Baby Book Entry II
I was watching News Radio and they showed Catherine (who is black) sitting next to Beth (who is white). Madison looked up and said, “Hey, dat’s Jessica and Nate!” Nate, being an extremely tall, broad-shouldered man has only one thing in common with Beth. Madison says Nate is “pink.”
From what I’ve read, she’s right on target to start talking about this (2.5). A book I used as a preschool teacher (Starting Small) says that biracial kids notice racial differences earlier than white children but older than black children. “But by age 3 or 4, most multiracial children are aware of racial differences.”
I wonder if it’s come up because we’ve spent a lot of time lately with Jessica and Nate?
She was younger when she would point to black women and say, “That’s Jessica!” in the same way she would point to women with short hair and say, “That’s Grandma!” Since the women looked nothing like Jessica or Grandma, I think she was saying (and responded as if she was saying), “That person reminds me of Jessica/Grandma!”
Anyway. Still no in-depth commentary. Just want the dates set down.
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All access (subtitled: Explode the Code)
American Family » Love is sometimes a Battlefield.
American Family takes the time to expand on her education post and it’s worth checking out. See, if I were to debate A about our differing educational values and only came at it from a “But Alfie Kohn says…” I’d be missing his point. Yes, you can concentrate the discussion down to “what way works best?” but at a certain point A might say, “But I’m Chinese.” And I might respond with, “And I’m not.” And then we’d be at a cultural impasse. My choice to reject academic pressure has a different resonance for me than it does for Chinese A.
You know how Jane Brown infamously said that internationally adoptive parents are a fifth best choice? (And I’ll assume that domestic transcultural adoptive parents are a fourth best choice.)
The first, she believes, is for
children to remain with their birthparents; second-best is for a child to be
adopted by, or remain with, a member of the extended family; third-best is to
be raised by people of the same race in the country of one’s birth, and
fourth-best is to be raised by members of the same race outside the country of
one’s birth.
(quoted from The Pain of Adoption)
What she’s talking about are the levels of adoption loss — the loss of a biological connection and then the loss of a cultural connection. If we adopt transracially/transculturally, our children become biracial/bicultural regardless of their biological roots. Both Twice the Rice and A Birth Project wrote about this recently (click the links). (American Family also just wrote about this in her infamous and hilarious Emergency Code Whitey entry.)
My goal isn’t to do “as good a job” at nurturing Madison’s black self as a black parent could because that would be an impossible goal. I can’t understand the nuances of black culture the way I could if I had grown up there. I can read about them, I can visit them (as an observer, as a tourist) but I can’t live them. Like American Family respecting A’s core values about education as a cultural issue even if philosophically they are not hers. When they discuss/debate what to do for M (their daughter), her acknowledgment that this is a cultural divide will benefit the both of them because it explains what’s at the root of his argument and it also explains why it’s not at the root of hers.
It’s kind of the same thing when people say that doing a white child’s hair is as difficult or as important as doing a black child’s hair. No, it isn’t. Even if the two children have the exact same hair texture, if one child has pink skin and one has brown, the state of their hair has different cultural connotations. There’s an extra layer to the discussion. We can exchange hair tips, talk conditioner, and trade beads and baubles but when we send our kids out into the world, they bear a different weight in their curls.
There are a lot of challenges in being a transcultural parent (and I include bio parents who are transculturally parenting — especially if they do not have a co-parent who reps the culture of the child) and for me, one is trying to make sense of when my values are more or less important than the values of the child’s birth culture. So between my two kids, I have very different discussions in my head. Like I never ever ever considered sending Noah to a Christian preschool or an academically-oriented preschool but I would send Madison to a Christian, academically-oriented preschool provided that she wasn’t a minority child there. (I’m still holding out for preschool because I haven’t found one yet where she won’t be a minority child. I’ve found daycares but not preschools — except for one that’s about 45 minutes away. Ack.)
The way I figure it, Madison doesn’t just need African American peers and role models, she also needs an introduction to African American culture in an intimate, care-giving way. This includes an understanding of the importance of Christianity as a cultural value and also an understanding of the expectations that black adults have for black children. I know that we’re less strict than is the wide cultural expectation for black children, (which is to say that I’m not turning my generalization into assumptions about individuals) and in a preschool where she is being taught by black teachers, she’s going to get that. That’s about giving her access, which gives her choice.
When I think about a strict, less play-based preschool and the potential “harm” of that, I have to weight that against the potential benefits for each of my kids. For Noah, there isn’t a whole lot of benefit in going against our family values about preschool but for Madison, there is. It’s the same thing as parenting for temperment (making the decision to, say, go to Boston and leave the toddler when I’d never have left her brother) — different kids need different things.
What we fifth and fourth best choice parents have to do is give our kids access to choice. That doesn’t mean that every white parent with a Chinese child has to sign said child up for math camp or that every white parent of an African American child has to send that child to mostly black preschool. But it does mean that considering those things is part of what we need to do as we think about how to give our kids access. I mean, I can’t teach Madison to code-switch no matter how many Langston Hughes books, Fugees CDs or black baby dolls are in our house. Hopefully preschool will be part of giving her access to her options. Likewise, math camp and Chinese school may offer opportunity M and her sibling-to-be.
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“Is she yours?”
Nobody has ever asked me that when out and about with Madison but Brett told me the other day that he’s been asked that more than a few times. Why the discrepancy? I’ve been thinking on that and here’s what I decided:
- According to American Family, Madison looks like me. I deny this but ok. (AF says, “No, once you’ve seen Jessica she doesn’t look like you but if you haven’t seen Jessica, she looks like you.”)
- Casual observation of our community says it’s not difficult to find white women with brown-skinned babies but white men with brown-skinned babies are less common;
- It might have something to do with the scarcity of men actively and publicly parenting? And so maybe people are just less used to connecting men on the playground with a kid running around? I don’t know.
Then again, my friend whose biological daughters are mixed-race has been asked if her daughters belong to her but her husband, who is African American, has never been asked. My friend is also biracial — Japanese/white — but people often assume she’s Latina. She’s been asked if she’s the nanny.
I’ve been thinking that Madison is likely going to have a shock when she realizes that Brett isn’t her biological father. Since her bio dad hasn’t been a part of her adoption (we have no pictures for our album, for example) and since pregnancy is easier to grasp than conception, I’m not sure when the father-realization will happen for her. I’m thinking that even with all the info she’ll probably think that Jessica and Brett somehow got together.
Other reasons I think this is that Noah will say things like, “Mommy and I have blue eyes and you and Daddy have brown eyes.” And she knows that she has dimples and that Daddy has dimples, too. Plus she’s a daddy’s girl and then, like I said, Jessica is a part of our life and we have a picture of her still pregnant (just one — from in the hospital while she was in labor). That’s concrete information for Madison but bio daddy? That’s pretty abstract.
I wish we had more info about him. I stalk him periodically on myspace but so far, no dice.
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More from that book
Sep 26, 2006 Adoption, Race, Read/heard/seen
By the way, here’s the official site for her book and the documentary that inspired it: SecretDaughter.com
I wrote this up last night but firefox crashed and I lost it.
June Cross was placed in an informal adoption when she was about four because she couldn’t pass as white. (She is biracial — her mother was white and her father was African American.) There’s a harrowing scene when she’s splashing in a bubble bath during one of her visits with her mother and her mom idily says, “If only you hadn’t gotten so dark, you could have stayed with me.”
Her aunt and uncle (really her parents’ old landlords) take her in but never legally adopt her (something that becomes a problem towards the end of the book when her aunt is ill). And she continues to have regular visits with her mother, Norma, who also sends money for her keep.
Throughout her life, June’s loyalties are torn as she grapples with family, with race as perceived by her family and with race as is the reality of living in America in the 50s and 60s. For transracial adopter such as myself, there is a lot to think about.
One of the things I was thinking about when I was rocking Madison last night was the revelation in this book (not in the documentary) that June has an older sister who was placed for adoption in a formal, state-supervised adoption. (There are very little details about this in the book but June’s sister is white so race isn’t an issue in that adoption.) She also has an older brother (older, too, than the lost sister) who was raised mostly by Norma’s mother. Then even later, June discovers that her mother was farmed out to relatives, too, as a child. June herself never has children.
This was hot on the heels of reading this (courtesy of a link from Susan):
Of course, there was the occasional blip. Like the time the yoga teacher asked us to visualize our own birth. At first I pictured a wooden-paneled station wagon. But then I went somewhere else. My non-adopted friends left the room feeling relaxed. I left the room terrified.Then there was the nightmare I had that I was leaving the hospital with my baby when the lights suddenly went out. When the lights came back on again, all the newborns had been stolen, including mine. A man with a stethoscope explained that he wasn’t really surprised, as babies were getting top dollar on the adoption black market that week.
–from an essay by Alison Larkin
It’s strange how things get handed down. This, of course, made me think about some things specific to our adoption and specific to my family of origin, (which includes a history rife with reproductive crises and difficult resolutions).
Then (because my mind will wander however I try to reign it in), this made me think about FauxClaud’s tragedy post because I was thinking about how deeply run our choices and how impossible it is to take adoption as a stand-alone event in anyone’s life.
Anyway, I’m not quite ready to articulate how this is all coming together in my head but this is how it’s all running around in there.
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Tags: Erica, essay, Madison, transracial, wordpress
