Image: Lucia Fainzilber
Reflections on non-biological motherhood from a queer, mixed-race family built by adoption
words Nishta Mehra
Every year for the past thirteen years, my three best college friends and I get together for what we long-ago titled “Girl Weekend,” a name that might need updating now that we are all pushing 40. Still, the name is appropriate at least in the sense that when we met and first befriended each other we were very much girls, eighteen and nineteen years old; a distinguishing characteristic of our friendship is the fact that we have learned to navigate adulthood and all of its accompanying challenges together. Two of us have lost parents, three of us have gone to graduate school, two of us have survived emotionally abusive relationships, one of us has had a spouse diagnosed with cancer, and all of us have changed jobs, switched places of residence, gotten married, dealt with in-laws, and as of March of this year, become parents.
Though it is not possible for us to gather in person this summer due to the existence of a global pandemic and the American government’s bungling response to said pandemic, we have, like many other groups of friends and family, found ourselves reaching out to each other across the distance and growing closer despite, or perhaps because of, our current circumstances. Since two of us recently gave birth, the four of us find ourselves group texting often, requesting pictures of each other’s children, asking for or offering advice, and sympathizing about the challenges of isolating at home with our families.
During a recent text exchange, as we were bemoaning the state of the news—pandemic, climate change, racial injustice, various global political crises, etc.—one of my friends jokingly asked, “Do y’all ever feel guilty about bringing a child into the world?” The others laughed via emojis and the conversation moved naturally to another topic as I stayed quiet. Because the thing is, I didn’t bring a child into the world. Instead, I signed up to parent a child who was already on her way into the world. This is part of what is different about being an adoptive mom.
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I always knew that I wanted to be a parent; I’ve known that in my bones since before I hit puberty, and have never once wavered inside of that conviction. In fact, I spent much more time in my youth imagining myself as a mom than I did imagining myself as a wife, probably because some part of me knew I was not destined for traditional marriage even though I didn’t come out to myself until I was seventeen. Parenting and writing have long been the two “givens” in my life, non-negotiable parts of my identity inside of which I feel the most myself.
Though I knew I wasn’t destined to settle down with a nice Indian boy, what I didn’t bargain on was falling in love with a white woman almost twenty years my elder, a woman who had already decided not to have children for herself by the time we met. This might have seemed like a dealbreaker for the relationship, except that being with Jill felt as destined to me as becoming a parent did, and I was so young when we first met—still a university student—so having kids did not feel like a topic we had to wrestle with right away. I was in no hurry, and so Jill promised to open herself up to the idea of co-parenting with me. Over time, adoption became the pathway to parenting that was a call Jill wanted to answer: to provide a home and a family for a child who needed one.
‘I wanted the love I felt for my child to be viewed as just as valid as the love that is culturally assumed “real” moms have for the children they grow inside of and birth from their bodies.’
I had no objections to adoption; my primary desire was to become a parent, and while I had always imagined myself getting pregnant and giving birth, I was able to let go of my attachment to this framework fairly easily.
What I found harder to let go of was a desire for “sameness” - I wanted my experience as a parent to be considered the same as that of biological parents; I wanted the love I felt for my child to be viewed as just as valid as the love that is culturally assumed “real” moms have for the children they grow inside of and birth from their bodies. So much of how we think about parenting, culturally, is premised on biology and, by extension, biological sameness. We comment on how babies look like one parent or another, attribute a child’s skill or proclivity to a family trait. There is nothing wrong with this, of course, except that the preponderance of this language can serve to conflate biological inheritance with the deliberate work of parenting. What adoption makes visible is that, while these two things often show up together, they don’t always. The default setting is not the only setting.
My desire for recognition as an adoptive parent struck a chord with my experience as a queer woman who has been in a relationship with another woman for eighteen years. Early on in our relationship, not long after I had come out to myself and the world, I felt compelled to place an emphasis on the similarities between my relationship and the “traditional” kinds of partnerships I had been raised to want and see as valuable. I shied away from the notion that there were differences—love is love, after all—but what eventually came to realize is that to insist on sameness is to perform a kind of erasure. My relationship with my wife is no less valid, worthy, or meaningful because we are queer, but our experience of navigating our relationship is different in certain ways from that of our straight friends. We do not necessarily fall into the same default gender roles as heterosexual couples; we cannot necessarily model our family life on our families of origin (which can be both liberating and challenging). Many of our choices come with consequences our straight friends don’t have to navigate, whether we are considering holding hands in public or selecting a healthcare provider. And since we are not only a queer couple but also an interracial one, there are very few spaces, institutions, or cultural signposts that were made with us in mind.
As I have grown more comfortable in both my queer identity and my role as an adoptive parent, I have come to insist less on sameness and to instead open myself up to the opportunities available to my family because of our unique make-up. From the day that our daughter was born, my wife and I have been conscious of the fact that she is not “ours.” She does not belong to us; she was given to us and she is her own separate entity and being. Our daughter’s birth mother chose us to be her parents and literally placed her in our arms. She chose us, and we chose our child. We made a commitment to do right by her and to honor her birth mother’s trust in us, and I believe this has helped Jill and me to keep our egos at a bit of a remove when it comes to parenting. All too often, it seems, parents see their children as extensions of themselves and attempt to live out their past dreams or correct their perceived misdeeds as part of their parenting. In my thirteen years of work as an educator, I have seen all-too-often how this approach, though well-meaning, can blind parents to seeing their children as individuals and allowing their child’s true self to emerge.
My wife and I have had to practice what we preach in a big way in recent years; our daughter is a trans girl. In her case and the case of all trans youth, parents giving their children space to explore and discover their true selves is not simply a pretty notion, it can be a matter of life and death. Suicide rates among trans and gender non-conforming youth are alarmingly high, as is the risk of these youth experiencing homelessness, sex trafficking, physical violence, assault, and bullying. For Black trans and gender non-conforming youth, the numbers just get worse.
I wonder sometimes how Jill and I might have approached parenting differently if our child were white or cisgender. Would we be as mindful about the books, movies, and television we expose her to? Would we think as carefully about the neighborhoods we live in, the dance studios we send her to, the doctors we visit?
The truth is, it is impossible for me to separate who I am today and how I think from the fact that I am part of a queer, mixed-race family built by adoption and the parent of a gender non-conforming Black child. For this, I am grateful; I show up more thoughtfully in all areas of my life because of my commitment to being the best possible parent for Shiv. And I am also grateful for the ways that my family’s experience has informed the parenting that happens around us. My Girl Weekend crew may have their blind spots, as we all do, but they have also each expanded their awareness as parents and as people. They’ve thought critically about their own children’s bookshelves, pushed for non-binary gender designations at their places of work, and brought anti-racist thinking into their teaching. They do this not out of a sense of obligation, but rather because they see that making choices with my child’s well-being in mind also creates expansiveness and opportunity for all of us.