Another Mother: Co-Parenting with the Foster Care System

4. I'm Vanilla, You're Chocolate

93 4 I’m Vanilla, You’re Chocolate I was walkIng down the steps of our brownstone with Cecilia in my arms, taking her a few houses away to a babysitter while I went on an errand. It was a beautiful day and on my neighbor’s steps sat Junior, a Jamaican American who had been doing some work next door for several weeks and with whom I had a nodding acquaintance. I often saw him on the steps reading his Bible during his breaks. As I walked past him after saying good-bye to Cecilia, he stopped me. “Excuse me. Can I tell you something? I’ve been watching that baby and, you know, she truly love you. I see the way she watches you and reaches out for you. Note: The chapter title is a play on Marguerite A. Wright’s title, I’m Chocolate, You’re Vanilla: Raising Healthy Black and Biracial Children in a Race-Conscious World. 94 another mother Just as natural as when my grandkids come to me.” Junior bent his knees and held out his arms, demonstrating how he reaches for his grandchildren. “It doesn’t matter that the colors of your skin are different. Your blessings will come not from man but from God himself.” With Cecilia’s arrival, we began to evolve into a multicultural family. We no longer felt just white. In most ways, our own changing cultural identity as a result of having Cecilia in our family was liberating and wonderful. Initially, I thought a lot about how people, both black and white, perceived us, and I worried about how they would react to our caring for Cecilia. And then I went through a period of feeling exuberant about the diversity of our world. I fantasized about adopting children from all over the world just so I could become closer to every culture and race. But gradually the issue no longer seemed significant, because I was wrapped up with my feelings for Cecilia as an individual and my concerns about her future. After several months, race was more a peripheral issue. However, this change also made us vulnerable in a way that we had not been before. We felt more personally sensitive to and injured by racism. I wish I could say I had been as sensitive before caring for Cecilia, but it was through our attachment to her that we became vulnerable. It reminded me that when I got married to Michael, I felt part Jewish. I had grown up knowing that there was discrimination against Jewish people and here I was, attaching myself to someone Jewish. This is extreme, but I thought, What if there is another Holocaust? When Michael and I had filled out the agency form for prospective foster parents, we had stated that we would take a child of any race partly because we live in a diverse Brooklyn neighborhood where we thought any child would feel comfortable. Besides , we were offering to take in a very young child and therefore it didn’t seem race would be an issue. A young child would be i'm vanilla, you're chocolate 95 oblivious to color. While some children under the age of four may be able to identify differences in race and skin color and even label them, they are not aware of the meaning of the labels (Crumbley 1999). While a very young child is “cultureless,” in a sense, we did realize that taking care of a child that was born into another culture , whether or not the child had absorbed it yet, would be significant to us and our community. However, we saw this as an opportunity. We welcomed the idea of diversity and felt that it enriched our lives. And at some level, we felt that our experience melding our Jewish and Catholic backgrounds while raising a family might give us more insight. While a difference in religion is less obvious to strangers than is a difference in race, we had to go through some of the same thought processes any two people of different cultural backgrounds might. We thought of our families’ reactions (for instance, Do you think your grandmother would have preferred that you had married someone who is Jewish?); we have to deal with people who oppose others marrying outside their religion; and we continually work on incorporating both our religious cultures into our children’s...