This Thing

I probably shouldn't be writing this, not yet, not while my stomach is still uneasy and my thoughts haven't settled. Most likely I can't even add to this piece that someone else has already written. In every way, it speaks for itself.

The girl in the window.

Two of my favorite bloggers have already posted this link; neither knew how to react except, seemingly, with the same sense of despair that I now feel. Perhaps parents react differently; perhaps parents of daughters react differently, but everyone who has grown up with loving parents or unloving parents or anyone at all that can feel - you will react to this story.

To be fair, I only read the story with curiosity and only a vague sense of discontent until I reached the section about the mother. The adoptive parents, I admired them. I admire their selflessness and their solid picture of reality: possibly the rest of their lives will be dedicated to the care of this small but growing person. Here I did confront a gnawing fear of mine, that I would be unfit for such an enormous task should it ever somehow be placed upon my shoulders. I am not a selfless person.

Yet it wasn't until the story turned to the mother that I couldn't read anymore, had to pace around the small rooms of my apartment before I could force myself to return to the entry. They portray her with such oblivious desperation, trying, maybe, to do what she could but failing to meet anyone's standards of a mother. I'm at once both disgusted and alarmed. The journalists went so far as to list her IQ, by way of what - explanation? Reassurance to the reader ("this could never happen to you")? Simple comparison? And yet, at the same moment, we wonder for an instant how much hope there could be for Dani, with neither the force of nature nor nurture falling in her favor.

Deepest, though, is the fear that I could suffer from my own delusion, doing what I think is best for my child but somehow blind to a grave and certain danger. It's this fear, perhaps, that keeps us rooted in our perseverance or at least to our consciousness of the parenting act: how is she growing, is she happy, are her moods a phase or is there something I need to adjust? I said once that the only thing we ever want is for our children to live, but it simply isn't true: we want so much more. We worry that our own expectations will stunt our children, or that our lack thereof will keep them from blossoming into the persons they could have become. We worry, not just that they'll be harmed, but that we will do the harming. We, the ones entrusted with these small and tender shoots of personhood, as if they've brought nothing to the table but are truly the tabula rasa upon which we write our own scripts, our own fears, our own shortcomings and neuroses.

This is not the optimistic view, to be sure, and it denies our children not only their own weaknesses but also their strengths, confining them to a sort of eternal childhood free of agency and strapping ourselves into the role of hapless provider. And yet this thought does not soothe me because I'm still shaken; I cannot, at this moment, tiptoe into my own daughter's room and gaze at her peaceful sleeping face.