“Mommy, just because you’re white, doesn’t mean you can order me around.” 
“Wow,” I thought, gazing into my five year olds brown eyes, “now what do I do?”

 I held her gaze and quietly and firmly said, “my telling you that it’s time to get dressed, has nothing to do with my being white or your being brown, it has to do with my being your mother.”  She held my gaze in return and grabbed her shirt to get dressed. 

You get about 5 tenths of a second to respond and you pray that it’ll come out okay.  I think it did this time.  The issue was clear in my mind—it was about putting on her clothes, not about race.  But, when is it about race?  And how is she making sense of having two white mommies?  The meaning she is making, that we are all three making changes from day to day.

A colleague of mine was told that if she wanted to become masterful at something she needed to find a question that she could live in for twenty years.  I think I’ve found mine:  “What does it mean to be a transracial family in the post Obama election world?”  

Browsing in a used bookstore over the weekend, I was in the parenting section, looking for books on adoption.  My eyes scanned the pregnancy, newborn, awaiting a child books, looking for a title that would indicate adoption.  Finally, toward the bottom of the section I spotted it: the label “adoption” separated with a slash, next to the word “divorce.”  “Oh,” I thought,  “They ran out of room and they smooshed these two sections together.”

I would not have chosen to put adoption books in the same section with books on divorce but it’s telling of how mainstream society values and views adoption–not quite in the same category with books about starting a family, but more in the category of when family plans go awry.  Still, somehow, second best, not equal to.

What about those of us who choose adoption, not as a back up, but as a great and valuable journey to pursue, equal to having a baby biologically?   And what of the children who are adopted, how then are they viewed by society?  Will they struggle against the social stigma that the circumstances that created their families were somehow tainted?

Adoption is about creation.  It’s about choice.  Adoption is about love.  And this one word doesn’t stand to qualifiers and hierarchies. There is no such thing as second class love.