In the middle of getting two boys out of the tub, getting one boy lotioned up and in his pajamas while the other is jumping off his bed still naked using his towel as a cape pretending to be superman he asks me, "Mom, you turn brown like me?"
I'm so excited to be at the stage where race is starting to make it's first real appearance in our home and to begin to engage in what I imagine will be many conversations on the subject. I've read almost anything and everything I can find on transracial adoption; an adoption where the parents and child are different races. For years I've commented on his beautiful brown skin, how lucky he is be the color of chocolate and he knows this is good because mom loves chocolate. He hasn't really ever commented back about it, he just seems to observe until now when in the past few days this question has been asked more than once. So here we go!
Our conversation went something like this:
Z: "Mom, you turn brown like me?"
Me: "No, I'll never be brown like you."
Z: "Why?"
Me: "Because you grew in Norma's tummy and Norma is brown and your birth father is really brown."
Z: "Oh. Where did you grow?"
Me: "In grandma's tummy. Grandma is white so I am white cause I grew in her tummy."
Z: "Where did grandma grow?"
Me: "In Grandma Frost's tummy."
Z: "And I grow in Norma's tummy, she's brown like me and my birth father is really brown." He says this while jumping from his bed to the floor and I'm glad because it feels casual and I want conversations like this to be comfortable and casual. "We go see him mom?"
Me: "I wish we could but I've never even seen him. Someday I hope we can both go see him."
Up until tonight he hasn't really put it together that he has a birth mother and a birth father even though we have talked about it. I'm excited that he's beginning to put more of his story together. So I offer to show him a picture of Mo, his birth father. We pull up the 2 pictures we have of his birth father and talk about his brown skin and black eyes, things Zad inherited from him and for the night he is satisfied and so am I.
I know it won't always be this simple and that a conversation about his birth father will last much longer than a casual 10 minutes while getting ready for bed and scriptures. Someday I imagine we will talk for hours about his story before he came to us but for now I'm happy to be starting that conversation and happy he feels comfortable asking me his questions.
