Brown White Black

by Nishta J. Mehra

  The sensation of being watched is almost palpable, though it’s not always hostile; sometimes it’s a gentle, friendly curiosity, while other times judgment, disapproval, or puzzlement come through clear as day. The response to my family is like a radio frequency—always there if I tune in to it. Is it the fact that we’re two women with a child? Is it the fact that we’re an interracial couple, a mixed-race family? Is it the fact that our child, whose body is male and large, often opts to wear clothes traditionally gendered as “girl”? Or is it all of these things?

  Jill and I spend our lives tuned in to this frequency, to the point that we take for granted that others don’t. I grew up watching people watch my family, because in Memphis we stood out: my father and I, dark skinned but not identifiably black, and my mom, much fairer skinned in a way people found harder to place. The lived experience of being watched and puzzled over time and time again becomes visceral, to the point that it can feel useless to try to convince your (white) friends that such watching and puzzling actually exists. Jill had certainly experienced it before Shiv, as a gay woman, but it’s been interesting to watch her discover the level of scrutiny and spectatorship that adding Shiv to our family has brought. And perhaps not surprising, she has an easier time convincing other white people that what we experience isn’t just our imagination.

  Sometimes, our loved ones live into our family’s experiences, building visceral, firsthand knowledge of what we regularly negotiate. A few summers ago, we were invited to spend the weekend at our friend’s family lake house in Arkansas, a few hours’ drive from Memphis. Driving behind our friends in a caravan, we followed them into the parking lot of a diner in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. “We always stop here for milkshakes on the way to the lake—the kids love it,” they’d told us. Shiv, being a milkshake fan, was excited, and we thought nothing of it until we walked into the place. Jill and I immediately exchanged a look—this diner might have been a favorite of our friends, a white heterosexual couple with two biological kids—but we weren’t optimistic that it would be a welcoming place for us, a two-mom, three-color family.

  And we were right. No one was outwardly rude, but no one tried to hide their stares either. Shiv and I were the only people of color in sight, and his calling me “Mama” eliminated the possibility that he might be our friends’ adopted child. Thankfully, our friends caught on immediately, assuming an upbeat and cheerful posture out of instinct, all of us trying to navigate the situation without speaking about it out loud. I sent Jill up to order food with my friend’s husband, while she and I sat with the kids, working to keep a happy face on for the kids while futilely attempting to keep a low profile. I was hyperconscious of Shiv’s behavior, not wanting to give anyone in that place an excuse to justify an existing opinion about black boys or two-mom families. My inner good southern girl prompted me to smile at a few of the people I caught staring, who pointedly did not smile back. We all ate quickly and made sure our kids did an excellent cleanup job, breathing a sigh of relief and raising eyebrows at one another as we walked out the door.

  Unlike so many other awkward experiences I’ve lived through, this one resulted in a thoughtful and honest conversation between us and our friends, which is, of course, the best-case scenario, dependent on our friends’ true open-mindedness and humility. More often, we find that even the most self-proclaimed “progressive” acquaintances and co-workers lack the willingness to align their actions with their beliefs, particularly when the result is an inconvenience to them.

  Which brings me to the question of visibility, and what visibility can and cannot accomplish. Take social media: Jill and I have never been shy or reticent about posting pictures of Shiv; that’s just not our way. We have both blogged in the past, sometimes sharing deeply personal news—I wrote about experiencing anxiety and seeking counseling after Shiv was born; Jill wrote about quitting her academic job as well as her experience with cancer. So it felt natural for us to share about our adoption journey and to celebrate Shiv’s arrival and subsequent milestones. Pretty quickly, we realized that sharing news about our family was not always as simple as it might be for others. Most minorities know what it feels like to be seen as the representative for their respective group, a burden that can be, to put it mildly, tiresome. But when you combine all the factors at play in our family, that unwitting representation is amplified. For many of the people in our lives, the only family they know like ours is us. Maybe they know another two-mom family, but not a two-mom family who adopted. Or maybe they know a family who also adopted transracially, but the parents are straight. Or maybe they know two moms who adopted a black child, but both of the moms are white. We are often looked to for our responses: after a shooting, after an election, after we post an article about racial inequality. We are the unwitting experts, or, more accurately, the only point of contact, for so many of the people in our lives.

  Sometimes I find this annoying, like Can’t y’all diversify your friend groups? But then I figure I have a choice: if I’m going to post anyway, I might as well try to be cognizant of the impact my posts can have. I intentionally explain why we use the term “place for adoption” instead of “give up for adoption,” because the former acknowledges Shiv’s birth mother’s participation in the process. Maybe doing so will cause someone I know to think about adoption differently, to consider a new narrative.

  But posts on social media are no silver bullet for understanding—this kind of visibility works only when people are either already invested in us or otherwise open to changing their thinking. And I worry sometimes that people will think they get a pass on the political issues that are inherently personal for our family, that they can “like” our photos and videos without doing any intellectual digging. Still, I think about the impact that images have had on me; I recently started following a handful of trans and genderqueer artists on Instagram, and seeing their selfies each day causes me to reconsider the narratives running in my head, my default feelings about beauty and “passing” and what it means to perform gender. This buoys my confidence in the choice Jill and I have made to post photos of Shiv regardless of the outfit he’s wearing at the time, which often means dresses, skirts, and/or wigs. It’s not that we don’t think about the fact that we might raise eyebrows or draw ire; it’s that we don’t let that stop us.

  We have gotten only a little flak and pushback, namely one hostile text message from a family friend my mom’s age, who later apologized; most people either don’t object or manage to keep their objections to themselves. But even the smallest hint of hostility triggers in me a realization of how primed I am to fight back against the notion that we’re somehow reinforcing the idea that two women shouldn’t be parents, especially not of a boy.

  I want things to go off without a hitch, afraid that every hitch we do encounter is just further fuel for the fire stoked by those who see us as perversions of a proper family. This feels akin to my parents’ exhortations to perform as well as I possibly could in school, in order to disprove anyone who might be tempted to attribute my success to some kind of brown girl sympathy vote. I resented having to account for the opinions of others, but it felt perversely satisfying to think that my performance in school proved people wrong. What I didn’t realize then was that this approach still meant living according to someone else’s standards.

  I know that people are going to look at Shiv’s gender fluidity and say, Well, that’s what you get for letting two moms parent, which makes me bitterly angry because I know that Jill and I are excellent, thoughtful parents. Because I know that “the right way” to parent, according to those same people, is the unquestioned, uninterrogated way of doing things, a way that has hurt and constrained so many people like my son. Maggie Nelson refers to “the eagerness of the world to throw piles of shit on those of us who want to savage or simply cannot help but savage the norms that so desperately need savaging.” This is why my son in a dress with his two moms is so threatening, and also why he’s so essential. T
hose of us who have been screwed by the traditional way may well prove indispensable in the work of creating more space for everyone.

  * * *

  About a year ago, I received an e-mail from the mom of one of Shiv’s classmates—she wrote to RSVP for her daughter to attend Shiv’s fourth birthday party. At the end, she tacked on this coda:

  I thought you would like this story. I asked K what she liked most about school this week. She, as usual, said she liked playing with her friends. And then she told me that she and A and Shiv were playing and she and A were the mommies and Shiv was the daughter and he took good care of the cat and dog. I didn’t get any more details, but she was quite pleased with how the household was running. :-)

  Your sweet family is a blessing to us.

  This little girl has heterosexual parents, like the rest of Shiv’s classmates, and this story from her mom puts me in mind of an assertion from Mahzarin Banaji, one of the Harvard University professors who developed the Implicit Association Test. Banaji talks about the power of the images we encounter, even something as simple as a photograph on a screen saver that we passively observe. What we see expands the scope of what we are able to imagine—“there is a point at which this brain is not just elastic in moving to what is being suggested, but that it may be plastic in that it can be reset into a new mold.”

  Hearing this, I think of my own mind, still molded a certain way despite my own experiences. A few years ago, a friend asked if she could bring along some out-of-town visitors to my family’s annual tree-trimming celebration. “They’re actually thinking about adopting, so I bet they’d love to talk to you, if you don’t mind.” I didn’t mind and said I’d look forward to meeting them. When they arrived, I did a double take and had to cover up my surprise that the extra guests, who I’d assumed to be a straight couple, turned out to be two women. I’m so used to people adding on these markers of identity—“my black friend,” “my gay uncle”—unthinkingly, whether they’re necessary, that it threw me when my friend didn’t. It wasn’t essential for me to know that her friends were two women; I was inviting them into my home, not picking them up from the airport. They are her friends, not her “lesbian friends.” This small omission confers so much dignity. I find it incredibly refreshing.

  Same thing when three kids—two female and one male—decide to play-pretend family and imagine themselves as two moms with one daughter. Think of the freedom that comes with that expansiveness, what it would have made possible for so many of us to grow up with that narrative, how much shame it might have erased: the way it presses the reset button on “normal.”

  When Shiv was about three years old, he became interested in babies. Many of his friends had recently acquired siblings, and several of my friends were having their first children, so he was spending a lot of time around newborns and infants. This resulted in his first waves of jealousy—I love to hold babies, which was hard for him—as well as asking what he had been like as a baby. He invented “the baby game,” in which he and I took turns being the mama or the baby, pantomiming crying, feeding, shushing, and rocking to sleep. Then, one day, while driving to the gym, he asked me the inevitable question: “Mama, how you make a baby?”

  The ensuing conversation, with a little fumbling on my part, led to the purchase of a book, What Makes a Baby, that helpfully discusses the component parts of baby creation (sperm, egg, uterus) without going into the details regarding mechanics; I’m sure we’ll get there soon enough. Instead, the colorfully illustrated book discusses how some bodies have sperm, and how some bodies have eggs, and that you need both to make a baby. You also need a place for the baby to grow—a uterus—and then, in that silly way of children’s books, the book explains that even though the word “uterus” has the sounds “you” and “us” in it, only some bodies have a uterus. But the uterus is always in the same place in every body, the squishy part below the belly button.

  The first time we read Shiv this book, he pointed to the spot below his belly button and asked eagerly, “Is this where my uterus is?”

  “Oh, buddy,” I said, stealing a look across the bed at Jill, “your body doesn’t have a uterus.” I figured he might be bummed to hear this, but I was wrong. He was devastated.

  “I wanna have a uterus! I wanna grow a baby in my body!”

  While Jill tried to console him with the fact that she, too, does not have a uterus (the result of a hysterectomy to treat uterine fibroids), I thought about how legitimate it was for him to be bereft. I hold sympathy for women whose infertility precludes them from conceiving and carrying a child, but I had never considered that boys or men might experience grief or disappointment over their biological inability to participate in pregnancy and childbirth. It must kind of suck to realize that you’ve been opted out of that prospect from the start.

  When I relayed this story to a male friend, about twenty years older than me, his response to Shiv’s reaction was “Yeah, that feeling got socialized out of the rest of us.”

  * * *

  Shiv’s mental flexibility around the way family works is due in large part to his own story, which he’s always known. We have spoken about his adoption since he was born, never wishing to keep it from him or to pretend our family came into being in any other way. Trying to take his lead, we answer questions when they come up, not withholding or lying, while at the same time trying to gauge what makes sense to share in the moment. This year, when Facebook reminded me that June 27 marks the day we matched with Shiv’s birth mother in 2012, I thought the occasion merited a dinner table acknowledgment and toast. (I am kind of a sucker for birthdays, anniversaries, and celebrations, and Shiv is like me in this regard, insistent that we say both “Amen”—his word for grace—and “Cheers” at every meal. We, the adults, often forget to hold hands and bow our heads before eating; he reminds us every time.)

  “Hey, bud,” I said, sitting down next to him at the table. “You know what today is?” He shook his head no.

  “Five years ago today, Gigi and I got the best email ever—an email telling us that there was a birth mom who wanted to meet us! And you know who was growing in her tummy?”

  “Me!” he responded jubilantly.

  “That’s right, it was you. Just a few days later, we had lunch with Mama D and met her for the first time.”

  “And we met you then, too,” Jill added. “Because you were growing inside of her. And we were so happy and excited and nervous. It was very special.” She reached over to squeeze his arm, which he wiggled in response, grinning.

  Then his face fell. “I wish I could see her now,” he said, referring to his birth mother. Mama D checked in with us via text fairly regularly during the first year of Shiv’s life, but we haven’t heard from her since his first birthday.

  “I know you do, sweetheart,” I said. “I can understand why that makes you feel sad. I’m sorry it’s not possible to see her right now. We do have pictures of her, though. Would you like to look at them?”

  He nodded yes. I went into the living room to grab his baby book, bringing it to the table and pointing to the pictures we have of Mama D—one sitting with Jill and me in the waiting area at a doctor’s appointment and several in the hospital, holding Shiv after he was born. On her face, you can see the complication of the moment: deep love and wonder, with pain and a touch of uncertainty.

  “See how she’s holding you?” Jill pointed to the page. “She loved you so much. She was very brave.”

  Everyone’s adoption story is different: Closed adoptions that leave adoptees with a deep longing to find their birth families and closed adoptions that leave adoptees with absolutely no desire to find their birth families. Partially open adoptions, like ours, where birth mother and/or birth parents become integrated into the adoptee’s life and are sometimes known for who they are, sometimes introduced as an aunt or a cousin. Some families take vacations with their children’s birth mothers; others never even meet them in person. And while I think I was prepared, at least intellec
tually, to experience Shiv’s sadness and sense of loss related to Mama D, it took me by surprise when he seemed to focus more on his birth father.

  Shiv’s greatest source of grief in his young life has been about “not having a daddy.” While his birth mother is specific, a person Jill and I knew and can share details about, a woman whose picture he can see with his own eyes, his birth father is an unknown, someone about whom we know little, and none of it very good. And Shiv’s longing seems to go beyond one specific person; it’s not just his birth father—it’s having a father in general. “I wish I had a daddy,” he has said more than once. Almost everyone he knows, including both of his moms, has a daddy. Culturally, everything geared toward young children—school, books, TV shows—talks about “mommies and daddies.”

  I was prepared for our family structure to give him some trouble, for it to be difficult once he realized that his family was not exactly the same as everyone else’s. But his position is not either/or; it’s both/and. He routinely shouts, “I love my two moms!” or, “I have the best parents!” as he pulls the three of us into a group hug. He doesn’t seem to be wishing us away—at least not yet!—but rather to be longing for something, or someone, that isn’t here. All children tend to focus on what others have and what they don’t; they’re comparative by nature, whether it’s housing, clothes, toys, or food that they’re focused on. My years of teaching have made it clear that there is no such thing as a child who isn’t envious of what someone else has, but still, I am hypersensitive to any indication from Shiv that his family structure is a disappointment.

  * * *

  Over Memorial Day weekend in 2017, our friends Dave and Burke had their first baby—a boy, Hugo. Dave is one of my closest friends, and the first time I met Burke, Shiv was only ten days old, which means Shiv has known “Uncle Dave” and “Aunt Burke” his whole life. On the day Hugo was born, I showed Shiv the video that Dave had sent me from the hospital room: Hugo, brand-new and wiggling on the baby scale, gripping one of Dave’s fingers with a tiny hand.