Brown White Black

by Nishta J. Mehra

  Over time, I learned how to occupy my grief: not turning away from it, or folding into it, but sitting with it, letting it be. Grief is a project, but it works on you instead of you working on it. Theorist and researcher Pauline Boss talks about how American culture is one of “mastery orientation,” meaning that our culture’s orientation is toward solving problems, rendering us fairly ill equipped to handle questions that have no clear answer or problems that can’t be solved. Death and grief represent a “kind of mystery … [that] gives us a feeling of helplessness that we’re very uncomfortable with as a society.” No wonder we’re terribly ill equipped to deal with grief. There is courage required in not turning away, and doing so can feel radical when you’re standing in the face of a culture and society that will accuse you of being morose and depressing and instead encourage you to “move on.” To instead live life inside of ambiguity is to make room for a more complicated, messy kind of truth, what British Romantic poet John Keats called “negative capability”: “the ability to contemplate the world without the desire to try and reconcile contradictory aspects or fit it into closed and rational systems.” Living with unanswered questions and unknowable outcomes goes against our modern instincts.

  * * *

  “Unanswered questions and unknowable outcomes” could be a tagline for the adoption experience. Becoming an adoptive parent gave me a jump start on making peace with insecurity. The process pushed me to forfeit the control I so desperately wanted to impose on the situation. While the pregnant women we knew wouldn’t so much as look at a deli meat sandwich for fear of the potential health risks to their unborn children, Jill and I were unable to dictate or determine what our child had been exposed to in the womb; his genetic material was, likewise, not up to us. To become adoptive parents is not to ignore the reality of the situation but to accept it.

  As Shiv’s grown, we have also had to accept the complicated feelings that can come along with adoption. We’ve never hidden the fact of his adoption from him; he knows the story of our meeting his birth mother, Mama D, just a few weeks before he was born, how we stood with her in the hospital room when he came into the world. We included pictures of her in his baby book on purpose. Sometimes he will express sadness about not knowing her or say, “I wish Mama D lived with us.” In those moments, I have to fight against my instinct to smooth out the narrative, to attempt to uncomplicate his complicated feelings. To say Everything worked out for the best! or But you have me and Gigi! would be to erase the truth of what he’s experiencing. He can feel sadness about his birth mother without it being a judgment against us. If he experiences grief, it is not an indication that anything is bad or wrong—on the contrary, it’s healthy and normal. Still, I have to work, to bite my own tongue, in order to hold these two seemingly contradictory positions at the same time.

  The impulse to sanitize the world for our children shows up in all kinds of places; we call pig meat pork and cow meat beef, allowing some kids to go years before they realize that they’ve been eating the very animals they find cute. We Disney-fy the world, repackaging the story of horrific historical events into media we find more palatable: Let’s memorize the rhyme-y names of Columbus’s ships instead of discussing how he perpetuated the cold-blooded slaughter of natives! Let’s go see a movie that depicts how much black caregivers loved and cared for the white children of their employers, even though those employers made them use an outdoor toilet! We domesticize radical things, radical people: Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr. We smooth rough edges.

  This obsessive need to smooth over speaks more to our privilege than anything else; we conflate “protection” with “good parenting,” ignoring the fact that so many other parents don’t have a choice when it comes to shielding their children from life’s most frightening and difficult realities. My status as mother of a black son has pushed me, perhaps more than anything else, to think carefully about how I expose my child to unpleasant things and when and why I shield him from them, if at all. Though my family undoubtedly has economic privilege, and my wife benefits from white privilege, Jill and I are both painfully aware that our privilege will do nothing to protect Shiv if he is caught in a particular set of circumstances as a black male. Having a white parent and coming from a middle-class family doesn’t change the fact that he is a black boy in America. The “constant worry” that many parents claim they feel when sending their kids to school, or outside to play on their own, has an added layer of reality for parents of black boys. The terror of what could someday happen to him, no matter what we might try to do to protect him, is a current running through my blood almost all the time, a recurring nightmare that wakes me, breathless. This fear is always present, though I rarely let it rise to the surface. Were I to keep it there, the fear would incapacitate me; it would render me useless as a parent. I have had to work to manage my own fear, to accept the fact that I cannot control what happens to my child. No matter what I do, I cannot guarantee his safety. In a free and open society, we cannot eliminate all risk.

  * * *

  A few months ago, I read an article in my local paper about kids as young as fourteen and fifteen being instructed by their parents in how to run the household, in case the parents were deported by ICE. Minutes after reading that article, I saw a post in my Facebook feed from a woman who had been to the art museum to see a collection of sculptures by Ron Mueck. Mueck’s work is hyper-real, sculptures so exquisitely detailed that they could easily be mistaken for actual human bodies, though most of them are scaled up or down in size. When this Facebook friend was asked in the comments if she’d taken her children with her (they were, at the time, between seven and eleven years old), she responded that she hadn’t, not wanting to expose them to the “heavy” material. The juxtaposition of these two examples of parenting was striking; what’s more, having since taken my own four-year-old to that same exhibit, I find myself perplexed as to what was “heavy” about it. Even if it had been heavy, I know that Shiv will be exposed to heavy in his life, far sooner than Jill and I would like. I cannot keep the heavy from happening, but I want him to know that he can handle it when it does.

  It’s almost always harder to explain fully, to tell the whole story, to ask students or children to rise to the occasion where nuance or difficulty is concerned. So often it seems that what parents object to is messiness, to exposing their children to a narrative that will blow up any notion that life is orderly and predictable, that the world operates fairly, that parents can keep their kids from being exposed to unpleasant things. Of course, parents do not say this when they object. Instead, they use the word “appropriate” as a way of communicating their disapproval. We don’t think it’s appropriate for this age or We believe this material is inappropriate, without being able to say exactly why. Is the material inappropriate because it reflects truths that adults would rather not deal with or think about themselves?

  What I’ve learned in the decade since my father died is that, as a general rule, we live inside a society that is profoundly bad at being in reality. Not the artificially constructed “reality” of television shows that bear that label, but the truth of what we are: humans who often treat our fellow human beings cruelly, who are capable of great evil as well as great good; mortal creatures, animals that will, someday, each one of us, necessarily die. What’s more, what’s worse—we have no sense of what it costs to be in such denial. I’ve had colleagues and friends—grown adults—literally cover their ears with their hands rather than hear me talk about the importance of making a will, of discussing final wishes, of plotting financials to make the inevitable even just a little bit easier. There is a numbness, an estrangement, that keeps us from relating, from telling the truth, from equipping our children for what is inevitably coming. We are so disembodied, so disconnected from the processes of the body and the inevitability of the body’s failure and the materiality of bodies—sinew, muscle, bone, blood.

  In his book Cooked, Michael Pollan defines disgust as the human response to a
nything that reminds us that we’re animals. As a feeling, disgust has a biological function—it keeps us from eating things that might kill us, like rotten meat. But I can’t help wondering if it hasn’t also sterilized us to the point that we’ve completely forgotten that we are, as it turns out, animals. As one of my son’s main ambassadors to this planet, I feel responsible for reporting the truth, as best I know it.

  And so Jill and I choose to parent our son in ways that often alarm other parents. He cuts vegetables with a real knife; he stands, as he has since he was much younger, at a hot stove and helps us cook. Though he’s not yet cut himself, he has been splattered by hot grease, felt the sensation on his skin; he has a healthy respect for what cooking oil can do. At the playground, he has fallen. Rather than follow him around, I establish myself on a bench, making sure that Shiv knows where to find me if he needs me, and then I take out a book or my journal. My ears sometimes perk up at the sound of a disagreement between him and another child, but I keep my butt glued to the bench unless Shiv calls for me; even then, I try to encourage him to find a way to work the problem out on his own. While I often strategize with him in the car before and after, debriefing whatever just went down, only once have I directly interfered in playground drama.

  Still, other parents seem to feel the need to jump in, sometimes even running over to “assist” Shiv as he climbs, though he has not asked for and doesn’t need help. We have had friends and acquaintances express alarm at the tools we keep in the backyard—hanging on a hook but still accessible—shears, a rake, a hoe. Even when he was a crawling toddler, parents of kids his age would move things off of shelves in our house when they came to visit, the background implication being that, were we more responsible parents, we would have done so ourselves.

  We strive to live in reality, to raise Shiv inside of reality and not magical thinking. Last night, he asked about Tillie, the beloved old dog of his auntie Coco and uncle John; we explained that they had made the decision to end Tillie’s life, as she was no longer able to move on her own.

  “They asked their doctor to come and give her medicine that will end her life.” (By default, I almost said “put her to sleep” but refused. Adults may know what that euphemism means, but I didn’t want to confuse or mislead him.)

  “The doctor going to kill her?”

  “Yes, sweetie. It will happen quickly and then Tillie won’t be hurting anymore.”

  He contemplated this. Jill, who grew up with dogs and has said goodbye to many animals in her time, explained that we had done the same with Dolly, the terrier we had when Shiv was first born.

  “Did you hold her and tell her [his voice dropping to a stage whisper], ‘Goodbye, Dolly, I love you’?”

  “Yes, sweetie. It was very hard, but we knew that it was the right thing to do.”

  Then—a choice. There was a natural opening to tell him the story of his grandfather’s death, how his grandmother and I placed an order to take my father off a respirator when it became clear that he would not be waking up, that his lungs would never again work on their own. How it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. How loving someone can be hard work, can mean forfeiting what feels good to us in favor of what’s best for them, sort of like his birth mother did when she placed him with us almost five years ago.

  After I told him the story, he responded, “I miss Nanaji,” he said, employing the Hindi word for “mother’s father.”

  “I miss him, too, dude.”

  “You get sad when you think about him. It makes you cry.”

  “Yeah, it does.”

  “It’s okay to cry, Mama. Sometimes I get sad about my birth mother and I cry, too.”

  * * *

  Powerful though the urge is, I know that to shelter my child would only render him dependent on me; my task is to prepare him, not protect him. On the ten-year anniversary of my father’s death, I had two tattoos inked onto my wrists: on the right, a stylized rendering of the initials that Shiv shares with my dad, SCM; on the left, a line drawing of a lotus, a potent symbol within both Hinduism and Buddhism. Thich Nhat Hanh, the Zen Buddhist monk, is famous for his saying “No mud, no lotus.” Without suffering, there is no growth. I work to keep myself grounded in reality, so that I can raise a child who will thrive inside of it.

  Raising Shiv

  We never had to tell our son that he was black. It was not a thing we had to name for him but something he gathered on his own. He was quite young, probably two, when he presented this fact to us for confirmation: “I black?”

  This did not surprise me; I don’t remember a time in my own life when I didn’t know that I was brown. I am gravely aware of what language can do, what it can generate, what it can erase. Labels are not neutral, least of all the ones tied to identity. Giving Shiv descriptors to apply to himself—brave, kind, boy, black—formalizes his identity and provides him with different ways to define himself, like those crystals we grew in elementary science class, strings suspended in sugar water, accumulating more layers with each passing day.

  As anyone who has spent even a little bit of time with a two-year-old knows, a toddler’s first linguistic obsession is identification. They hold up something: “What dis?” You tell them. Over and over and over again. Occasionally, you struggle to recall the names of objects you have taken for granted or to articulate the answer to unintentional toddler koans; what sound does a giraffe make?

  Questions like these were prompted by Shiv’s obsession with his Visual Dictionary, a doorstop of a book that contains an illustrated catalog of almost every concrete noun you can imagine, organized by category, from creatures to weapons to food items to sports. From the start, he was particularly taken with the animal section, as many kids that age often are. He’d spend half an hour turning pages and pointing to illustrations so that we would say the names aloud: albatross, tern, condor, eagle. As he grew in his knowledge, watching him was like watching a tiny Adam, tasked with naming the creatures in Eden: dis woodpecker, thas humminbird, is ostrich, Mama—no can fly. Words are declarative, words are generative, they make the conceptual real, they provide meaning. We identify something, we name it, and suddenly it exists.

  * * *

  Jill and I made the decision to adopt together, the end result of several years of talking and thinking through our future. When we fell in love, I was young—nineteen—but already knew that I wanted to have kids. Conversely, Jill was thirty-eight and had previously decided not to have children. Committing to each other was a bold leap of faith for both of us; we met because I was a student in one of Jill’s classes at Rice University, which sounds more like the plot for a scandalous TV drama than the formula for a successful long-term relationship. But the doubts of those around us were assuaged over time. The only question that hung unsettled in our life was the one about having kids.

  The idea of becoming pregnant and giving birth had always interested me, but ending up in a long-term relationship with a woman complicated that vision. My dear friend Wayne agreed to be my “someday” sperm donor when we were both in college, but as we got older and that prospect became less theoretical, it also started to feel more complicated. Plus, there was something about the whole idea that made Jill nervous or, at least, didn’t inspire her excitement or enthusiasm.

  Adoption did. Jill felt pulled, called by the thought that we could provide a home for a child who needed one. It was a vision I could be easily drawn into—two of my good friends were adopted as infants—and helped solve the question of genetics. Our task would be to nurture a person who was already here. Only, what kind of person would that be? Our application to adopt included a form asking us to check the boxes that corresponded to the traits we were comfortable with in an adoptive child: male, female, twins, Caucasian, Hispanic, Asian, African American, Native American. There were also boxes for the baby’s alcohol and drug exposure as well as family history of mental illness.

  That piece of paper tied me up in all kinds of knots. I was being given the option to
choose my child, to exert some power over the process, and the consequences related to the form were real. Though I had embraced adoption wholeheartedly, there was still a part of me that wanted the same baby experience as “everybody else,” but the form served as a blatant reminder that I wasn’t getting it. Adoption is an industry where a great deal of money changes hands and “customer satisfaction” is a factor. I, however, was attached to the conventional narrative that adoption is inherently more noble than other ways of becoming a parent. My response to that form—namely, my hesitancy in signing up to potentially parent a black child—interrupted any sense of nobility I might have conjured for myself. Filling out a form to adopt a child felt a little too similar to filling out an order form, especially because the pricing varied, depending on the type of child. Our adoption agency had two different fee schedules: one that was standard and one that was for children considered “difficult to place.” And which children qualified as difficult to place, you might ask? Black children.

  Part of me firmly believed that Jill and I would provide an excellent home for any child. We were thoughtful, we had resources, and we would do what we needed to do. But another part of me wondered if I was being naive. Were we prepared for all the issues that we would inevitably face if we became the parents of a black child? This was circa 2011, before Tamir, before Trayvon, before I had thought meaningfully about the fraught complexities of being black in America, but I was aware enough to know that there would be challenges. Were we the right people to raise a black child? Could we do right by that child? Would our child someday wake up and think, What the hell am I doing with you people? Was that a responsibility we were willing to take on?