Brown White Black

by Nishta J. Mehra

  Because what’s considered permissible now for Shiv, what’s seen as cute and funny, will change, and rapidly, especially because of his size. Shiv is big for his age—to the point that it’s one of the first observations people make about him. As I’m writing this, he has been five for less than a month but is already the height of an average eight-year-old boy and weighs enough that his allergy doctor just upgraded him to an adult EpiPen from an EpiPen Jr. Shiv’s body creates its own set of dynamics: as a kid who was adopted, his body does not necessarily make sense in context, the way it might if his biological parents were standing next to him. I worry about him hearing the word “big” associated with him over and over again, worry that it will make him self-conscious or that others will judge him by his size, especially as a black male. We routinely fend off inquiries about his future sports career from strangers (though he’s interested only in gymnastics and dance) and, at times, I have to remind myself that Shiv is in perfect health, even though others imply that his size must or will correlate to his health in a negative way. He’s a five-year-old with a tummy, I want to tell people. Chill the fuck out.

  Shiv’s body presents logistic challenges, particularly as it relates to his clothing preferences. I thought of this as I read my friend Molly’s essay about her partner’s transition. Molly and I met when I was in graduate school, right around the same time she started dating Anne. I remember well the early blush of their love, their rightness for each other. Now Molly speaks of the difficulty in finding her partner clothes, of shopping in the boys’ section, of learning which styles broaden shoulders or camouflage breasts. With Shiv, the challenge is related but on the other end of the spectrum; he is already wearing two to three sizes up for “boy” clothes, three to four sizes up for “girl” clothes. And the way he is shaped does not seem to match up with the shape of the hypothetical bodies kids’ clothes are designed for—no one is taking my five-year-old’s booty, tummy, or shoulders into consideration.

  Having fought my own battles with ill-fitting clothes and felt shame at my body not corresponding to available styles, I work hard to be body positive with him, never implying shame or wrongness when clothes he tries on are tight. Everything I’ve read suggests that clothes and dress are a particularly fraught piece of the genderqueer puzzle, the quickest way for kids to gain or lose autonomy, a reminder that the world is not set up for them to feel good inside of their own skin. It’s clear that Shiv’s fixation on his outward appearance is about more than vanity; it is crucial to his identity. He’s not the kind of person who can wear the same uniform each day or the kind of child who is content to have a parent pick their outfits. The anguish on his face when he can’t get something to look the way he wants, the fact that the harshest punishment we’ve imposed to date (for unacceptable rudeness to his grandparents) was temporarily taking away his wigs and some of his dress-up clothes—that is information I can’t ignore.

  At this age, Shiv often passes for a girl, and it doesn’t bother him to be mistaken for one. I’m amazed that he’s read this way, even when wearing tennis shoes and with his natural, short hair showing. People see a dress and automatically decide “girl,” even when he’s displaying no other recognizable attributes of femaleness. Shiv is broad shouldered, sturdy: the type of body stereotypically read as masculine. I find it fascinating just how committed we are to the norms and categories we’ve created and what little room we have to imagine something else.

  Truthfully, though, when people assume Shiv is a girl, it feels both like a relief and like we’re getting away with something we won’t be able to for long. Author and activist Janet Mock has written about how scary it can be for trans women of color to come out as trans, the risk of violence it brings. It was one thing to imagine Shiv growing into a large black man, but it’s even scarier to imagine him as a large black trans woman or non-binary person.

  I know we are approaching the limits of any kind of “pass” Shiv will get when it comes to being “just a kid” and breaking expectations related to gender. This is especially true because he is black; last week, I read a study showing that black kids get read as four and a half times older than they are compared with their white peers. Black boys, as they become men, are seen as dangerous, menacing. Darren Wilson testified that eighteen-year-old Michael Brown looked “like a demon” right before Wilson shot and killed Brown. Conversely, well-connected white men like Donald Trump’s sons and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, enjoy a kind of protracted childhood; they have the ear of the president of the United States and are granted unbelievable leniency when they make mistakes, even well into their thirties.

  A few years ago, I bought an Elsa dress for Shiv at his request; around that same time, a Facebook post went viral in which a father explained why he had done the same for his son, railing against the norms and stereotypes that made it such an anomaly. The man and his son were white, as all of the people with wildly popular posts and tweets about gender-nonconforming children seem to be. When white kids defy gender norms, they are certainly vulnerable but still protected by their white privilege. Even a cursory look at statistics demonstrates the fact that violence against trans people disproportionately impacts trans people of color, specifically black trans women. And yet none of the resources I’ve found related to gender-creative parenting even acknowledge that race is a factor that will influence the public response and reaction my child receives, the enmeshed layers of complications and considerations. In fact, if you were to base your assumptions simply on the available children’s books that show boys wearing dresses, you would think only white boys do it.

  * * *

  Try as I might, I seem unable to fight my impulse to find a reason for Shiv’s unique choices. He’s recently been insisting on wearing shirt hair at night, even if he hasn’t worn it at all during the day. The other night, I asked him about it.

  “Can you tell me why it matters to you to wear a shirt on your head at night?”

  “Because I’m jealous of people who get to go to sleep with their long hair.”

  “Do you want to grow your hair out so it’s long again?”

  “No.”

  “You prefer the shirt?”

  “Yeah, because it’s so nice and I really, really, really like the way it looks!” Okay, then. That has to be good enough for me.

  I think I feel compelled to understand in part because other people expect me to; they want me to explain Shiv’s behavior to them, something I can’t necessarily do. There’s this little nagging voice that suggests, If you were a better parent, you’d know the answer. If you knew him, you’d understand what this is about. In this way, navigating the parent-child relationship is not unlike navigating a serious romantic relationship for the first time; in both instances, the desire to know and be known is necessarily balanced alongside the inability to fully understand another person. While I’m pretty sure that I know Shiv as well as anybody does, he is separate from me, and parts of him will always be mysterious, unknowable to me, even though I am his parent.

  So too we are unknowable to ourselves; as much as Shiv has a strong self-conception, he’s also just five years old. As a parent, I want to toe the line between honoring the self-knowledge he’s asserting—not doubting or shrugging it off or acting as if he can’t possibly know such things at such a young age—while also giving him space and time to explore, imagine, and unfold. I do not want him to feel pressured to identify with one camp or another, to “figure out” his identity in a way that makes other people comfortable. And I want to fight against the parental instinct to need Shiv to validate or mirror me in my personality, interests, or life choices.

  Children of all kinds are often molded, whether intentionally or not, as developing representations of their parents: think of how much pride is implied when a parent claims that their child is a “mini me.” This seems to be a natural instinct, one that I am sympathetic to and have experienced myself, but the problem is to what extent this projected mirroring perpetuates
and reinforces cultural norms. As a teacher, I have a history of queer students finding their way to me as a first point of contact during the coming-out process. Subsequently their parents may seek me out as well, for advice and reassurance, and their concerns are always based in a sense of alarm that their child has surprised them and has turned out to be, in some fundamental way, different from them. How can their child know for sure that they’re not straight? Is it possible they will change their minds? What are they supposed to do with the future scenes they’ve played out in their minds for years—proms, weddings, grandchildren—that now may never be realized?

  Losing my father out of the blue taught me about the futility of assigning certainty to the future, so it has thus far been fairly easy not to speculate about Shiv’s academic, romantic, or professional futures. But I never considered that I’d possibly need to let go of my attachment to Shiv’s gender. Not until I sat down to write this paragraph did I recognize the irony; though not quite as blindsided as my parents were when I came out to them, I, too, have been surprised by an aspect of my child’s identity that I hadn’t seen coming.

  So I work to make adjustments, small ones. I seek out certain images, spend time looking at them, interrogating my response. I fight my own impulse to register alarm when I see photos of the genderqueer and non-binary artists I follow on Instagram; their visibility makes apparent how black and white my own thinking still is. My task, then, is to retrain or interrupt my brain when I feel unsettled by a male body dressed in clothes that my mind codes as “female.” To choose, instead, my intellectual response, which champions the way that these individuals are calling the whole construct of gender into question. I want my child to be able to play inside the world that they’re creating, to love his body and wear whatever he wants, to call himself by whatever names and labels feel right to him.

  I know that I will have some sadness if Shiv decides someday to fully transition, know that I have, on some level, built a part of my own identity around the idea of having a son. Lately, I find myself avoiding the term “my son” and replacing it with “my kid,” so that I don’t get overly attached to thinking about Shiv in a certain way, practicing for something I may or may not be called to do in the future. “Cotton is great because my kid gets so sweaty in the summer,” I tell the salesclerk when she comments that a particular dress I’m buying for Shiv is cute.

  * * *

  I am encouraged that Shiv seems to feel free to experiment, to play around with language and expression. Last week, he asked permission to go visit at a neighbor’s house, as he’s done before; they have a son exactly two years younger than Shiv and a big backyard where the kids like to play. After getting dinner ready at our house, I walked down the street to retrieve Shiv. He begged for five more minutes, so I sat down on the patio with the other boy’s mom. We chatted about the weather, her recent weekend trip. Then, out of the blue, she asked me, “Does Shiv have a sister?”

  “What? I mean, no, he doesn’t. He’s an only child.”

  “Oh, hmm. When he came by today, he said, ‘I’m not Shiv, I’m Shiv’s sister.’ I thought maybe he was wearing his sister’s clothes.” Shiv was wearing a polka-dotted dress and shirt hair, the first time he’d come over to this particular house dressed that way.

  I immediately wondered if I should feel defensive, as I didn’t know this mom well enough to know anything about her politics or beliefs. She didn’t seem alarmed or upset, just maybe a bit curious. Don’t be preachy, just tell her the truth. Go easy, don’t make it a big deal.

  “No, those are his clothes. He picked them out for himself. I think he’s just exploring, kind of figuring out…”

  “Who he is?” she finished my sentence for me. “Yeah, that makes sense.”

  This Is What a Family Looks Like

  One thing I hate: car sticker families. You know the ones—little stick figure renderings of a mom, a dad, and a handful of kids, maybe the family dog or cat? Some are customized, with specific hairstyles and hobbies reflected in individual family members. There are thematically oriented sets, too: cowboys, pirates, elephants, owls, minions, aliens, superheroes, Star Wars characters; down here in Texas, I’ve started to see stickers in which each family member is represented by a different type of gun. “You’ve got your family, I’ve got mine,” the copy reads. Delightful.

  I’m not alone in my disdain for even the most innocuous seeming of these stickers; once they gained some popularity, I started to see new stickers that read, “Nobody cares about your car sticker family,” with drawings of stick figures being eaten by a T. rex or chased by a storm trooper. These are perversely funny to me, sort of like the “My kid beat up your honor student” stickers that I found oddly compelling when I was younger, even though I myself was an honor student (one who would have been mortified had my parents labeled their cars accordingly). I disagree, though, with the statement that “nobody cares” about the car sticker families of others; of course we care. That’s why they piss us off.

  Car sticker families hit a cultural nerve. They feel like performative bragging, a demonstration that you have what everyone is supposed to want and strive to achieve: a heterosexual marriage, two or more kids (preferably one of each gender), a family pet, and a vehicle large enough to carry everyone around in. Placing a sticker on the back of your vehicle to show strangers what your family looks like strikes me as the ultimate demonstration of privilege. There are many who have avoided or seriously debated putting Black Lives Matter or Human Rights Campaign stickers on our cars for fear of vandalism or harassment.

  But it’s not only queer families or families of color who are unaccounted for in the proliferation of these stickers. Where are the stickers for blended families with stepkids and half-siblings? Or families where grandparents or uncles or aunts are the ones raising kids? Where is representation for the nannies and housekeepers and babysitters who perform essential supporting roles behind the scenes for, I suspect, many of the families driving the large SUVs sitting in private school carpool lines on which so many of these car stickers are placed?

  I don’t even know how I would begin to go about making a car sticker to represent my family. Where would I put Shiv’s birth mother, who is undoubtedly and permanently included in how we think about “family,” though we haven’t spoken to her in years? Would we include Shiv’s birth father, who was never interested in knowing his child? A depiction of my mother, who is an active and essential part of our life, but not my father, who’s dead? What of Auntie Coco, whom we call “sister wife” but who lives in another state? Even if we could figure out whom to include, then there’s the issue of what these stick figure people look like—the templates are crowded with girls wearing long hair and boys playing sports. And, of course, car sticker families are “color-blind” (that is, the default choice is white unless you seek out “full color” stickers, which are more expensive), so to accurately represent all of us would take some serious work.

  The truth is that I would never bother to order a car sticker family and place it on my car, even if it were cheap, convenient, and uncomplicated. I don’t understand the compulsion to do so, which is why I’m both fascinated and revolted by the sight of them. Ultimately, they are just annoying, like the voice of a singer you dislike but can’t put your finger on why. Here, though, I suspect that I do know why: jealousy. I’m irked every time I see a car sticker family because anyone who puts one up has something I don’t; there is no risk in showing their family to the world.

  * * *

  For my family, how we are perceived by others can be an adventure full of mistakes, questions, incorrect terminology, raised eyebrows, puzzled looks, or warm smiles. It’s a grab bag: we never know what we’re going to get. Often—especially when we’re engaged in mundane or routine tasks, like going to the grocery store or the library, places we’ve been dozens of times—I don’t think, worry, or wonder about any of these dynamics. But whenever we’re going somewhere new, or one of us is coming alo
ng for the first time, I go on alert, monitoring the body language and behavior of the people around us, observing them observe us. Watching them try to do the math: Who goes with whom?

  Shiv’s been taking gymnastics this summer, at his own request, once a week for an hour. I drove him the first few times, reporting back to Jill how fun it was to watch him on the bar, on the beam, so she came along to see for herself. The class is a bit of a drive from our house, into the older part of town, which is much more politically conservative and demographically homogeneous. Drive twenty minutes from the natural foods grocery store by our house and you enter neighborhoods with large parcels of land, horses, and riding lawn mowers. A small distance can make a world of difference.

  Which is why I was wary when I noticed one of the other gymnastics parents noticing us. She was white, about my age, with a daughter in Shiv’s class and a younger son sitting with her. I’d seen her before, but now she was giving me and Jill the side-eye, refusing to meet my eyes or smile when I turned her way. Had she thought I was Shiv’s biological mom, assumed my husband was black? Then I noticed her shirt—branded with the stylized American flag with a single blue line that’s become emblematic of the Police Lives Matter movement. Then I realized that Jill and I were sitting next to the only other people of color in the space, a dad whose daughter was trying out class for the first time and two older girls who’d be doing their trial classes later. Was I imagining hostility from this mom, or was she genuinely sending it our way?