No matter what, my mother was always sacred to me … When I can hang on, this is where I leave it, but more often than not, I hammer the nail until the wall bleeds: … but I am not at all sacred for you. It is the voice of maternal desperation speaking, though have I not peaked a few years early? What room am I leaving for emotional bribery in (God forbid) any really serious teenage crisis – methamphetamines, pregnancies and membership in extremist political organisations? I grew up knowing implicitly (because this is how my parents and their friends were) that you should never try to wrestle recognition or respect out of anyone, let alone your own child, so to demand an acknowledgment of my maternal sanctity is a new low. But with Billie, I am already in the valley of lows, and we are just starting out – at least, this is what everyone keeps telling me, with the kindest intentions of course. I know, I know, but can’t you see, I am waiting for a miracle.
 
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 re-enact 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 which 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’, as we say today. 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 my own maternal crimes, 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 cost. 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 awestruck, 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 of 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 that. 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 the 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.
 
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