Brown White Black

by Nishta J. Mehra

  “You looked like that when you came out, too, bud,” I said. “Gigi and I were right there.”

  “Did I hold your finger like that?”

  “You held Gigi’s finger. She talked to you like Uncle Dave was talking to Hugo.”

  Minutes later, driving home in the car, we pulled up alongside a motorcycle—a big Harley with a large black man in the seat, probably about ten years older than me. He caught Shiv’s attention, because motorcycles always do, and must have sparked a series of associated thoughts. As the motorcycle sped away, Shiv asked, “Was my birth father in the room when I was born?”

  “No, sweetheart, he wasn’t. We never met him.”

  “Why not?” A difficult question to answer with honesty, without breaking your child’s heart.

  “Well … he and your birth mother, they weren’t really in a relationship together. By the time you were born, they weren’t part of each other’s lives.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know, sweetie.”

  “But how I can communicate with him?” The combination of his correct use of a “big kid” word and the attendant desperation in his voice was devastating.

  “I don’t know, buddy. It’s not something that’s possible, at least not right now. I’m so sorry. I know you wish you could.” Pause. “What would you tell him if you could talk to him?”

  “That I want him to come pick me up from school sometime. That I want to see him.”

  “Maybe we could write a letter to him. You can tell me what words to write and then you can decorate it. Even though we can’t send it, it might feel good to put your feelings down. I still do that with Nanaji, you know.”

  Nanaji means “mother’s father” in Hindi and is the name Shiv uses for my dad, who has been dead for over a decade; he is only “Nanaji” in the abstract. I wrestled with grief for many years before Shiv came along, but his arrival complicated that grief, adding another layer to it. Missing my father is one thing; knowing that my son will never have the opportunity to know his grandfather is another.

  Everything I’ve learned about grieving—that there’s no “fixing it,” that grief does not necessarily equal “something’s wrong”—is more difficult to hold on to when it’s Shiv who’s experiencing the grief. As a parent, I find it so tempting to rush in and say, Buddy! Having two moms is okay! Lots of your friends are jealous of your two moms! Sometimes dads aren’t all they’re cracked up to be! But it’s crucial, I know, to let him experience the sense of loss and feel the sadness. I think of the frustration I felt every time someone tried to manage or minimize my own hurt, and I want so desperately not to do that to him.

  In the first few years after my dad died, I learned to be careful about expressing my grief in front of my mother. My sense of loss and devastation was almost pathologically triggering for her; she simply couldn’t be with it. Though she herself was reeling from the same loss, being reminded that I was suffering was almost more painful for her. I learned to work around this, but it irked me that I had to. Now I feel like I understand.

  It’s humbling to think that my child, my own family, the true and full story of how we came to be and what we are, challenges and expands my notion of what family looks like. Shiv can love having two moms and also wish he had a dad. We can be wonderful parents and Shiv can also long for his birth mother. Our story can be messy and complicated while still being good.

  * * *

  July 2 is a big day in my house: not only is it my mom’s birthday but it’s also the day that Jill and I got married. We did this on purpose; we were eager to get married as quickly as we could following the Obergefell Supreme Court decision in 2015, and my mom’s birthday was six days later. Since that first year, we’ve established the tradition of getting a babysitter and going out to dinner the three of us, sans Shiv, at a restaurant we all love but can’t afford to go to except once a year. I always volunteer to drive, so that we can get my mom a little bit drunk. Generally, my mom is funny and sassy and passionately opinionated, and she becomes only more so with a glass of sangria followed by a shared bottle of wine.

  The first year, the folks sitting at the table next to us began conspicuously pointing and looking over at us halfway through our meal.

  “What is their deal?” Jill asked.

  “They’re trying to figure us out,” I responded.

  “What, they’ve never seen three women together?” My mom giggled.

  As a crew, we don’t immediately make sense—we are not three women people are accustomed to seeing together, not part of the conventional family narratives. I wonder how many people would guess the true nature of our group: mother, daughter, daughter-in-law. And I wonder whether it matters.

  Etymologically speaking, the word “mistaken” is related to “misapprehension”; “apprehend” comes from the Latin that means “to grab hold of, grasp.” To be a new kind of family is to feel like people are working hard to grab hold of us, but that they cannot, at least not at first glance. We’re slippery fish.

  The summer that Shiv mastered a balance bike, we spent many evenings on the neighborhood golf course path, taking advantage of the slightly cooler temps afforded by dusk. One night, a woman whose backyard faced the golf course overheard Shiv call me “Mama” and looked at me puzzled, then accusing.

  “I thought she was his mom.” She pointed at Jill, who was walking a few paces behind. Turns out that Jill and Shiv had interacted with this woman a few days prior, without me there. I bet this woman thought she was dealing with a heterosexual white woman with a white husband who (so magnanimously and generously!) had adopted a black child; I was an unwelcome interruption in that narrative. Even though she was the one who didn’t seem to know what to do with me, I still managed to feel embarrassed. This is a scenario I recognize from childhood, when people would guess at my ethnicity or assume that my mother was not my mother because she is much lighter skinned than me. Inevitably, I wound up feeling like I had done something wrong, all because my family did not make sense to someone else.

  Shiv, thankfully, seems to feel no such embarrassment. “I have two moms,” he told the golf course woman. “A Mama and a Gigi.” And that was that.

  * * *

  Jill chose the name “Gigi” when Shiv was born, to avoid Mom/Mommy/Mama confusion and because she liked that it sounded like Jill. Though occasionally people mistake it for a grandmother name, overall it has served her and Shiv well. Whereas I was pretty attached to the prospect of responding to the title of “Mama,” Jill felt some reticence about buying into everything that comes with conventional notions of #momlife. She isn’t a lot of things that people expect moms to be, has never experienced herself as maternal or felt the tick of a biological clock. But she is the one who felt morally compelled by the prospect of adoption, the one who led us as a family to adoption. And as Shiv’s Gigi, Jill has proved to be a source of refuge, patient teacher, beloved playmate, and thoughtful co-parent.

  After adopting, Jill and I volunteered to place our contact information on a list of references that our agency could provide to prospective families, specifically other LGBTQ folks. One woman sticks out in my mind, not for the dozens of questions she had about the adoption process (those I was prepared for) but rather for asking, rather abruptly, “Which one of you is the ‘daddy’?” Puzzled, I took longer than the polite amount of time to craft a response.

  “Well … neither. We, um, don’t think about our family in those terms.”

  “Oh, well. I just assumed that one of you would be. It’s very important to my wife to be the daddy when we have kids.” Advocates for and reinforcement of norms can come from seemingly unlikely sources.

  When we struggle to talk about something, it reveals a gap in our collective thinking. In this way, “Gigi” creates something new, and not just for our family; Shiv’s teachers and friends all know that Jill is his Gigi and refer to her accordingly. Philosopher Bertrand Russell asserted that “language serves not only to exp
ress thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.” Whenever there is a push for new terminology, or more sensitivity in speech, a sector of the public will cry foul, allege “political correctness,” imply that such an emphasis on speech is soft or silly or otherwise pointless. I agree that to only change speech is not enough, but what’s clear to me is that this resistance to changing language is a resistance to being asked to do any kind of work. When the default position is tailored to fit you, being asked to give something up feels like an affront, an injustice. Don’t take away my flag, my monument, my team mascot, my slur.

  But sometimes damage has to be done, the kind of destruction that makes way for something new. And there is real power in invading or interrupting conventional spaces. You show up where you aren’t expected and you manage to make room for yourself, make yourself comfortable, make yourself right at home. You test the limits of others’ self-proclaimed open-mindedness, call them out, fighting against the instinct to be gracious and agreeable, as you were raised: to not make a fuss.

  To retrain ourselves to speak differently is a way of indicating that we care enough to be more precise, to make space for others who are different. Yes, it requires more of me to use the pronouns “they” and “them” when requested, requires me to retrain my brain and stumble around as I do, but is that so hard? Is that not effort I am willing to expend to be in a relationship, to become better, more thoughtful, to do less damage? To ask what matters to others, and to then demonstrate a willingness to take on the answer as our own concern, is a form of generosity I believe we can all cultivate.

  Acknowledgments

  The story of this project begins with two emails from two extraordinary women. The first is my dear friend, the brilliant writer Aisha Sabatini Sloan (if you haven’t read Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, please do so immediately). Following up on a blog post I’d written about Shiv, Aisha wanted to know if I might have other stories to tell about race, adoption, and parenting; her belief in my voice led directly to my writing the first version of “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,” which was published online in Guernica Magazine in March 2015. That piece caught the eye of this story’s second heroine, Anna deVries, whom I am now lucky enough to call my editor.

  I must thank another editor, Lauren LeBlanc, who worked with me on “Black Is the Color.” Her relentless integrity and exacting eye helped me refine my thinking about the stories that would eventually make up this project, and I am grateful for her energy and her friendship. Many thanks also to the staff at Guernica, who generously gave my writing a home, and the folks at the NPR Code Switch blog, who posted an excerpt from the piece one Saturday morning, serving both as a tremendous vote of confidence and as a lesson to never read comments online.

  My memories of writing this book are inextricably bound up in the structural changes and sacrifices that my family, both immediate and extended, made in order to create the time and space for me to do the work. I am forever grateful to Linda Draper and the staff at Blossom Heights for providing such a loving and affirming environment inside which Shiv could learn and thrive, allowing me to fully utilize my summers to work on this manuscript. A small bevy of babysitters and family friends welcomed Shiv for dozens of play dates and zoo trips, allowing me to sneak in writing time on weekends: Lauren Schoen, Bram Lowenstein, Hannah Plantowsky, Noah Pacht, Hannah Golub, the Goodman girls (Audrey and Rachel), Sophia Zulu, Uncle Jim and Aunt Julie, Silas and his moms, Ellie and her parents, and the Hudley crew—thank you, thank you, thank you.

  There is no way to overstate the influence that my students have on me, generally and in connection to this project. Their willingness to take risks, to push themselves, to show up with vulnerability, to write with honesty, to accept criticism with grace—all of this has served to make me a better person, teacher, and writer. Thank you to my former work wife, Amanda Lucas, for modeling what lifelong learning looks like, and for bringing me chocolate when I really needed it. Deepest gratitude to Kristine Varney and Cara Henderson, silver linings in embodied human form, without whom I might not have made it through the most difficult school year of my life.

  From the start, this book has had many cheerleaders who have turned what could have been a wholly solitary undertaking into a collective effort. Burke Butler, who asks the most insightful questions, and her husband, Dave Berry, one of my oldest friends, brought a kitchen island’s worth of take-out to celebrate the signing of my book contract, and regularly permitted me to snuggle their sweet newborn, Hugo, when I needed a sanity break. Big kisses to another snuggly newborn, Alice; her million-dollar-smile big brother, Marcus; and her parents, Sacha and Maconda Abinader, all of whom have been unfailingly supportive of me and this project. I’ll never forget Maconda asking, “What can we take off of your plate?” when I was working up to a deadline—the selflessness with which she shows up for others is truly remarkable. Rebecca Villarreal, who has walked with me through more major life events than we bargained for when we met our freshman year of college, listens to my hopes, fears, and anxieties during our weekly phone date, and always knows what to say to make me feel heard and understood. Katherine Bush and Shari Ray are talented writers and master teachers who have offered me the gift of relating to me as a peer; they have demonstrated their love for and faith in me for many years. David Waters has mentored and inspired me since I was a sophomore in high school; Leanne Klinemann has offered me support and encouragement in the most generous way. Tim Mazurek and Sarah Searle are internet friends who became real-life friends and both have made my life so much righter as a result. Josh Foster has been my champion since we met in an MFA workshop in Arizona and is the brother I always wanted, as well as the uncle Shiv loves playing with the most.

  Megan Batchelor is my Queen of Everything Good, the one who resets my true north, makes me laugh, and restores my sanity with just her smile. She is, famously, responsible for introducing me and Jill, and for that alone I am indebted to her for life. Jen Bauer-Conley is my sunshine, the woman who brought theater back into my life and jump-started some of the most fulfilling work of my teaching career, then became one of my best friends in the process. Lue Bishop, aka Mama Lue, is a jackpot I managed to hit as a brand-new teacher; her mentorship of me and the way she consistently leads by example has changed me forever.

  I would be remiss if I did not thank our family’s wider village, the chosen family that has shown up for us for so many years and in so many ways: Greg Lopp and Sharon Stinson, Vicky Julian and Lois Kemp, Kym King, Bonnie Dayton, and Christian and Lisa Seger. Though far away, Marynelle Wilson, Phil Imus, Noa Gutow-Ellis, Emily White, Rachel Miller, and my “Arkansas group” aunties and uncles have lent their support and encouragement in ways that have made a true difference. I am indebted to the folks behind JustCity Memphis (www.justcity.org) for the incredible work that they do, and for allowing me to be a part of it. Special thanks to Josh Spickler for helping me understand the difference between wishful thinking and hope, and how to hold on to the latter. And my love and gratitude always to Lurene Kelley and Kerry Hayes for countless Spotify playlists and their honest, abiding friendship.

  Maria Massie, thank you for taking a chance on me and for advocating for me each step of the way—every writer should be so lucky, but I know not all of us are. Anna deVries, you are essentially this book’s midwife and I am regularly astounded by your patience, wide-ranging intelligence, and the deliberateness with which you take what you believe and translate that into the work you do. No doubt my life would be very different had you not arrived in it.

  My beta readers—Jill Carroll, Courtney Rath, and Courtney Humphreys—are also three of the most important women in my life. They each gave many hours toward making this book more honest, more precise, and more thoughtful. Jill, your willingness to let me put our family’s life on the page is fundamental to this book’s existence, and your commitment to doing so with rigorous integrity has irrevocably changed the way I tell stories. Coco, your br
ain and your passion for justice have taught me so much; this book and I would be a mess without you. Court, your heart is unlike any other, and the way you speak truth has made not only our friendship but also my writing, stronger. I love all three of you more than I can say.

  And then there were four: my father, my mother, my wife, and our child. Papa, I question so many things about how our lives would intersect were you still with us, but one thing of which I am certain is how proud you would be of this book. Amma, you are the rock at the center of the nuclear family I spent a long time thinking would never be possible. There’s no way I can thank you for even a fraction of all you do, but your care and encouragement are just as powerful to me now as they were when I was a little girl. For every story you read me, each book you bought me, all the family dinners you cook with love, and the way you step in without hesitation to support me, Jill, and Shiv, I am grateful beyond measure. Jill, you have taught me so much about what it means to hustle, to make a dream real, and to show up for myself. You keep me honest, remind me of myself when I forget, and never once waver in your conviction that what I have to say is worthy. For keeping the plates spinning, for the thoughtfulness and joy you bring to co-parenting Shiv, for loving me so well—you are, and always will be, the best thing that ever happened to me. And, of course, Shiv, my treasure, you are the best thing that ever happened to us. I know that writing this book will likely bring some complication into your life, and that there may be times when you wish that I hadn’t. My hope is that you will be able to understand why I believe sharing stories is so important, and that you will always know that being your mama is an honor I strive to be worthy of each day. I love you to the moon and back.