I'm Gonna Need Backup
I have a confession to make. Sometimes I fantasize about my husband dying. It’s not a happy fantasy—not like I actually want him to die. I don’t. My husband is wonderful, and he also travels quite a bit—several times a week he drives down to Los Angeles as the sun comes up, and then returns home to Santa Barbara late into the night. It’s usually dark when he’s on the road, and I know he’s tired. He listens to books and podcasts and drinks lots of coffee, but still I'm constantly fearing for his life. When I was pregnant with our third baby, instead of laying in bed at night feeling my baby kick, wracked with worry that I may have to continue my motherhood journey alone, I decided that I needed a backup plan. In the wake of my husband’s sudden vehicular death, my vision is this: channel grief into a riveting best selling novel, meet Trevor Noah and have him fall in love with me, get married. In my imaginary widowed state, this plan is absolutely feasible. Also, I think every woman is entitled to at least one celebrity back-up husband: Trevor Noah is mine.
After spending five long years grieving my deceased husband and penning emotional page turners, Trevor’s South African sarcasm will be balm to my sad and weary soul. He’ll woo me back to life with laughter. In this dream, we become the perfect family. I might even have a fourth baby for him—and I will magically not need to be induced again and our hospital will support VBACs for the first time. I will be the ideal, natural birthing Earth Mother. My oldest son will have both a black father and a new biracial sibling, and everything will be perfect.
That last part is the key, you know. If I were meeting with a therapist right now, I’m sure she would home in on that final phase of the fantasy. Obviously, I have some issues to work through with regard to some of my birth experiences (and fine, it’s probably not super healthy to regularly think about my husband’s potential death), but the real kicker is the bit about my son. I know that. I love Trevor Noah, I do, but my back-up plan isn’t formulated to include him just because I’m going to need an adorable substitute foot massager after my husband is gone (although that will be nice). I know that entertaining this fantasy is helping me work through an area where I am deeply insecure.
You see, my husband and I began our family with adoption through foster care. Our social worker phoned me on a foggy Friday in September to tell me about a possible placement. “We have a nine week old African American boy—” I said yes before she could finish her sentence. We met him two hours later.
He was wailing, but he was perfect.
“He’s probably the cutest baby I’ve ever seen,” I said to my husband later that night. “Right? Don’t you think he’s just the cutest baby?”
“He’s pretty adorable,” my husband replied. He doesn’t relish in hyperbole and absolutes the way I do. “Pretty adorable” is about as cute as a baby can be in his book.
And our little boy was just as cute as can be. We got comments everywhere we went. People stopped me in practically every aisle of the grocery store to commend the cuteness of my baby. I could hardly leave the house without someone mentioning his adorableness … or his race.
Here’s the thing about being an transracial mother/baby combo: no one ever lets you forget it.
Once when my son was about three months old, we were at Starbucks. I was wearing him in a wrap, and he was sleeping sweetly on my chest. I had gotten my coffee, and I was stirring in some cream when an older man walked up to me. I stepped aside, assuming he needed to pick up his beverage, but instead he looked at me closely and said “You’ve got a baby on your chest.”
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“It’s a boy,” he added.
“Yes,” I said. My baby was wearing a little blue beanie at the time, so I wasn’t surprised at this observation.
“And he’s black.” The old man nodded at my son.
“Yep,” I added. “He is.”
The old man grunted and walked away. The interaction was gruff and a little odd, but I wasn’t entirely offended. There was really nothing to be offended by. It was simply an old man stating a series of facts about my baby and then walking away. But the moment gave me pause. This was the first time I felt unsure. Like maybe if I were also black the old man wouldn’t have said anything to me at all. Like maybe if we matched, fewer people would comment. Maybe if we matched, fewer people would ask questions.
As I walked back to my car with my still sleeping baby and my coffee, I grew more uncertain. On the one hand, I felt thankful that he was so little so he didn’t have to participate in such a strange interaction. I wasn’t sure whether or not comments about our racial differences would be a point of concern for him. But what would happen when he was older? What if someone made a similar comment when he was of an age that he could understand? How would I handle that? What would I say? More importantly, how would my son feel?
On the other hand, I wondered if the facts or realities of his adoption—the fact that he doesn’t have the privilege of looking like his parents, or the realities of how he came to us—would be more troubling than any inciting incident with a stranger in a coffee shop or at the grocery store. Will these issues be the undercurrent of his life? Will they become the undercurrent of mine? I began to wonder, and worry, if perhaps the facts were the bigger hurdle than the odd and sometimes offensive encounters with outsiders.
My son is now eight, and these questions and concerns are ones with which I am still wrestling. The real confession here is not that I want a celebrity back-up husband. The confession is that I routinely feel ill-equipped to parent my son. I worry that I won’t be able to give him what he needs as he grows. I worry that he’ll feel misunderstood or like he doesn’t fit anywhere, either in our family or out in the world. I worry that he’ll wish he had another mother, a mother who isn’t me.
In fact, I often find it hard to believe that I am uniquely qualified to be his mother. Most days I feel like I’m captain of a ship that is far too big for me to steer and the waters are murky and the course uncharted. I need a guide. I need back-up.
Several years ago, my son looked up at me and asked when he was going to get a match. I asked him what he meant, and he clarified, “In our family, everyone has a matching skin. I don’t have a matching skin.” I looked at him and struggled for words. “Just you wait, baby. There’s a South African comedian waiting in the wings for you,” seemed like a really inappropriate response. Also, I really don’t want my husband to die, and I recently read Trevor Noah has a girlfriend. However, over the years I have pooled some real resources, and in the moments of questions and concern, the times like this when I feel ill-equipped, I’ve learned that I can reach out to the network around us: The whole families that look like ours, the friends that match, the books we’ve read about skin and family, the therapist who looks like my son. Conversations about race and culture are, have been, and will continue to be part of the fabric of our family. These are resources that help us, support us, and provide us with guidance.
***
The other day I was helping my son with his homework. He made a particularly good joke, and I laughed. “You’re my favorite boy ever,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “ You’d probably say that to whoever your son was. Like, if you adopted another boy, he’d be your favorite.”
“Sure,” I said. “That might be true.”
“Unless he was boring,” my son replied. “Gosh, that would be the worst. Ugh, and what if I had gotten a boring mom? Oh man, I’m really glad we’re fun.”
“Me, too,” I said. “We’re a pretty great team.”
My son reached across the table and gave me a high five, and then he smiled real big, winked at me, and tooted because he has excellent comedic timing and the ability to fart on command, and I laughed again because he actually is my favorite.
Life is long, though, and issues will arise that I won’t know how to navigate. As our family grows and changes, I continue to feel ill-equipped, but I’ve learned that feeling insecure about my role of mother doesn’t actually mean that I’m not qualified.
We match in so many important ways, and for everything else, I’ve got back up.
A version of this essay originally appeared in The Magic of Motherhood and has been revised in honor of National Adoption Awareness Month.
Photo by Annemarie Bollman