[img]139|left|||no_popup[/img] Without any sunscreen, my baby is getting some color. Even with that deep dark Coppertone tan, though, people still ask if I am his mother.
The first time it happened, it just washed over me. We were at the first birthday party of another baby, in the backyard of a friend’s home in La Canada-Flintridge. I had put my seven-month-old baby in his first dressy outfit and was thinking more about feeding and napping schedules than socializing.
So, when a woman came up to me and commented on my baby’s good looks, and then asked if he was mine, I didn’t think much of it. Why I would be holding someone else’s baby? I don’t know. But I owned up to motherhood — still a new and amazing concept to me at the time — and moved on.
Then it happened again at the park where I was pushing him on the baby swing. Again it happened when I was buying personal care items at the drugstore. Once again at the mall. And so on. I could go on, but you get the idea. For some reason, people see my baby, then me, and imagine that his “real” mother is off somewhere else.
I haven’t probed the reason people have asked me this question. What I really want to say to them is that really, I don’t love kids so much that I’d be at the park or the zoo or the drugstore (or anywhere else) with a child if he weren’t mine. I’m enjoying motherhood, but it hasn’t turned me into a lover of babies generally. If I didn’t have one, and when I don’t have one anymore, I don’t imagine I’ll be anyplace that babies congregate ever again.
The Nerve of Some People
Still it is not hard to guess why people don’t think my child is mine. Either it is because I look so “black” or because he doesn’t.
The first time I was mistaken for a nanny, the child wasn’t my own. I was playing with my nephew (who’s half Mexican and half white), at a pool at a resort in the Catskills. It was 1998, and he was five to my twenty-seven or so. My newly minted Ivy League lawyer self was horrified to be cast into their early twentieth century stereotype, but I was visiting my husband’s family and on my best behavior. I kindly informed the women who were so inquisitive that I was his aunt and left them and their gaping mouths to figure it out.
I now live in a neighborhood filled with nannies, including the nanny for my child. Most, if not all, such nannies are women of color. I guess the logic that follows, in the minds of my fellow park-goers or store-shoppers is that any woman of color must be a nanny. (Sadly, my nanny has also been mistaken as the nanny of her own children). Is it so hard to believe that women of color are conscientious mothers? I presume no one would make this mistake if I were standing in line at a welfare office or seeking out some kind of government aid.
The idea of asking any woman about her relationship to a child in her care makes little sense to me, unless one is a kidnapping suspect. I make no assumptions when I see someone with a child who doesn’t “look” like her or him. With adoption, and many different family configurations out there, I assume that when a woman (or for that matter, a man) is with a child, the child is likely hers (or his), or somehow related — like me and my nephew. Even if I assume a woman with a child is in someone else’s employ, I’ve never thought to probe the relationship. For the few seconds or minutes we’re in the same place, why on earth would that matter?
I have lived in this country long enough to know that race always matters. And this brings up another question for me. How is it, given our legacy of slavery with its own legacy of rape and brutality visited upon its victims, that people can’t work out in their brains that my child, with caramel (but not brown) skin, with curly (but not kinky) hair, etc., could be mine?
Don’t You Know?
The apparent ignorance of these people reminds me of the “brouhaha” over Michelle Obama’s heritage. People claimed to be shocked to learn that she had at least one white ancestor. Seriously? Don’t white folks wonder how it is that some of us are very light, some very dark, and others every hue in between? Have they not seen indigenous West Africans who, despite a whole lot of colonization themselves, for the most part remain dark-skinned? Have they not pieced enough together to reason that most African-Americans, despite tracing their history back to West Africa, are a heckuva lot lighter skinned than the African natives? The answer should be obvious, but just as obviously, much of America seems to miss it.
European blood runs through the veins of most African-Americans. One estimate puts the average amount of European ancestry for African-Americans at about twelve percent. Lena Horne clearly has a higher percentage than, say, Shaquille O’Neal, but the odds are that a little bit at least is in all of us.
Regardless, it should be obvious that if you mix that with a white parent with all European ancestry (my husband) with someone like me (an African-American, who most certainly has some European blood), then the result will often be a fairly light skinned child whose genes are probably more European than African. I’m not the only one.
Since people have been questioning the relationship between myself and my child, I have paid far more attention to the children I see and the women I see with them. There are plenty of (likely) mothers who look like me with plenty of children who look like mine. You would think the sheer number in such a small area would render the question moot. Or do they, like myself, get questioned about their relationships as well?
When I’ve mentioned this to my friends, a number of them have said that I should throw the question back at the women who ask – ask them point blank why they are asking. Challenge their assumptions. In the more feisty days of my youth, I probably would have done just that. My outspoken college-self would never have stood for it. But my older, busier self doesn’t even care to answer the question, let alone follow up with my own. I can’t change anyone’s perceptions, and no longer care to address others’ ignorance. Maybe, to avoid the issue entirely, I will just turn into one of those parents hiding behind ear buds and other electronic gadgets so as not to be disturbed by anyone.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
