Brown White Black by Nishta J. Mehra

Author:Nishta J. Mehra
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador

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“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

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