Last summer, at a pool party in a white part of town, Shiv was one of only two black people among at least a hundred. I stayed close by because he was still learning how to swim but tried hard not to interfere. He wound up near a group of white boys who looked about six or seven; because Shiv is so big for his age, he is often drawn to kids his size who end up being much older than him and whom he tries to imitate.
Instinctively, I knew the boys were making fun of him even though I could not hear their words: their body language and laughter were enough. I moved closer and saw Shiv point to me. “That’s your mom?” the older boys asked skeptically. He nodded. They kept asking him questions, which he either didn’t understand or chose to ignore. “Can you talk?” the boys asked. They started to speak louder, to overenunciate their words as if he were deaf or stupid. Were these boys just being jerks, or was it extra because my kid is black? How much did race play into the dynamic? Not if but how much. Even if kids can’t articulate, they still understand and see difference. They internalize what is external in their world. I was eager for the moment I could pull Shiv from the pool to go inside and eat cake.
Even in our own neighborhood, which is wonderfully diverse and blessedly safe, where kids ride their bikes out in the street and parents and caregivers keep a collective eye on them, Shiv was recently told to “go back home to his white parents” by the visiting aunt of a couple of neighborhood kids he’s played with in the past. I had had a conversation a few months before with one of those same playmates in which I’d had to work fairly hard to convince her that my son did, in fact, have two moms and did not, in fact, have a daddy. Genuinely perplexed, she kept staring up at me as if there had to be some mistake. Now, if she happens to stop by when Jill’s not at home, she will ask, “Where’s his other mama?” We often serve as others’ learning curve, on one level or another.
It’s difficult, perhaps impossible, to separate the layers of our family’s dynamics: the attention we attract as same-sex parents; the attention we attract as a mixed-race family; the attention we attract simply through our respective personalities. So while it may not be a productive exercise, I often wonder if what feels so essential to me now would still be on our radar if we did not have a black son.
* * *
I am always surprised when others are surprised to hear that Shiv pays attention to skin color and that he has from a young age. For him, it does not yet have the baggage that it has for us; often his observations are a simple celebration of representation and sameness. Of the little girl he played with at Memphis International Airport: “She black, like me!” Of the little black boy with a shaved head flying a kite in Wynton Marsalis’s book Squeak, Rumble, Whomp! Whomp! Whomp!—“Thas me! I in the book!” When our friends express surprise at this awareness, I am reminded that the extent to which this is not a part of their consciousness is the same as their unawareness of how ingrained it is into mine.
At another birthday party, a woman on the playground pointed to my son and his buddy rocking on one of those spring-mounted plastic creatures and said, “So those are your boys?”
“No,” I responded, “just the one on the right—that’s my son.”
“Oh,” she said, clearly flummoxed. “Oh—I saw you talking to them both and I just assumed…” She trailed off. Both my son and his friend are black and were the only two black boys on the playground. They are the same age, but they don’t look at all alike. To her in that moment perhaps, they did.
So much of what we encounter on a daily basis are these kinds of moments, moments that everyone wants to tell me are likely innocuous, moments that I myself tend to disclaim as “little things.” Perhaps these assumptions and questions individually don’t feel like much, but they build up, even over a short lifetime of my son’s four and a half years. What has been most revealing about this is tracking Jill’s reaction; as a woman who has benefited from white privilege her whole life, being on the receiving end of these racially charged moments is new for her. She’s witnessed and observed them her whole life, but watching them circle around your child is another thing. How many times have we been met with a comment about football whenever someone notices how big Shiv is for his age? How often have we witnessed an adult stranger treat our child just differently enough to have us suspect that it might be related to his color? I don’t want these moments to rule us or determine our behavior in the world, but to have them ignored or discounted repeatedly is disheartening and exhausting.
We were recently gifted a beautiful book about the life of Josephine Baker, vividly written with distinctive illustrations. At first Shiv looked through the book himself, flipping pages and focusing on the pictures—he is a dancer, after all, so he did not need words for those images to translate—then that night, he requested that I read it to him at bedtime. For a picture book it’s fairly long, and I thought that he might lose interest partway through, but he insisted that we read the whole thing. I learned much that I didn’t know about Baker, who was tremendously inventive and brave, but the section that drew Shiv’s attention most had to do not with her dancing but with the race riots in East St. Louis.
“Why the white people want to hurt the black people?” he asked. It’s a question to which I always want to respond, I don’t know, baby, as if there’s no explanation for such hatred, though of course there is. But how do I explain thousands of years of white supremacy to a four-year-old? How do I explain how it undergirds essentially everything around him, from this book about Josephine Baker to the very circumstances that created our family?
Then I reminded myself, This is not the first nor will it be by any means the last conversation we have about race, so I focused on the question at hand and responded to it as simply and honestly as I could. “There are some white people who believe that they are better than black people simply because of the color of their skin. These white people were, and still are, threatened when black people try to assert themselves or create better lives for themselves. And sometimes when people feel threatened, they become violent.”
“But Gigi is white!” he said with alarm, as if just realizing this for the first time. Connecting the abstract white people represented on the page with the real-life white person he lives with and loves. This complexity and its attendant baggage are a lot for anyone to hold, let alone a four-year-old. But he will have to hold it, all his life, an inheritance that will constantly shape-shift; just when he thinks he’s wrangled it, it will alter in his hands.
For most of my life, I have been afraid of anger: my own and other people’s. This is true to such an extent that it feels disingenuous to write the phrase “my own anger,” as it is a feeling I have trained myself to deny or push away or disassociate from for so long. As a girl, I sensed that anger was unbecoming; as a brown girl in a white world, I felt anger was a trait destined to relegate me to the realm of easily dismissible, further proof of the stereotype.
Sara Ahmed, self-described “feminist killjoy,” writes about our culture’s relentless obsession with positivity and the detriment that brings. To kill joy, she says, can be “to open a life, to make room for life, to make room for possibility, for chance.” Certain ways of being are not even visible under the glaring light of our stubborn bright-sidedness. By focusing on the light, we conveniently forget and devalue the territory in the shadows.
I grew up with a lot of privilege and, like many woman, was raised to be pleasant. But becoming Shiv’s parent has created, or maybe revealed, a deep well of anger in me. It makes sense to be angry. Anger is, at times, the only logical response, the necessary first step. I am late to this party, but I have learned that anger, properly processed, becomes fuel. Resisting anger for so long only led me to fear, and I refuse to put my child in the same position.
I owe him honesty. I owe him the truth. I owe him a willingness to sit in ambiguity with him, to refuse to tell the convenient story or to pretend that I myself have arrived at some full understanding. “And still you are called to struggle
,” writes Ta-Nehisi Coates in his letter to his son, Samori, “not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life.”
Making Space
I never thought I would be a dance mom, but here I am, kneeling on the linoleum entrance of a high school auditorium on dress rehearsal day, fishing a black makeup pencil out of a Ziploc bag to touch up my son’s eyeliner. “It tickles, Mama,” he says, standing in his black leggings and ballet shoes, his three-and-a-half-year-old belly visible under the cream fabric of his “sailor shirt” costume. After double-checking his dinosaur backpack for the recommended supplies (snacks, extra makeup, quiet toys), I zip it up and help him pull it onto his shoulders.
As we move into the line that had formed behind the “dancer drop-off” table, I take a moment to absorb the pre-recital chaos: sequins, glitter, hair spray, bright lipstick, tights, dry-cleaning bags full of costumes. And girls. Every single one of the other dancers is female. Shiv is already the only boy in his five-person dance class—a fact that he had never once commented on—but here he is about to be the only boy backstage (minus the parent volunteers who are dads—I do see a few). I kneel down next to him, feeling obliged to prep him:
“Hey, buddy, you know how there are lots of other kids here? And they’re mostly girls?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, I just think it’s really awesome that you’re here, because you love to dance and that’s what you have in common with all of these girls. And it doesn’t matter that you’re the only boy, in fact I think it makes you really brave. And I’m proud of you for doing what you enjoy.”
“Mom, I know,” he says, shifting his weight beneath his backpack, sounding exactly like a teenager demonstrating that it was I who’d needed that little pep talk, not him.
We reach the head of the line. I give my cell phone number to a parent volunteer, who issues me a sticker that will allow me to pick him up after the rehearsal; another volunteer, whose Forever 21–style wardrobe I try and fail not to judge, stands smiling and ready to escort Shiv backstage.
“What’s his name?” she asks. I prompt him to answer, as I always do, even though by now we both have a sense of how it’s going to play out. It’s kind of a thing, when Shiv is asked for his name. He says it clearly, and other kids can parrot it back just fine, but adults, who are anticipating a name they recognize, or who do not expect his name to go with a boy who looks like him, almost always puzzle over it, as the woman standing in front of us proceeds to do.
“Shay?” She cocks her head at him.
He says his name again, more firmly this time: “No, Shiv.”
“Jeff?” Now she’s looking up at me with puzzlement.
Shiv also looks to me for backup, so I jump in. “Shiv, like Shiva,” I explain. “Rhymes with ‘give.’ S-h-i-v, Shiv.”
The woman smiles warmly at both of us and takes my son’s hand. “Okay then, Mr. Shiv, are you ready to dance?” He grins at her, barely offering me a wave goodbye as I tell him I’ll be back to pick him up later.
* * *
We knew it wouldn’t be simple, giving Shiv his name. Nothing about parenting Shiv is simple, because we’re this at once recognizable yet totally unfamiliar amalgam of a twenty-first-century family: white mom, brown mom, black son. We push a lot of cultural buttons; our friends joke that our holiday cards could double as ads for United Colors of Benetton. We draw attention without trying to, and the world doesn’t always know what to do with us. We are still a novelty for most of the people we encounter, and almost everywhere we go, one of us or all of us are in the minority. This has become normal, but even in our own home, where parenting is not public, it can feel fraught. There is a consciousness about our family’s visibility, what it means, how our choices will be judged, and, on top of that, the extra consciousness of trying not to let that factor into our decisions too much.
Our son is a sweet boy, well behaved, if willful, and most of the time he is exhausting and fun, like every other three-year-old I know. But because of who he is, who his parents are, and the various spaces he occupies, we spend a lot of time crashing like bumper cars into people’s assumptions, questions, and disbelief. Even when doing something as simple as telling people his name.
“Is that Indian or something?” they ask. (Most don’t know the exact reference, but his name almost always rings a bell.)
My son’s name is, in fact, “Indian or something,” and as it turns out, it suits him perfectly. When our adoption agency matched us with his birth mother, she was thirty-six weeks pregnant and thought she was carrying a girl. A second ultrasound, at which we were breathlessly in attendance, seemed to confirm the gender. For seventeen days, the “It’s a Girl!” ultrasound printout hung suspended on the front of the fridge with a Gustav Klimt magnet. The ultrasound was why we didn’t have a name picked out for our son when he was born. We weren’t even sure we could call him our son when we left the hospital that first night, unable to stay past visiting hours; the nurse on duty was fairly hostile to Jill and me and refused to issue us wristbands that would allow us to remain overnight, even though our adoption agency had assured us we would be entitled to them. As with many things, in retrospect I think we ought to have pushed, asked to speak to a supervisor, but in that space of dazzling vulnerability and uncertainty about what was coming next, we were scared to challenge anything. So instead we drove home.
We wanted our son to share his initials with my dad, Subhash, who died in 2006. I briefly considered naming Shiv after my dad outright, but it seemed like a lot for a baby to carry, the name of a dead man, not to mention a name that isn’t easy for most people to spell or pronounce. We knew that we would be giving our child—regardless of gender—Jill’s last name, Carroll, for a middle name, and that the baby and I would share my last name, Mehra. To figure out the missing piece, Jill Googled “Indian baby boy names S” and I called my mom. We moved down the list unsuccessfully for a few minutes, before they both asked, within seconds of each other, Jill to my face and Mom through my ear, “What about Shiv?”
Shiva is one of the three primary deities in Hinduism, a warrior and a dancer, a yogi and conqueror of the ego, a god of contradictions, a container for things that do not, at first glance, seem to fit together. Shiv Carroll Mehra—the more we get to know him, the more we believe we got the name just right.
Of course, “shiv” has another connotation. When you look up “shiv” in Urban Dictionary it means something very different: a prison knife, or the act of stabbing someone with one. The helpful example sentence given is Ima shiv you, bitch!
We knew this when we picked the name, yet we named our son Shiv anyway. Naively, perhaps, but I saw the decision as a firm assertion of what kind of world we would raise our child to be a part of, what context he would occupy. It was always going to be challenging for him—two moms and three colors in one family—so I didn’t see the point in bowing to the hypothetical misinterpretation of others. Better to arm him with ancient Sanskrit and a badass namesake and then raise a kid who could carry the weight of both.
* * *
Being a nontraditional family means constantly navigating and questioning public perceptions and stereotypes while also being occupied with the same mundane tasks and activities as every other family: bedtime stories, pancakes on Saturday morning, trips to the neighborhood pool. This can create a kind of cultural whiplash. Some people think our family is adorable, the very embodiment of twenty-first-century America, a testament to the power of love and an ever-expanding definition of family; some people think our family is an abomination, everything wrong with America today, evidence of a civilization in decline. The latter comes with a certain freedom, the ability to create our own traditions and expectations, precisely because we are challenging long-held conventions. Jill and I joke that the biggest perk of being a lesbian—aside from the free and guaranteed birth control—was the fact that we largely got to opt out of the cultural gender norms that seem to descend upon our stra
ight friends, particularly when they get married and/or have kids. We thought that we were aligned with our friends in principle, but then suddenly they’re planning a wedding or raising their children and these deeply gendered, traditional assertions come out of their mouths, like some kind of pre-programming we didn’t know was there. Of course Jill and I have a bit of an advantage, being gay. Much as (some parts of) society wishes to normalize us now, Jill and I have a history of being outsiders, both as individuals and as a couple. Coming out is itself a move outside of the familiar, and it’s a move that necessitates—or creates—at least a modicum of courage when it comes to disregarding what others think. When the norms don’t apply to you, you have to make up another way to live, which can be difficult, isolating work. But it’s also freeing: it proves that, in fact, another way is possible. It reveals how much we are choosing, even (or especially) when we act as if we have no choice.
* * *
A few months ago, I saw a post on Instagram from a woman I don’t know well. She has a son, who at the time was about fourteen months old, and is pregnant with her second child. She’d posted side-by-side photos of her son, before and after getting a haircut:
This baby’s hair reached the bottom of his nose in the front, and it’s longer in the back. Everyone called him a girl, and he walked with his head leaned back so he could see. Since he’s not a girl, we can’t pull back the front into a clip or a bow. So … we broke down and got his hair cut.
As an English teacher, I spend a fair amount of time working to convince my students that words matter—where we use them, how we use them, which ones we use.
We can’t pull back the front into a clip or a bow.
We won’t pull back the front into a clip or a bow.
Brown White Black Page 13
