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.

Ruby’s grasp of language seems to have exploded in the last week. She was a sappling on Friday morning, I swear, but she somehow sprouted branches and roots in every direction by sunset, which is when she pointed out that I hadn’t asked Sam to pass the salsa please.

Polysyllabic words and multi-sentence paragraphs, combined with her unnerving attention to everything happening around her, leaves me no room to be under-the-radar imperfect. Over the weekend, she scolded me for talking with my mouth full and pointed out that I needed to stop picking my lip. “That’s a bad habit,” she said as she walked past me en route to the backyard. She didn’t slow her pace or even stop to look at me but instead used the eyes in the back of her head as she made for the door. They’ll serve her well someday, those extra eyes, but I prefer she not use them to spy on me, thank you very much. It’s like I’m living with a hall monitor.

Yesterday at the park, some kid was having a bit of a nervous breakdown just across the grass from us. Ruby shrugged her head in the direction of the outburst and asked, “What’s friggin’ happening over there?” Sam and I—thankful it wasn’t our kid shrieking about the the misfortune of spilled Goldfish—plucked the finest parenting skills from our quiver when we fell over each other laughing and asked her to please repeat herself. As if we actually wonder where she learned such a ghastly turn of phrase.

And then there was the pesky issue on Saturday of Bambi’s mother. What happened to Bambi’s mother? Where did Bambi’s mother go? Is Bambi’s mother under the snow? Each of my answers seemed to lead to another question and frankly, I wasn’t in the mood to come up with 17 different ways to explain why I don’t believe in heaven or a “rainbow bridge.” Eventually, with no exit from the question labyrinth in sight, I shrugged and told her that Bambi’s mother is living in the North Pole and will be Santa’s 10th reindeer come Christmas. Then I sang for her just to prove what I was saying:

You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen,
Comet and Cupid and Donder and Blitzen and Bambi’s Mother…

The silence in the room was so loud, it was blinding.

The keeper moment in all of this, though, came while reading Thank You, Dr. King, a book in the Little Bill series that I’ve been reading with Ruby for two years. For the first time ever, Ruby pointed to Little Bill and said, “HEEEEEY! He has my kind of brown skin!” Then she pointed to Alice the Great. “HEEEEEY! So does Alice the great!” It was a discovery more exciting than bubbles.

“Yes, they do have your kind of brown skin,” I said, sort of holding my breath. I didn’t want to make the issue more important than she could handle, but I also wanted to avoid a ridiculous (though tempting) Easter bunny analogy.

“Your skin isn’t brown, mama,” she ran her fingers up and down my arm, tickling me. “Your skin is pink and MY skin is brown!”

“It’s true,” I said. “Though you have some pink, too. See your hands?” I took her hand, flipped it over in mine and stroked her palm. “Your palms are pink. And look at the soles of your feet. They’re pink, too. You’re lucky because you have brown and pink. And! Get this!” I moved in close and whispered in her ear. “Do you know who else has your kind of brown skin?”

She turned to look at me. “Who, mama?”

“Barack Obama!”

Her eyes got wide. “Barack OhBAH-MAHHHHH!” She yelled. I explained that Michelle and Malia and Sasha all of have her kind of beautiful brown skin. I was elated to be able to make such a positive and concrete connection. And she was elated too.

Well. Not really. Having the attention span of a gnat, she was already onto the next thing while I was staring at her in the dreamy annoying way my mother-in-law stares at my husband. I snapped out of my daze and we finished the book, just like we always do. Then we snuggled up under her favorite blanket, nose to nose, her brown arm draped over my pink neck. That is until she said, “I don’t want to smell you anymore, mama,” and she rolled to face away from me.