I Am the Place in Which Something Has Occurred - Julie Farrar

I’m not my mother. And for that I’m immensely sad. She laughed all the time with us. The only times I can remember being angry at her was when I wanted to scream “Get out of my head!” because she always seemed to know me too well. Other than that I wanted to be the mother that she was – helpful, understanding, encouraging, competent, loving. I remember one night waking in the middle of the night to noise outside my bedroom. Mom was sitting on the edge of the tub, holding the head of my sister who was sprawled over the rim of the toilet suffering the not-unexpected effects of a teenager’s foolishness. This moment disappeared with the morning when she told us to be quiet because my sister was sleeping. That was the mother I wanted to be.

But for reasons that I still don’t understand, God gave me different children. Every minute of every day I’ve had to abandon yet another small piece of that vision I had held of who I wanted to be. I’ve had to write a completely original script, not an adaptation of someone else’s story. Since the day Brad and I walked them out of the orphanage in St. Petersburg, Russia I’ve had to live with altered expectations. Fifteen years later, the little girl who stomped her foot in a defiant “Nyet, Momka!” as a frequent test for whether we loved her enough not to send her back to where we got her, still rejects all of our attempts at parenting, still tests the fact of our love. I’ve yelled, I’ve screamed, I’ve cried, I’ve begged, I’ve tried to talk my way into her life. She remains a mystery to me that I desperately want to unravel. But she will not open a single page for me to read. So I’ve learned not to chase after her. Trying to hold her even tighter, trying to parent her more fails every time. I want to be the mother who holds her as she suffers from too much foolishness. Because she’ll have none of that, however, I’ve been rocked by a seismic shift. It is enough, I’ve finally realized, to do nothing.

How does a parent do nothing, day after day, month after month? It goes against every instinct. I do nothing and expect less. A psychologist once asked me quite pointedly, “She probably will never change. Can you love her anyway?” I wanted her to play the young me, sitting eagerly at the feet of me starring as my Mom. I thought this would be my role of a lifetime. But my daughter won’t play the script as written. And so I’ve become a master at improv. I try to imagine how Mom would play each scene. I think that she wouldn’t do anything. She would know that she can’t change the other person, so she would change how she reacts. She would be there to sit on the edge of the tub if invited in. But love can also just stand outside that door, silently waiting.