Before I turned fifteen and we left for Australia, I remember my mother getting it wrong only once, when she peremptorily dismissed an honest, if bizarre, ache in my chin, when what I really needed was comforting reassurance. And I remember as well her deliberately hurting my feelings only once, saying to me in exasperation, ‘Your sister was right. Demons do lurk in a quiet pond.’ I was a quiet pond because, unlike my older sister and, later, Billie herself, I was not in the habit of enlarging my emotions to ensure that they could be detected from the outer reaches of the sky. As to the proliferation of demons my mum diagnosed, she was referring, quite legitimately, to my use of the family’s painstakingly procured Yugoslav wall unit to reenact a recurring fantasy of being a teacher (a good teacher, you understand, not like those shrivelled-up, bitter women who dominated my later years at school). The back wall of this unit was hidden from the general view, but not from the eyes of my mother, and, in a moment of weakness, I forgot myself and used it as a blackboard, on which I drew words and equations with a slippery piece of precious white chalk shaped like a cigarette butt, all the while making warm and witty elaborations on my imaginary lesson to the imaginary class before me.
The bit from my mum’s pond sentence that really hurt was the affirmation of my sister’s longstanding suspicions that behind my comparatively placid exterior (placid at least compared to hers) there was a litany of vices and flaws every bit as hair-raising as a seasoned recidivist’s. She was right, of course, if somewhat premature in her assessment. My demons first surfaced somewhere around the time of our emigration and, by the time we settled in Australia, you could barely see the pond for all their splashing. And though for several years I tested my mother’s patience in earnest, she did not budge, she did not ‘lose it’. So one light dismissal and one deliberate hurt: this is all I can remember of my mother’s crimes over my formative years (over all the years, in fact). Which is quite remarkable, especially considering the long list of my own maternal transgressions, and that even before Billie officially becomes a teenager, she looks set for a full submission to the Hague tribunal.
When I want to damn someone in front of Billie I say, ‘He was the kind of a person for whom nothing is sacred, not even his mother.’ The purpose of this statement is twofold. First, it is what I think. Secondly, I am sending Billie subliminal messages. Is she getting them? Probably she is, together with all the other glorified guilt trips that have not worked for a long time, if ever. As a mother, I want nothing more than to be like my mother. Yet our trip home is a constant reminder that I am nothing at all like her. (Such journeys of self-discovery are not recommended for parents in denial.) I remember, when Billie was young, thinking that parental disappointment was more destructive than simple anger and hurt, and promising myself to stay well away from it at all costs. Both my mum and dad were always like that, at least with me: total strangers to the outward expression of their disappointment. So I never felt like I let the team down – myself, yes, all the time, but not the proverbial team.
And after all that, on this trip I do nothing but channel chronic disappointment. In no small measure, this is because I am looking for Billie to be awe-struck, inspired, blown away – actually, any one of the three will do. Not only that, I am waiting for her to articulate these feelings with highly charged words to match the occasion or to let me know, in subtle, silent ways that only I – her mother – can understand that her universe is expanding, her nerve endings are abuzz and that her heart is barely able to contain all the emotions she feels. Instead, in front of me is a tired, hungry, bored little animal who constantly wants to sit, eat and go home. This little animal is my daughter, brought on this trip by her mother, for the purposes of – let’s say it here and be done with it – some sort of transformation. Yet more often than not this daughter’s eyes slide away from cathedrals and boulevards to displays of pastries in kiosks; her legs cannot carry her anywhere without aching; and her mind, her beautiful mind, is preoccupied with the demands of her flesh and with wanting all these things orchestrated by her mother to end, the sooner the better. There is no lift-off, no second wind, no energising burst of curiosity.
She is not five anymore. There are no excuses. What would my mother do? Oh, forget it. I explode.
‘Why do you look like that? Don’t any of these things get to you? Don’t they mean anything to you at all?’
‘Mum, you just want me to react in a certain way. You just have expectations of how I should react but I am reacting in my own way.’
OK, yes, she has every right to react in her own way. This is not a crime. No question.
‘But why this bored, fatigued, unhappy facial expression? Do you realise that you look like this all the time, Billie?’
‘This is what happens when I feel scared or embarrassed sounding like an idiot in this language. I turn inward, Mum.’
This time she does turn away and inward, her anger made glossy by tears.
There is a cacophony of voices in my head, all the embarrassing, unbearably trite things I am trying not to say to Billie – Not by bread alone, Billie… Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves… She who can no longer pause and stand wrapped in awe… Sage Wisdom 101. I ache with disappointment. I promised myself I would never become like this. And here I am scraping the bottom because my daughter is not having epiphanies at the time and place of my choosing. Billie does not deserve the tragic eyes of her mother, dark with undiluted grief for a daughter who is no longer marching to the tune of her mother’s drum (or not marching at all, for that matter). No one deserves eyes like that, certainly not Billie. She certainly does not deserve this trip to be turned into some kind of moral education boot camp. I need to back off. The days of moulding and shaping are over.
Sheila Munro recalls her mother, the Canadian writer Alice Munro, telling her what she remembered of herself as a daughter. ‘I always talked back,’ Alice told Sheila. ‘I wasn’t a nice child. Being nice meant such a terrible abdication of self.’ Sheila remembers not wanting to hear her mother say those words. For she herself was a nice child – compliant, obedient and eager to please. What did her mother’s words mean then? ‘Did I abdicate my self?’ Sheila wondered. I think of mothers, daughters and all the infinitely complex webs of self-abdication. As a Dr Seuss poem Miguel is fond of says, ‘Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!’ Perhaps it is much easier to respect your kids’ choice of clothes or friends, their need for privacy, their social networking, than to respect the fundamental autonomy and legitimacy of their actual selves, because there is always a danger of really not liking them once you accept them as fully formed human beings. As long as they are not done, our parental fear and vanity conspire to persuade us that we still have a big contribution to make (in fact, it is our responsibility to make it) to our children’s self-begetting.
But am I not the link between my mum and my daughter – genetically, culturally, spiritually, whichever way you look at it? And if so, have I dropped the ball; have I failed to transmit something essential from one to the other? I do not mean cultural traditions, stuff them, I mean something almost on a molecular level – the way our engines run, the sources we draw from, the way we automatically reconfigure ourselves in the presence of other people’s needs and bursting worlds. The easy self-effacement, the ability not to listen too closely to the constant, self-important humming of our minds and bodies always hungry for something else.