. She’s just Amy, my Amy.

And she is utterly beloved.

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