Momentum
Much of the literature I’ve read about transracial parenting has said that three is the age at which the questions about race begin. I’ve been apprehensively waiting for the inquiries, hoping I’d have the right answers when put on the spot. I’ve tried to prepare myself for it, and at the same time—however wrong this might be—I’ve tried not to think about the daunting task of handling it because it’s just so…big. There’s this giant complicated thing we have to help Ruby learn and I don’t know how to do it and can’t she just be a happy kid with no worries? Cocooning her in bubble wrap is becoming an increasingly attractive option.
Nevertheless, this waiting hasn’t been passively done in avoidance. Sam and I talk to Ruby about adoption as part of our ongoing family dialogue and have since the very beginning. The topic mostly comes up during reading time, in particular with Todd Parr’s The Family Book or A Mother For Choco or the poetic Black Is Brown Is Tan or any number of books that include some aspect of adoption. For the most part she seems disinterested.
But we also tell her about the day we got The Call and the 36-hours that transpired between learning we had a daughter and then huddling with her in our arms on the floor of a Chicago apartment, feeding her her first bottle on a sweltering summer night. In all of the re-tellings, we haven’t put a lot of emphasis on race, preferring to let her lead us as she’s ready, and it wasn’t until last week that she showed her first real awareness (see post just previous to this one). Tonight, there was more.
After reading to Ruby at bed time, I rubbed her back and told her the familiar story about when we met, careful to be as consistent as possible in detail. When I got to the part about her birthmother, Ruby asked to see a picture.
I’m not sure if it was the right thing to do and I immediately wondered whether it was an age-appropriate maneuver to show her a photo. It wasn’t exactly a moment where I felt I could stop to consult the experts. Changing the subject or inventing a white lie to ease my anxiety or put her off seemed disingenuous at best. The parenting philosophy Sam and I embrace is one of honesty and openness and our child asked to see a picture of her birthmother, which, it seems, is her birth right.
I called Sam into Ruby’s bedroom and had her tell him what she wanted. She fluffed the pillows behind her head so she and I could be more comfortable, then Sam knelt at her bedside and the two of us together showed our child—our joy, our light, our reason—the only picture we have of her birthmother.
“You have her eyes,” I told her. She was serious and quiet for I don’t know how long before she ran her right index finger back and forth across Sam’s forehead. She said to him, “But she’s the wrong color. Why is she brown? How come she’s not pink like you?”
I had to bite my lip to keep from crying. I wanted to gasp or heave or rewind, rewind, rewind! Sam talked to her in the most loving, simple language possible to help her understand and inside I was thinking Oh, man! We’ve fucked this up, we shouldn’t have shown her, she’s not ready.
Or perhaps I’m not ready. It’s not that I feel threatened in any way or that I’m worried she will stop loving me. It’s none of that. It’s about what this information will mean to her as she grows and how she’ll process it and whether she will come to be okay with it. It has to be this way, I get that. I signed up for this. It’s the way it’s supposed to be. The hardest part, though, is that it felt like a part of her innocence simply evaporated. It was like I watched it get up and walk right out the door.
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