20 Questions: The Junior Version

Yesterday I had a first: I listened to my oldest daughter comfortably and clearly explain her families and her heritage, under a barrage of questions that had me uncomfortable. She was across a quiet swimming pool, so I could see (and hear) most of the conversation, but I was not part of it. It began with an acquaintance about her age (6) asking, “So, are you two related or something?” indicating Jaja and Gretel.

“We’re sisters,” Jaja replied. Without even asking Jaja’s name (or Gretel’s), this girl continued. She said that my girls couldn’t be sisters because they aren’t the same color. “We are sisters!” Jaja answered cheerfully. This girl then asked if Jaja was adopted. Jaja said yes, and then I missed a few sentences of their conversation.

The next I heard was Jaja saying proudly, “I’m biracial. One of my birthparents is Black and one is White.”

And then this girl says (more than once, so I know I wasn’t hearing things), “You’re not biracial. If one of your parents is Black, you’re Black.”

“I’m Black and White,” Jaja says, apparently unfazed (at this point, I was getting a little hot under the collar–who does this kid think she is, questioning my daughter like this?)

Then the girl says, “Well, if you’re adopted that means you’re not biracial.” What!?

“Well, I am,” Jaja kept saying, standing her ground without moving an inch. She never said ‘you’re wrong’. Instead, she just kept repeating her own truths. They played together in the pool for a while, and later I heard this girl start up with the color/race/adoption questions again.

At dinner last night, we were talking with all our kids about their favorite parts of the day, and Jaja brought up this girl. “She wanted to talk about skin color a lot,” Jaja said with a sigh.

“Yeah, like brown, tan, mixed,” Gretel chimed in.

“But I liked swimming with her,” Jaja said. She talked a bit more about their initial conversation, and all the questions the girl had asked her.

“You know,” I began, “if someone outside our family asks you a question–about anything–you don’t have to answer it.”

“I know.” Jaja said confidently. “Sometimes it’s good to answer people’s questions, though.”

“Sometimes it is,” I confirmed. “But the questions this girl was asking you were about your personal information. You do not have to share your private information with anyone. You can, if you want to. That is your choice.”

“I know,” Jaja said again.

“If someone asks you a question, you don’t have to tell them the answer–even if you know it. You can say, ‘That’s none of your business’ or ‘I don’t want to talk about that’ or ‘My mom says I don’t have to talk about that if I don’t want to’. If they keep asking you, you can just leave.” I wanted to give her specific things she could say and do.

Jaja nodded. I turned to Rico, “Same goes for you. You don’t have to answer any questions you don’t want to,” I started in.

Rico interrupted me, “I heard everything you said to Jaja. And that’s the same for me, right?”

“It’s the same for you.”

For several hours I was internally focused on my initial shock and annoyance at this child (and her parents). Where did a six year old learn that families/siblings must match? Why is adoption the only connection she can see between brown-skinned Jaja and her tan-skinned sister? And the biggies: Where did this little kid learn that if you have one Black parent and one White parent then you must be Black? And where does she get off telling my child that her racial self-identity is incorrect?

Hours later, after all the kids were in bed, I began to feel really impressed with Jaja. My sometimes shy little girl aswered this litany of invasive questions with confidence and clarity. She knew her facts and did not seem a bit rattled by this other child’s insistence that Jaja was wrong. Jaja knew she was right: she’s biracial; she’s both Black and White; she was adopted, and Gretel is her sister.

My daughter had the facts and the words and the answers at hand when she needed them. And she was so mature in the way she handled the whole situation–she made me proud.

What Are You?

I have heard this question in my life more times than I care to, and I know that for my children–one in particular–this line of questioning has just begun. I have a pocketful of pre-formed answers, responses designed to catch the questioner off guard, to get them to examine their own assumptions, and to (sometimes) get out of answering the question all together. The problem for me–and for many others, I suspect–is that when an adult singles out one of my children and asks me, “What are they?” I know what the questioner means.

I am better–and more practised–at fielding and deflecting such questions from White parents/adults. When the questioner is an adult of color, I slip a little. When the questioner is another parent of color, I’ve already let my guard down a bit. With a Black parent of color standing alongside their young daughter, I have to admit–I am not expecting this question. I am also not going to call out this person I’ve just met, possibly embarrass them or make them look dumb, in front of their child.

When I was introduced to this particular questioner by a mutual acquaintance (that made all three of us adults of color at this event standing together) I was holding Teri. I was grateful I had brushed out, re-parted, and re-styled her hair that morning. The one thing this person said to me about Teri was that I have to ‘get her used to sitting for long periods of time because of her hair texture’ (don’t I already know it). This was not said in a complimentary way about Teri’s beautiful hair, even though this parent’s child has a similar hair texture. Then Jaja arrived, practically wordless, clinging to my legs (as she always does around strangers). My new acquaintance practically glowed in her presence. Thankfully, Jaja quickly skipped off to play near Dad with Gretel and a friend–and that’s when the questions began.

First, the adoption questions. I offered only, “We have two domestic open adoptions. We know and see our children’s birthparents. We were there on the days they were born.” (Yes, I know, to those of you who know our full stories this is a slight exaggeration–Teri was four days old when we met her–but I was going for the short version at this point. I was beginning to see where these questions were going.)

My answers to the adoption questions (which included some version of the ‘where are they from?’ question) did not give the information that was really being sought. Which brought on, “What is she?” There was no mistaking which ’she’ we were talking about; Teri (still on my hip) hadn’t been offered a second glance. Still, I played a little dumb (I do after all have three daughters). I refocused on my children as a group. “All my kids are multiracial,” I answered. “So am I.” I was just about to start in on the ‘We have Black, White, and Cherokee heritage in our family . . .’ when I was stopped.

“What is she?” the questioner repeated, pointing across the grass at Jaja.

I sighed. I knew what this person was asking. They were not asking if my child is human. They were not asking about her gender. They were not asking about her ‘nationality’ (As usual, that one had been covered with the, “Where is she from?”) I caved. “She’s biracial. She’s Black and White.” I said.

“She doesn’t look it,” this Black parent responded.

Do you know any biracial kids? I wanted to ask, but I kept my mouth closed.

With their daughter standing right next to them, this parent went on. “She [Jaja] is so beautiful. She looks like a little doll.” I had pretty much tuned out at this point. I excused myself (with four young children, there’s always an excuse) and walked away. I was disappointed. I had been excited to meet another parent of color in my community.

There are a couple things I want to point out here: (1) I never would have even let this line of questioning begin had any of my three older kids been within 15 feet, (2) Teri and Jaja have almost the same skin tone, also very similar to the skin tone of the questioner’s daughter, and (3) All four of my kids are physically striking–they get complimented on it all the time–in completely different ways (bragging mom here, sorry).

The questions and comments about Jaja–which, unfortunately are not going to stop any time soon–are because few people can racially place her. (Although in cities with large Black and White populations–Philly, St. Louis, D.C., for example–Black/African American moms seem to know that Jaja is multiracial, that she has Black ancestors. The same thing can’t be said for White moms in the same cities. We got the most inane comment ever from a White mom in Philly, who said Jaja looked ‘island-y’. My husband reported this comment back to me. “I wanted to ask, ‘which island?’” he said to me. Perhaps racial segregation–including isolated parents of color in my current community–is a big piece of the story.)

My oldest daughter has medium brown skin. Her smooth dark brown hair gently curls. Her facial features are a complete blend of her birthparents’ faces; she looks so much like both of them. This racially-defining question, and all its accompanying baggage, is something she will likely have to deal with her entire life. Unlike her three younger siblings, she is not easily racially stereotyped/categorized by a combination of visual factors, primarily skin tone and hair texture. Rico, Gretel, and Teri will have a similar experience to mine (in this one way): they will have the option to ‘out’ themselves as multiracial, when and if they choose to. But they are unlikely to be questioned or challenged about their racial ancestry based on their physical appearances.

The comments that really get me are the ones after people ask an inappropriate question about my own or my child’s racial heritage, surprise or weasel me into answering their question, and then say I’m wrong or lying. I want to be able to answer these questions about my family’s racial heritage without feeling that I am violating some sacred trust, without feeling as though I am talking about my sex life or my spiritual beliefs or my children’s birthmarks–with a virtual stranger. I want to normalize the multiracial experience, for multiracial families and multiracial individuals. I want people–this person–to know that multiracial people come in all colors and shapes and forms. That we don’t all look alike (anymore than two people of similar racial heritage look alike). And that saying “You don’t look like what you are,” is one of the most dismissive, condescending things someone could say to a multiracial person.

Space to Sleep

I haven’t slept through the night since the baby died. In the last year I’ve gone from up several times in the night with nursing/toddler waking, to a few months of asleep-when-my-head-hits-the-pillow, to periodically awake from pregnancy aches and pains, to just awake. I’ve become a tosser and turner. I have weird semi-realistic dreams. I lay in bed listening to my dog (and sometimes my partner) snore, song lyrics running through my head on endless repeat. Lately, the music has been Wyclef Jean (he’s an adoptive parent of a daughter from Haiti, too).

My brother gave me Wyclef’s CD Ecleftic right before we left Florida. Although the guitar part on 911 is awesome, what I’ve most been into is Wyclef’s version of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. My partner knew the song from the first notes of the guitar (we thought he was just sampling Pink Floyd), but he sings all the lyrics:

so you think you can tell
heaven from hell
blue skies from pain
can you tell a green field
from a cold steel rail
a smile from a veil
do you think you can tell
did they get you to trade
your heroes for ghosts
hot ashes for trees
hot air for a cool breeze
cold comfort for change
did you exchange
a walk on part in the war
for a lead role in a cage
how I wish, how I wish you were here
we’re just two lost souls
swimming in a fish bowl
year after year
running over the same old ground
what have you found
the same old fears
wish you were here

My insomnia is not helped by two of our kids–the wiggly ones–regularly arriving in our bed around three a.m. In Florida we had a king-sized bed. When everyone had migrated into our bed each morning (we’re usually all in the same bed by six or so) there was enough room for us all to stay put. At home, when child number four (whoever that happens to be) arrives in our very-small-feeling queen-sized bed, even if my partner is already in the shower, I have to get out of the bed–there’s no room for me.

44 Hours in the Car

We just returned from a much needed getaway: a family trip to Florida. This was the first beach trip for us with the kids; my partner and I both road-tripped to Florida with our families when we were children. As you probably guessed from the title of this post, we drove. It was 22+ hours in the car each way, with four kids ages 2, 3, 5, and 6.

The road trip of today is quite different than those I experienced as a child in the 70s and 80s. Most striking is the carseat factor. My brother and I used to set up in the back of our Oldsmobile station wagon. We had our own portable tape player back there. We’d sit and play cards, build with legos, and create fully furnished houses with paper and scissors and glue. We could lay down and read or nap. When we were crabby with each other, we’d climb over the seat and take turns sitting in the front of the car, chatting with whichever parent was driving. Not so today. My two youngest kids are in 5-point restraint carseats, my two oldest in 3-point seatbelts and full-back boosters. They can never sit in the front seat because of the air bags. They are stuck in their same in-car positions, staring at the same view, kicking the backs of the same seats, sharing (or arguing) with the same sibling.

Even with four virtually motionless children (ha!) here’s what made the trip doable:

• Coloring books: a pile of cheap $1 coloring/maze/connect the dot books (some sports and fairy ones, although none that are licensed). These worked for a while, although Gretel and Teri lost their crayon privileges on the way home for writing on many things that were NOT the coloring books.
• Small erasable magnetic writings boards
• Mini Etch-a-Sketchs
• Sticker activity books (I bought a new one for Gretel in Florida because her original one had very thin stickers that kept tearing when she’d try to peel them back.)
• Playmobile people with wheeled accessories (1 skateboarder, 1 biker, 1 motorcycler, and 1 roller-blader)
• Matchbox cars
• Recycled (we already had 2) and redressed dolls (pictured above)
• Magnetic activity boards: The ones I thought were going to be great (building houses and flowers) were terrible because the magnets weren’t very strong and kept slipping to the floor. But one of the hits of the entire trip was a Brown Bear magnet set I purchased for Teri, with magnets to match the illustrations from her favorite book. That bought us hours.
• Portable DVD players, and favorite DVDs from home (Cars, Happy Feet, Mary Poppins, Cheaper by the Dozen) and some new ones from friends (Kiki’s Delivery Service). We borrowed a friend’s old player, and at the last minute my husband bought us another new one ($90), which turned out to be good. We set up the first movie between the front two seats, made sure all the kids could see, and then found out that even with the volume all the way up Jaja and Rico in the third row seats couldn’t hear the movie. So we let them be in charge of their own DVD player with a different movie.
• Lap desks: 1 left over from college and 2 homemade (stiff cardboard, 2 squares cut from an old t-shirt, pillow stuffing, and duct-tape)
• A bag full of books: old favorites, a few library books, and our brand new collection of fairy tales featuring Black characters

The crowning glory of the vacation presents were these floofy little zip-up bags (okay, my girls AND my husband call them purses, sigh) that came with a matching fairy/dancer inside (pink, green, blue). If the store had sold four different colors, I would have purchased one for Rico as well. Instead, I found him this great little finger puppet person the same size as the girls’ dancers. Rico’s person has a mop of spiky blue hair and is playing a tiny electric guitar (he calls it his punk rocker). I found a small drawstring bag we had here at home, sewed a piece of an old woven belt of mine around the bottom, and Rico now had a fancy bag for his guy.

We’re in the not-buying mode around here, especially cheap plastic. But before we left on vacation, I was caving. I had lined up a sitter for the kids so I could go to a doctor’s appointment, and I planned to do a bit of car activity shopping at the same time. I confessed to a couple people I was planning to go on a junk run to Toys-R-Us. I haven’t been there in years. (Can I now just say what a horrible store this is? The lighting, the maze set-up, everything needing batteries, plastic that never ends, boys’ toys in black with guns, girls’ toys in pink with mini-skirts and make-up, AAK!) Anyway, on my 45-minute drive to my appointment, I had second thoughts. I didn’t want to waste money on toys that we’d give away when we arrived home, and I (still) didn’t want to support the companies that make those toys with our money. (Toys-R-Us was basically useless, even if I had gone in wanting to fill my basket with stuff I thought would entertain our kids in the car.)

Here’s the decision I had to make: was I going to buy my kids healthy toys? Or was I going to buy them racially diverse toys? Now, our existing home toy collection is heavy on PoC, more than half (by design, because every time I find something great, I buy it–even if I have to hold it for a year before giving it to the kids. We have this awesome zip-up space shuttle with two astronauts–1 Black and 1 White–that I bought when Jaja was 3 months old, and kept in a box for years). So I went with healthy, and pulled toys from home to balance out my new purchases. Those fairies and the blue-haired rocker in the little bags? All White. But they each had another little doll tucked inside the bag with them; the four dolls I added from our home collection were Black (Gretel had quite a story going about the two ’sisters’ living in her blue-feathered purse/house).

Racial balancing is something I think about every time I purchase an item that has a person in/on it. I skimmed all those sticker books to make sure there was a mix of people in them. I looked through the entire ‘natural’ toy store for something comparable to the fairies in their purses, something that had a little brown face to balance out the three little tan faces I was about to buy. (I just looked up the fairy/purse dolls online to add the photo link above; the company makes the dolls in six different coordinating colors–all six of the dolls are White.) Dolls and toys representing PoC are massively underrepresented in natural material and Waldorf-style toys, which I discovered while trying to buy a natural or organic brown-skinned doll for Jaja when she was an infant. There was nothing. Things have improved a bit in the past six years, but the fact remains that many of the organic toy companies are based in Europe (primarily Germany), and dolls of color in their collections are rare. This dearth of variety is what inspired me to make the kids’ winter-holiday gifts last year, and to start my neglected Etsy store.

Was every minute of the car ride all fun family sing-a-longs, cheerful parents, and four cooperative kids? Absolutely not. There were some hours when the kids slept, several hours of movie watching, and many many hours of activities, eating, fussing, negotiating, and the sometimes hysterically funny stereotypical parental warning, “Keep your hands, feet, and toys to yourself, or . . .” and there’s where it ended, and often when my partner and I would start to laugh. Because what exactly was the passenger seat parent going to do? Driving down I-95, we were just as trapped in our car seats as the kids were.

Seven

The last month has been a difficult culmination of the last two years–all in the quest for a seventh member of our family. We have been through two homestudies, six potential adoptive situations, and now the hardest part: a miscarriage. I had a great post brewing this spring about why we were not renewing our homestudy, why we are abandoning the domestic infant adoption system–and then we found out I was pregnant. My post continued to simmer, now with the added piece of pregnancy and why having a biological child was the way our family was finally expanding. Then came another first for me and for our family: our baby died and was born barely into its second trimester. We were devastated; we are all recovering. Gretel keeps saying, “Mama, I didn’t want our baby to die. I really wanted an alive baby.” And all I can say is, “Me too.”

The thing (just one? you may ask) that caught both me and my partner completely off guard was that this most recent event brought up all the potential adoptive situations of the past two years that didn’t work out. We are not only grieving the death of our baby, we are also regrieving some of the closest–and saddest–adoption situations of the past two years. The hardest are the kids who are now in foster care (instead of with their birthparents or with a family chosen by their birthparents), the children whose parents were unable to get their damaged lives together enough to make positive choices for their kids. I don’t blame those parents, but I am so so sad for their children. Months and years later, I am still sad.

Losing this bio baby, and contemplating the rollercoaster of the past few months, I have (however temporarily) inadvertently achieved a sense of peace about life–a kind of internal peace that usually eludes me. I am at a place where I finally know that if I have my partner and my children, all else is just icing on the cake of my life. I have spent a good part of my adult life theoretically/intellectually believing this to be true while behaving and feeling as though I needed countless issues lined up just so for me to be okay. I want a lot of things for my children, my family, all children. (You know, world peace, socioeconomic justice, interracial unity, not much.) Although I haven’t lost my drive to make the world a better place for everyone to live, I have narrowed down what is most important for me, for my life. I often get lost while trying to take care of everyone else in my immediate family, in my extended family, in the limitless family of mothers and people of color and parentless children everywhere. I lose myself in what I think the world needs–and I totally forget to consider what I need.

The physical and emotional slowdown that losing this baby required helped me reaffirm the essential elements of myself, my life, and my dreams. For me (aside from the health and companionship of my partner and four children) I want only two things; they are separate but related. First of all, I do want a bigger family–two, maybe three more children–no matter what our life looks like, whether we must remain in a virtually monoracial town, are able to move to our dream town, or finally become organic farmers. With this pregnancy, we had moved into the big family mindset: test driving a 12-passenger van, thinking about bedroom configurations and years more of diapers. I was lurking over at Lots of Kids, pleased to find families who feel that four or five children is at the smaller end of family size. At the same time, if our family is in fact complete with these four brilliant, beautiful, wild children–that is okay too. A plan is nice to have, but it doesn’t mean that whatever else happens in spite of the plan won’t work out at least as well as the perfectly executed plan might have. (This would be one of my big revelations–my husband thinks it won’t last. I am such a planner.) Part two of my wish involves moving to a more racially diverse community: for me, for all our kids, for our Black daughters (no surprise here), but suddenly I don’t feel so frantic about it. I know it will happen because my husband and I are both committed to moving. The sooner the better; but if it’s not tomorrow–I can live with that.

Right now I am purposefully entrenching myself in the day-to-day job of being the primary parent to four bright and active children. I am working on our homeschool plan for next year, wrapping up this year’s ’school’ work, and focusing on being in the moment with my silly three year old who tonight at dinner requested a “pink zucchini with a little skirt” (that would be a bikini, as her brother pointed out) and my six year old who said to me this afternoon, “I’ve been thinking a lot about this question for a week: Why do Gretel and Rico get to see their birthparents everyday, and Teri and I don’t?” I’ve got a double fulltime job around here; I have to remember that daily and give myself a bit of a break: for serving mac and cheese for dinner again (what can I say–it’s their favorite) or for letting the ten loads of laundry sit clean but unfolded on the couch. It’s when I start to get on everyone else’s case that I know I’m really in trouble–because what that means is that I’m not satisfied with my own performance.

Being a parent is a hard job–and so is being a kid. If I can cut myself as much slack as I do my five year old (”He’s doing the best he can!” I argue on his behalf at least once a week) then I’ll be okay. I have a quote by Max Ehrmann tucked in the corner of our bathroom mirror. It reads:

Be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars. In the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.