"Are you his nanny?"
These are some of the questions I get out loud. Heaven only knows what people think or wonder in the confines of their own little mind. I'm sure it will only get worse with time, and that me keeping my maiden name will only add to the confusion.
On Sunday Solly and I stopped for lunch. Out of the corner of my eye I saw I woman staring at Solomon and talking about him. He's gorgeous, so of course this happens all the time. I didn't look up until I heard the husband (teasingly) say 'Stop looking at the baby!!' I caught the woman's eye and she confessed their son had just gone away for college, and seeing Solomon was making her feel nostalgic. This is when I noticed the couple was also biracial. I wanted to ask what her experiences were: if she ever stopped getting asked if she was the nanny or adopting mother, if her son grew up with a confident sense of self and identity, if he felt accepted by people of all races, etc. But I didn't. They had left the restaurant before I could work up the courage.
It's a shame, because Solomon's racial identity has been on my mind a lot recently, before I had seen this couple at the restaurant (I still can't spell that word correctly on the first try, btw). Due to my work schedule, Solomon really only sees a select few people on a daily basis: Leila, our daycare provider, and the other 3 kids there. Sure we'll run into our neighbors, or Leila's neighbors, but most of his daily interactions are with white people. Most of the books, dolls and toys he is exposed to are white. Yes, we have friends and babies who are mixed, Asian, Indian, etc., and yes, obviously Gerard is black. But I don't want his first understanding of the world to be that most everyone is white, and there are some people here and there with darker skin.
So, short of posting on my mother's board asking if there are any black people that want to be friends, I'm trying to increase Solomon's awareness of different races in the little ways that I can control. Firstly, I want to get him a doll. My first inclination was to try to find a baby doll that matched his skin complexion, but I think instead I'll get him a darker skinned 'black' doll so he can have some other daily exposure to black people besides just Gerard. Or maybe I'll get both, who knows. I ordered these dolls for work a while ago, so I might get 1 or 2 for home also:
they are a little bit ugly, but they get the job done.
My next project was to substitute Solomon's library with more diverse books. I brought home every book I had kept at work that featured any non-Caucasian child or family. Yes, right now he has his select few books he wants to read over and over again, but he will still flip through the pictures of other books by himself, so maybe he'll have some subconscious perspective of racial diversity.
Of all the books I have between his home library, and the kids books I keep at work, I only have one book- ONE- that features a mixed family. Shame, isn't it??
I've done a fair amount of research and made an Amazon wishlist of a handful of other books that depict mixed families, but it's pretty hard. The killer is, if there's a book with a biracial family, the book is about the family being biracial... Now, I'm sure those books have a place, and if/when Solomon needs a book about this- fine. But, I want books that the biracial family can just be. Where their skin color doesn't have to be explained, it's just accepted and a non-issue. I don't want Solomon's attitude to be 'Some families have different skin colors and that's ok,' I want biracial/multiracial families to just be the norm, and nothing to blink at.
I've posted this issue/question on a number of different multiracial families parenting boards, have gotten pretty much 0 response. So apparently nobody else cares about this, but I do.
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