Ari Kelman and I got to know each other in non-adoption nerdy internet contexts. He’s a history professor who has a new book out, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek and I really enjoyed reading it and don’t think I’d have found it without knowing him already, which is one reason I want to talk about it.

Not long before reading Ari’s book, I’d reread Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare by Dorothy Roberts, and while I absolutely agree with her driving argument that black children are over-represented in foster care and adoption from foster care for reasons stemming from racism on a lot of fronts, the anecdotes she used to buttress her arguments kept leaving me saying, “Yeah, but!” I mean, every time Mara’s mom introduces us to one of her friends or relatives, that person will tell me about being Mara’s regular babysitter. Now, maybe Mara’s mom just went through a lot of babysitters, but you’d think that if there were that many other people keeping an eye on Mara, some of them would have noticed the problems that brought her into care, no? And so I don’t entirely discount the truth of what these people tell me (and certainly not in the case of the person who gladly volunteered she’d routinely given Baby Mara soda and Cheetos and then napped while the babies watched tv, but also not in the case of the elderly relative who sheltered Mara and her mom when they didn’t have anywhere else to go) but I also think that what they’re trying to tell me is that they cared and care about Mara, that they wanted to see her do well when she was in their care and want to see her doing well now. In some cases, especially with the family, they’re giving me the story they’ve told themselves about why and how they did what they could for her that absolves them of some of the guilt or grief they might feel about losing her to foster care and adoption. This is totally normal behavior and makes a lot of sense to me, but can be understandably frustrating for the foster-adoptive parents who are hearing these stories about how great everything was until foster care came along.

So while Ari doesn’t talk about foster care and Dorothy Roberts does nothing but talk about foster care, it struck me that his book was better at covering the dynamics of how and why people tell themselves the stories they want and need to hear, which is a topic that’s long fascinated me anyway. (And to be fair to Roberts, she’s very clear on the racist cultural narratives going on and how they were shaped and who benefits from them, which I do find both useful and true, but she didn’t go as deeply into the individual side of the things as I would have preferred. I still like and highly recommend her book!)

I’d describe the Sand Creek Massacre as the violent destruction of a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment in Colorado in 1862 by soldiers from the fort supposed to protect them, possibly under the belief that they were actually harboring anti-white criminals. From the start, you get soldiers who understood their grisly attack and the destruction and mutilation that followed it as justified and justifiable, the leader of the attack who hoped to use it to further his political goals, surviving tribe members whose leaders and families had been destroyed and who could no longer keep faith in the peace system, and military men who’d refused to participate in or support the massacre. So far, so simple, right? But then you add well over a century of propaganda and selective memories, in which the massacre is commemorated as a Civil War battle on a monument at the Colorado state house while the Cheyenne and Arapaho descendants of the survivors have ended up on reservations where the massacre is seen as a deep source of collective pain and the trauma that followed. (It also somehow ends up getting mentioned as part of the backstory in the latest Iron Man movie, but despite Mara’s brief interest in running around in Iron Man’s iconic Black Power Salute-esque pose, I’m not likely to see that any time soon and can’t really say more about it.)

So by the time there starts to be interest in an official historical designation for Sand Creek, not only are the descendants deeply invested in a story they’ve carried for generations and feel is being disregarded, so are various landowners who believe (but can’t always prove) that the massacre took place on their properties and what to be well-compensated for it, the national and state officials who need to try to tease out truth from exaggeration to find and mark exactly where the massacre occurred and how to acknowledge its ambiguities, not to mention amateur historians and historical reenactors and the overwhelmingly white townspeople who aren’t sure how to feel about a potential influx of visitors. And all that’s even before the September 11 attacks in the midst of the process of preparing the historical site make it controversial to even talk about a monument to American troops who acted dishonorably, who are going to be portrayed as bad guys rather than heroes in a political context where words like “evil” are getting thrown around freely.

My favorite quote Ari got was probably near the end of the book: “I think I know what I know. But what I know is still pretty limited.” Basically any of the participants in the process to create the National Historic Site could have said it, but not all of them would have had the self-awareness to do so and Ari is fantastic at teasing out what people do think they know, but also why and how. He’s (mostly implicitly) making a larger argument that this is how all history works, piecing together incomplete and biased sources to try to find a meaningful workable narrative, and that was part of where I think it overlaps with the weird world of foster parenting. There are plenty of people involved in a case who think they know what’s going on but can’t share that with everyone or who enter something in the computer under the wrong kid’s name so a child is suddenly tagged with a sibling’s diagnosis or who get the child’s name wrong in the first place (which has happened to all three girls who’ve been in our care and is what I was originally planning to write about today) or who jump to conclusions because they think they’ve seen this story before or because it resonates with something in their own histories. None of us foster/adoptive parents, birth parents, caseworkers are ever going to know what happened to our beloved children in the gaps in their stories, and all children remember their lives with selective biases just like the rest of us do.

What I know about my girls and their families and my parenting is indeed pretty limited, but what I can control about that is my willingness to be open to multiple readings of that limited knowledge. Sometimes there’s someone like the one National Parks worker late in the process of haggling over how to reconcile various survivors’ and later visitors’ memories of the location who was able to find a plausible reading that validated all the major viewpoints and created a response that respected everyone’s truth. Sometimes, much as I hate talk about “agreeing to disagree,” I just have to be at peace with knowing that different invested parties are going to see things in mutually exclusive ways, especially in something as personal as a child’s life, safety, or custody. As Ari delineates so clearly, not only do people carry intergenerational pain through the personal stories they believe and use to define themselves, but people also create emotional connections to symbols and stories that then guide their identities and behavior. I look at this as sort of the definition of being human and accept that I’m more obsessed with the idea than your normal person, but I find a lot of meaning in looking at what people find meaningful.

In fairness to people who don’t have that inclination, when I tried to explain what I found exciting about the book to Lee by starting with a “plot” summary, she said, “That sounds boring as hell!” and, well, I guess that’s her story. She wouldn’t necessarily agree that understanding Mara’s and Nia’s families is helped by reading about slavery and debt peonage and the Great Migration and the Black Panthers, but to me it helps I can’t connect them to their ancestors directly, though we’ve got some access to those stories, and yet I can be aware of the larger narratives that lie behind theirs. I appreciate having Ari’s book to add to that mental backdrop not because it speaks to their history specifically but because it speaks to a history that includes incompleteness, uncertainty, and a somewhat satisfying ending that still doesn’t and can’t tie everything up because the world is still going and people are changing and we all only think we know what we know.

Anyway, nothing legal will happen for quite a while yet, but I feel like a huge weight has been lifted. Tonight we’re buying some new storage furniture for the hallway outside the bathroom and we’ll be rearranging the playroom and the girls’ rooms. I can get rid of all the duplicate things I’d been saving in case Nia didn’t end up staying and we can have things ready to transition quickly if/when we do end up getting the right call about a little boy. (It’s my fault that we haven’t; I’m very late getting my medical form in this year and we’ve just supposedly been taken off the call list, though we’ll be back on next week.)

Nia finishes school at the end of the month and I think I’ll be enrolling both girls at the YMCA day program so they can get swim lessons every day and stay active and social. It means Mara will be leaving the program at the community college she started when I had to go back after my two months of parental leave when she first came to us and was 3, but I hope having that transition with Nia will help ease the transition to kindergarten.

Speaking of kindergarten, we just met some new neighbors whose son will also be there, the first kid from our neighborhood we know who’s going to be in the public program. (There’s another who will join for first grade when he graduates from his Montessori school.) I have my own thoughts about how much the schools could be better if the people in our neighborhood who are paying to send their children elsewhere sent them to the schools, but I guess that’s why I need to get elected and have a stronger role. Anyway, Mara has one new friend who will also be in kindergarten and she has a cousin on her dad’s side she’s met twice now I think who will also be there. We’ve asked to have her placed in his class so she can have a chance to get to know that part of her family in a less-mediated way. 

And I don’t remember anymore what I’ve posted or not, but after a long time complaining about not wanting two moms, Mara said the other night, “You know, I really like two moms.” And we know she does, and also that she misses the other parts of our family, which is why we never made a big deal about it when she said otherwise. In other cute-kid news, Mara and Lee were awake for a change when Nia and I left for school/work this morning. Nia shouted, “Adios, amigos!” because it’s okay to yell once people are awake and Lee has had some coffee, I guess, but she immediately asked me, “Wait, what’s Spanish for ‘family.’” I told her, and much more quietly she said, “Adios, mi familia!” We haven’t talked to her about TPR or adoption yet, but she knows that she has a place here with us, and that heartened me too.

This means that the moment when we/Lee are going to have to commit to adoption is getting closer. That got a bit murkier in the week before when we ran into one of Nia’s relatives at a birthday party for one of Mara’s classmates, who is a cousin on the other side of one of Nia’s cousins. (And yes, that makes us two-for-two in coincidental family contact with the girls’ relatives thanks to the community college!) The relative claimed not to have realized that their branch of the family would be eligible to request placement (which I’d mentioned in direct conversation this summer when we met previously, but whatever) and yet also was now apparently serious about trying to bring Nia home rather than have her be adopted. Because all her relatives live in the next state over, our state is not going to seek them out and they have to make themselves known to the worker. That’s exactly what Lee had been hoping and praying for, that there would be an appropriate relative placement for Nia so that we wouldn’t have to be in the tough position of either refusing to adopt because we don’t think Lee is going to be able to do better at connecting to her and meeting her needs for the next dozen years or adopting her even though Lee isn’t yet comfortable with the idea and forcing Lee into changes she doesn’t want.

As it turned out, the relative wasn’t serious enough about wanting placement to manage to call before court, despite multiple explanations from both Lee and me about why that was essential. Since the reunification phase of the case is over, the state is not interested in looking into other relative placement options. Our worker tried to push this a bit, but I don’t think her view has gotten any traction. It sounds like this relative is just going to be told that it’s too late and that Nia is now headed for adoption. Personally, from some things I know and have observed, I think that’s most likely how it would have worked out even if the relative had been screened and vetted, but Lee is sort of shaken to have that last hope for another alternative taken away.

I’ve always said that I thought Lee would get better with the idea of adoption once she was no longer guarding her heart against reunification, and I guess we’re about to find out how true that is. Nia’s mom called me after court and was surprisingly calm and lucid. Her preference would be that Nia go to the relative (though it had never occurred to her to suggest that relative in the first place) but stay with us if that can’t happen. When we saw Nia’s grandmother this weekend, she said the same thing. So I’m honored that they trust us with Nia and can see that she’s healthy and cared for properly. At the same time, I feel awkward and guilty to know that we’re not as committed to her as they might think. Concurrent planning is really emotionally hard, and I think this is more common than people probably let on. Lee was up in the night comforting Nia during a series of nightmares Nia was having and I’m really impressed with the job she’s been doing as a parent to Nia, but that doesn’t change her underlying discomfort.

I also had to talk to her mom about the plan for Nia to repeat first grade. She’s made huge leaps in her reading and steady progress in math, but she’s still just not where she needs to be to cover the material first graders are expected to know. The plan is to keep her with the same teacher next year so she can be the expert who helps the younger kids learn the ropes. Her teacher and workers and Lee and I all agree that this seems like the best balance, that letting her soar and be a role model will be a much healthier fit for her than letting her start another grade significantly behind the other kids. She’s such a bright girl, but she has a lot of trouble listening rather than talking, staying on task without reminders from an adult. I’m grateful that this doesn’t mean she’s getting diagnosed with anything as she would be at a lot of schools, because I agree with her teacher that it seems to be immaturity and her personality rather than an underlying condition, but she makes things harder for herself and hasn’t learned yet how to stop that. There will be a number of her classmates retained, too, but most of them are going to other classrooms. And we’ve talked with her best friend Katrina, who repeated a grade the year she was adopted out of foster care and is now glad she did. But still, telling Nia’s mom — who puts a premium on Nia looking cute and working hard at school — that a year’s progress wasn’t enough to make up for the disrupted year of kindergarten was hard and I hedged more than I probably should have. But she was understanding about it and supportive of the rationales. She wants to see Nia succeed.

And that last sentence has the last big issue. Even though the case against Nia’s mom is concluded, the no-contact order the judge put in place is still in effect I guess until adoption or maybe just TPR. I asked the workers and lawyers if Nia would now be able to send letters to her mom and was immediately told that I’d be in contempt of a court order if I let any contact happen. Sigh. So she can’t get her daughter back and doesn’t have a caseplan to comply with to regain visitation but she’s also barred from seeing her daughter because she’s not following the no-longer-existent caseplan? Welcome to foster care, I guess! And we have to figure out if we do adopt Nia what role her mom and her extended family will play in her life. Right now, Nia can only see her grandmother, who would like to visit every weekend but I think is going to get scheduled for once a month plus special occasions because I think more would be overwhelming to Nia. (Ugh, as I’m reminded that she wants to bring family to a birthday party for Nia, and I’m going to have to tell her that the worker won’t allow it unless I can talk the worker into it somehow. Ugh.) All of this is harder in certain ways than it needs to be and it would be hard anyway to be talking to someone who’s losing her rights to her daughter even if you weren’t the person who’s been raising that daughter for almost the last year, and so on.

Nia doesn’t know about the changes yet, and I’ve sort of been putting them off because I don’t know how to answer the questions that will come up about adoption. I guess once Lee and I know that, I’ll move forward with talking to her. All of this is weird and hard, very different with a child who’s almost 7 than one who was still 3 when all these legal changes were going on. I’m a different person and parent than I was back then, too. I suspect the outcome will be the same, that Lee and I will arrive together at the courthouse for an adoption, this time to join these girls who already consider themselves sisters as legally part of the same family. I hope if that happens we can come to it as joyfully and peacefully as we did last time. I guess now that’s my personal goal.

Last week I picked Nia up from her after-school program because her worker was coming over. As we were driving home, I stopped at the stop sign two blocks from our house and there was Rowan ready to cross the street in front of me. We recognized each other simultaneously, I rolled down the window to ask where he was going and whether he wanted a ride, and he hopped in. (He was going “over by where I ran away from you that one time,” because this kid is nothing if not honest, as I noted when he did run away from us that one time!) He of course didn’t know anything about Nia, but they said hello and he was kind and chatty in his questions to her. He was happy to meet Mara, too, and immediately wanted to check on the animals he remembered, cuddling our dog while he talked to us a little about what he’s been up to as he reconnects and now draws back away from his birth family and what his recent life has been like.

Our worker showed up within 20 minutes so we can’t have talked long, and then Rowan was off again with directions on how best to walk as far as he needed to walk. He’s taller than I am now, but he grinned and hugged us, asked Lee to help him apply for college even though I know that’s a job that will mostly get delegated to me. Our awesome worker got to meet him for the first time and didn’t think there was anything odd about us seeing him and just bringing him home. It just feels right to have had him here, to have found some small way to let him know that he’s still connected, that the girls know about him (and have more questions they want to ask next time) and that we haven’t forgotten about him. Lee and I reminisced and laughed a lot that night after the girls had gone to bed, just like we had a lot of good memories to talk about with him in that short visit.

I am so grateful that I got the chance to be a sort-of parent to Rowan. We never were paid a cent for the time we spent with him because it was always considered visits or respite, never even got mileage reimbursed for all the times we drove to the other end of the state to pick him up from his residential treatment center even though we were supposed to get that. And yet at that time in his life, we were the only adults he interacted with who weren’t being paid to do so, and that ended up being worth far more than anything the state would have given us. That he has some warm memories from his time with us, that he’s held onto photos and letters and gifts makes me so happy. It means we did what we wanted to do in showing him we cared for him even if we weren’t able to meet our original goal of becoming his family through adoption. I didn’t use the “mom job” language we use with the littler kids then, but I got the idea that we could reach out to him, feed him, connect with him meaningfully. I know it meant something to us and I now know for sure that it still means something to him. Lee and I have been so lucky and so loved and it just amazes me.

With that out of the way, though, I want to talk about going to church. Again. I know I’ve done this a lot of the years, but trust me that it takes a lot of mental energy to know where I stand on church as a white atheist going into this church that is almost entirely black, with a worship experience very different from the Catholicism I grew up with and a theology that (of course, since I’m an atheist) I don’t accept. There are tough parts like how Lee thinks I’m going to hell and won’t talk to me about it because it’s too upsetting for her. There are tough parts like how Mara, who’s doing much better since starting her occupational therapy, would spend too much of the music time with her hands over her ears trying to protect herself from the noise, and how she and Nia get jealous if the other is getting more of my attention (since I’m almost always the only parent there) and so I spend an hour or two with two 50-plus-lb. children on my lap.

I don’t know when I became an atheist, though the first moment of doubt I remember comes from when I was 4 or so and realized that if God was watching people all the time, then that meant watching them while they were on the toilet, which was gross and disrespectful and I was not cool with that. As an adult, I’m totally comfortable with what I believe, and remember during my teens dropping my recitation of bits of the Apostolic creed as I stopped believing in various parts until there was nothing left to say. (When I thought about this to write it up, I had to admit that I do believe in “the forgiveness of sins” except that I don’t believe in sins in the Christian way and so it probably doesn’t count anyhow.) At any rate, I’m an atheist and Lee has made it very clear that she doesn’t want me telling the kids, at least at this point, that I think religions are stories that are created by people to help people structure their lives and give meaning to a big, scary universe. For that reason, though, it makes me laugh that Mara insists on saying “The end!” after the “Amen” at the end of prayers at my parents’ house and that when Nia asked for a soothing prayer the other night Mara suggested she “pray for ‘happily ever after.’”

But regardless of my beliefs, Nia as a child in foster care has the right to be supported in her own religious beliefs and practice. As a 6-year-old, she doesn’t have much of either, but it’s clear that she and her family are (Protestant) Christian and I want to encourage and preserve that for her. This means I’ve bought her Bible stories with ambiguously brown characters and take her not just to a church but to a black church and pray with her every night as part of her bedtime routine. (Mara’s family is also Christian, though her mom has become a Jehovah’s Witness. I don’t think there’s an easy way for us to incorporate being part of any local JW community as a lesbian couple, but I can teach the girls about some of their beliefs, especially the ones that involve not saluting the flag or saying the Pledge of Allegiance or joining the military and so on.)

As I was driving home from church a few weeks ago, I said something to the girls about, “And you know why we go to church…” and Mara immediately peeped up, “Because at church everybody got brown skin!” So we ended up talking about how, yes, that’s a big factor. I would not take them to a majority-white church. It’s important for me to be the minority, typically one of two white people in the room. If I’m going to take them to church as a non-believer, I want them to get the “black church experience” so that when they grow up they’ll be able to draw on shared idioms with their friends, though that may be less of a factor in their generation than it is among my friends and peers. This way, they won’t have the experience I did of never see anyone speak in tongues until I was 30 and so on. They’ll also have some shared experiences and language with their families, though none of them attend our same church.

Even more important than that, they’re seeing other black lesbian-headed families. They get to talk to other kids who haven’t always been thrilled about having two moms. They hear people give testimony about having a mom who was absent because of drug addiction, about being a mom who was absent because of drug addiction, about growing up in foster care or being a foster parent, about the people who played parental roles for them and the ways they’ve created family within and beyond their biological families. The head pastor spoke recently about how hurt she was by the parents who didn’t care for her and how even the love of the grandparents who raised her didn’t heal that hurt, she had to learn how to be loved by a parent to make her peace with being loved by God. All of this resonates with the girls and means a lot to them, and I see part of keeping them in touch with their culture (distinct but overlapping with keeping them in touch with their families) is making sure they’re getting a nuanced view of people living in poverty like their families are, that race and class and gender and everything everything everything get mixed up together for us.

So for the first time, all four of us went to church together for Easter. Mara wore the same dress as last year and Nia had a new one, both of them with coordinating sweaters and flower clips in their hair. They brought new dolls (mini American Girls, Celine for Nia and Addy, and don’t get after me for going in for Easter basket presents because both girls have some sad Easter memories and I don’t regret giving them something extra special at all) and were able to play some and pay attention some and make it the whole three hours of the service, though Lee bailed after two to get home to watch basketball. They got so many compliments on how sweet they looked and how much they are growing, and I think it really matters to hear that from other people with dark skin, other people with locs, other people who are affirming that we are a family and they are part of it all.

Now that I’ve written all this, I’m not sure what I’m saying exactly. I don’t regret what we’re doing even though it’s sometimes a stretch for me and even though in some respects it’s made me less open to Christianity as a belief system I’d consider than I might be with less contact with Christianity, more secure and sometimes more frustrated in my atheism. And yet every night I pray with the girls, “extra love and blessings for all the people you love and all the people who love you, and may you sleep well with the sweetest dreams and go right to sleep” and I mean all that. It isn’t what I grew up with (the “God bless all good people everywhere” that led to one of my first rejections and revisions, since it seemed like the good people were the ones who needed blessings the least) but it isn’t too different either and it helps Nia get the transition she needs to going to sleep. It’s not how things worked when she lived with her mom, but I don’t think it’s incompatible with how her family would want things to work. In all of this stuff where I’m/we’re trying to connect with the girls’ cultures and histories and so on, that’s the balancing act we have to go through. And I think it’s good that it’s hard on me sometimes (or is that my Catholic youth talking?) to get through this element of what we do for them because so much of what they do with us is hard on them and I’m trying to make church as painless and meaningful as possible, though admittedly they still sometimes think it’s too loud and too long. It’s normal to them and that’s what I want and what I think they should get, and where they go with their understandings of divinity and the universe from here will be up to them at some point. I am just trying to teach them to listen, to learn, to love, and I think both Jesus and I can be cool with that.

Then Lee turned to Nia at dinner the other night and flat-out asked whether Nia was afraid of her. Nia agreed that she was, but also agreed when Lee asked if she knew that Lee would never hit her. I think this broke the ice between them and I’m proud of Lee for talking directly about something she was thinking about, which is often hard for her but has often been successful for me. It may be too soon to see how this impacts their relationship, but they had a hilarious time through the rest of that evening and have seemed more comfortable with each other since then. 

Nia has a teacher in-service day at school coming up and so I’ll keep Mara home that day and the three of us are going to have some adventures. Already in the last week we’ve gone on a long nature hike, gotten to a Celtic music and dance fest, gone to a foster training with childcare the girls enjoyed, and spent some time with an adult friend the girls enjoy. This weekend we have a babysitter (a sweet and peppy education major at one of our local universities who turns out to have also been a gymnastics coach, so a home run in terms of making the girls happy!) so Lee and I can go to a neighborhood party. 

As a result of seeing our friend, we were looking back at old pictures and seeing how the girls have grown. Mara has gone from a clingy little thing to someone so self-assured she decided to have me leave the room so she could talk to her counselor. (She did, of course, talk about not wanting too moms, but this time clarified that what she really wants is for all her families to live together in one big house. It’s made me more sad for the day I hope will never come when we’ll have to say no to having her siblings move here.) Nia had just lost her first tooth when she moved in, and now she’s cut molars and is about to lose her first up top while Mara has a tooth hanging on by a thread and will probably have her first loss by bedtime. They’ve gotten taller and more muscular and their faces lengthened. They’re both more comfortable and so sweet and settled with each other. They’re growing into such wonderful little people, curious and hilarious, gentle and kind. I am so grateful for all three of the others who make our family what it is now.

The next morning, I was getting dressed for work when Mara woke up and went in to snuggle with Lee, who takes her to school later than Nia and I have to make our own morning trip. Suddenly I heard hysterical sobbing and went in to find that Mara was losing it over the thought that I was getting ready to go to work and never come back. I scooped her up, took her back to the rocker in her room, and eventually got her to calm down and talk to me. Obviously she’s learned that sometimes parents go away and don’t come back, so I knew that was part of her worry, but I decided to flat-out ask if she was feeling sorry that she’d told me she wanted me to go away, and she agreed that that was her impetus. We had the usual talk, about how it doesn’t matter what she says or what she does, that I’m going to keep being her mom and keep loving her. I think she felt better, though I can tell some of her sadness and confusion is still swirling around inside her.

Then yesterday Nia came home from school with a card she’d made me that read I LOVE MY MOM, which she confirmed was meant for me. She’s called me “Mommy” like Mara does, most recently saying “I need Mommy Time too!” and things like that, but I’ve only heard her refer to me as her mom once before. We’re quickly coming up on the anniversary of her removal and are expecting to see some behavioral and emotional fallout connected to that, and I think playing with putting me in that “mom” role is part of that. However, she blew the positive momentum she had going by passing Lee a card she’d made her that read I HAT MY MOM. On the plus side, she’s never actually called Lee anything close to “mom” before, but the negative side is pretty obvious. Lee’s feelings were hurt, which didn’t seem to have occurred to Nia as a likely outcome, and Lee stayed sort of cranky for the rest of the night, having a little conversation with Nia about how we don’t say “hate” (which she knows is on Mara’s banned words list right now) and how saying that is unacceptable, which is probably not how I would have put it but still what she was feeling. I’m not sure what feelings Nia had been trying to convey, but think it was a joke of sorts but also a comment on how she likes me more than she likes Lee most of the time.

One of the reasons I haven’t been writing here is that I keep reading all this stuff about how someday your children will read everything you’ve written about them. I know that’s true and I know it’s a possibility and so it’s been very hard to think about how to write about the confusion we feel about whether to agree to adopt Nia if her mom’s rights are terminated, which is a process that will probably begin as early as next month though stretch on from there. Lee and Nia butt heads a lot. Lee is not having the trouble she did with Val and Alex, but she’s a better adoptive and pre-adoptive parent than she is a foster parent. The uncertainty unsettles her and triggers some of her own concerns and just generally doesn’t bring out her best. I think some of this is race-based, that Nia also doesn’t expect the best from Lee because she knows what black moms are like and how they can let you down and be inconsistent. So they come at each other with their fight-or-flight responses at the ready and then wonder why things aren’t comfortable between them.

Also, Lee doesn’t know a ton about child development and since Mara is behind Nia age-wise, we’re going through stages with Nia first and some of them scare Lee. “Will she keep dropping her pencil on the floor while she does homework forever?” I dunno, probably not. She’s SIX, and soon she won’t be six anymore and she’ll do different things. Probably some of them will be annoying, but a lot of them will involve greater responsibilities and so forth. I’ve seen her grow in her time with us and I’m really not worried that she’s going to become a monster or anything, though I too have concerns about how good I’ll be at keeping up with her stereotypical girliness and how extreme her extroversion is. 

If her fairy godmother showed up and said that she was sorry she’d been away but was ready to take Nia to a magical home where she’d be surrounded by friends at all times and have round-the-clock nurturing attention and get to watch magical Disney shows that aren’t all about looking cute to get a boyfriend but would still make her happy and where her clothes would always meet her standards as “cute,” well, I think we might be relieved that she’d be going somewhere perfect for her but very sad to see her go. I really have a hard time imagining how crushed Mara and I would be to lose Nia, because just thinking about it feels overwhelmingly sad. I think Lee would be very sad, too, but guarding her heart as strictly as she has means she doesn’t have as much to lose either, and I realize that’s the point. 

Right now, though, there’s no fairy godmother on the horizon and all her known family members have been ruled out as options. So I’m stuck with feeling like we are not the best family for her in the whole entire world, but we’re a family where she’s found a place for herself and has flourished and I realize that’s not nothing. When she and Lee do end up stressing each other out, my initial response is to be sympathetic to Nia because Lee needs to act like the adult she is, and yet we have a policy of backing up each other’s parenting decisions as much as possible, so usually I’m walking a fine line there. And ultimately, there’s this family that we already have and if I believe Lee is not going to be able to function effectively and appropriately as Nia’s mom — which I’m not at all convinced is what’s going to happen, but it’s my worst-case scenario — then I can’t sign off on an adoption and I’m going to have to agree to break my own heart and have them find a new home for her. Ugh. 

Lee is actually not a bad foster parent, and I want to make that clear. She’s not hurting Nia or hurting Nia’s feelings inappropriately (and you have to understand that Nia claims Lee hurt her feelings by asking her to put her dirty clothes in the hamper, so basically she’s six) but just doesn’t have the same sort of connection she has to Mara and doesn’t seem willing to put in the work she’d have to do to get to that point, or at least not while there’s still some chance Nia might go home. All of this, too, is heartbreaking for me because it turns out I’m pretty good at being a foster parent, and so here’s that whole potential future closing off to me because Lee can’t and won’t keep up. Of course it’s selfish of me to be hung up on that, but that’s part of it. Being a foster parent is just too much for Lee, though she’s still convinced it would be easier for her with a boy than with a girl and that she really wants to parent a boy, which will probably happen because she’s getting calls from the state pretty regularly.

I’m terrified to do more and I’m even scared to put this out here because I imagine people will talk about me and ask how could I even contemplate bringing a little boy into a home where he might not be loved and treated equally, where he might end up having to leave to go to another foster home rather than back to family. I know that stuff, really, and I’m honest about it. All of this is brutally hard for me, and there are plenty of times I’ve thought that we should just quit and not risk it. But if Lee is convinced she can do better and I’m convinced she can do better, I want to give her the chance to do that. And maybe adding a third will make it easier for her to find better emotional space for Nia. Maybe it will be a failure and they’ll both have to leave and we’ll close our home. I have no idea at all.

I didn’t really plan on going into so much detail here. Like I said, it feels inappropriate to even be talking about this, but it’s also what’s on my mind all the time. It will be there when I pick Nia up from school and hug her and ask about her day and when she bounds into the living room to hug Lee and talk to Lee about what went on at school. The truth is that she loves Lee, too, and Lee admits that she loves Nia even while she’s guilty about feeling that the love she has isn’t enough. They’ve both just been pushed off the path of easy, exuberant love by their tough early relationships with their moms, and I know they have the capacity to get through it and figure things out, especially the one of them who’s had decades to work on it. But Mara’s fantasy of a home for her and Lee is not on the table at all and wouldn’t be a good idea even if it were. We have the family we have and that will include Nia for as long as it can, I honestly hope forever. At least all four of us can enjoy it as best we can for what it is now, and most days we do that.

Whatever happens, I got to be a mom and I got to be loved, and that’s huge and so much more than I once would have thought I could have done. I have a lot of thoughts and big feelings about coming to the end of fostering in the next year or so, but I’m so glad and grateful that I got a chance to do it and I have so much love and respect for the children and families I’ve gotten to know in the process. I wouldn’t change that part for anything.

So at any rate, Nia went off to school this morning with enough money to subsidize half her classrom’s expected minimum level. I hope that means her class will meet its target! I’d said something on facebook about the drive, thinking that some of my relatives who know her might be interested in contributing or that I could hit up our neighbors without having to have her walk across the street. Instead, I got donations from friends from all over, parents and foster parents and non-parents, teachers and unemployed folks and my coworkers. I am so overwhelmed with this kindness from people who care about Nia and her schoolmates, probably half of whom have never even met Nia.

Friday after school, both girls went to the dentist and then we had a celebratory dinner out afterward. I took the girls to the bookstore down the street from the restaurant. Partly I was being selfish (and seriously, had me obsessed and dreaming furiously all weekend!) but I also wanted to get some new books for Nia to try to read.

On Saturday night, Nia read Mara a bedtime story for the first time ever. We’d had to go to a special shelf to find “level 1″ learn-to-read books at the bookstore, but we brought some home and Nia had puzzled through one with me in the afternoon (with some special help from Mara, who was able to sound out “sad” when Nia couldn’t) and then read it with a pretty high degree of comfort again that evening. Lee was astonished to hear her fluency because normally Nia is not much of a reader, though she enjoys writing and doesn’t generally make a fuss about doing her homework.

At this point, we’re all taking it as pretty much a given that Nia is going to be in first grade again next year. If she’s still with us, which is the most likely outcome, she’ll have her same teacher again. Her teacher has been there long enough to have been my teacher if I’d gone to the school and next year is her last year before retirement, but she’s still active and involved and I really like her, as does Nia. She thinks that Nia’s problems are not learning disorders (and the fact that Nia managed to learn a whole year’s worth of math in 3 months suggests the same) but a combination of being young — just 6 and a half when half the class has already turned 7 — and having gaps from her kindergarten and early childhood experience. If she can come in next year already knowing what the rules are an in a position to be a role model for less-experienced kids, which we know is a situation she loves, we all think she’ll be able to find a niche for herself where she can really succeed, especially if she can remember that she really does need to stop talking sometimes!

Now, though, first grade is so academic in ways it never used to be. Kindergarten is, too, and Nia started kindergarten last year in another state, then sometime in the fall was withdrawn from that school when her mom moved to the city where Mara’s siblings live, at which point she was eventually enrolled in a new kindergarten there, though not at the same school Mara’s siblings attend. (I’m curious about that and don’t know whether all the city schools each get a share of the kids from the public housing area or whether it’s that some streets in the development go to one school and some to another and because Nia lived up by Mara’s Grandma Joyce and not down by the siblings and cousins that she got bussed somewhere else.) One of the problems that brought her mom to the state’s attention was an inability to get Nia to and from school appropriately, though her mom was also active with homework and cares very deeply about Nia’s academic success. So then almost a year ago, Nia was removed from her mom’s care and sent out to a rural McMansion suburb where she was the only black child and the only child who couldn’t read in her third kindergarten that year for the two months or so that school lasted, and her teacher seemed (going by what I see on the papers Nia saved and what Nia’s prior foster mom said) to be uncomfortable figuring out how to meet Nia at her level and so chose to ignore her rather than try to get her up to speed or get supports in place to help her.

In any event, we enrolled Nia at the high-poverty school with a go-getter principal near us. I know most of our neighbors pay to send their children to private schools rather than be part of our city’s public school system, but I’ve been so impressed with the education Val and now Nia have gotten there and look forward to having Mara join in next year. I also feel more and more strongly that if more of the parents from our neighborhood <em>did</em> send their children, that the school would be a whole lot better. But from our middle-class perspectives, it’s hard to think about having to fund-raise to get something that seems as simple as a theater performance, and yet that’s the situation this school is in and the reality for the other kids who live in our city, who aren’t making it to the zoo and the children’s museum and art museum as often as Nia and Mara are, who don’t have the home libraries that we and our neighbors do. Okay, I’ll stop before I take off on a rant, but the more time goes by the more I’m taking it personally when I can tell people feel some kind of way about “those kids” when those kids are MY kids.

And my kids are wonderful! The girls have been asking about getting more chores and so yesterday they scrubbed the bathroom and couldn’t wait to show off its shine to Lee, but also practiced dusting baseboards and bumping down the stairs on their bottoms while holding rags to the sides to dust the edges along the hideous carpet runner on the stairs. They played well all weekend while Lee and I were different strains of sick and pitiful and I know I’ll come home to big hugs and big smiles tonight. Then after dinner, Nia and I will sit down and maybe Mara will follow us and we’ll all read a story, or Nia will read to us. She’s grown up so much in the time that we know her and I’m so proud of that and excited about where it will take her next.

I am reminded of a friend of ours in our old town who asked what we’d do when our child asked why he or she didn’t have a dad and my immediate response was, “Who in our town has a dad???” Really, we’re so lucky that Mara and Nia do have parents who love them and have been involved in their lives. There are plenty of kids who don’t even have that, and while we’re the only lesbian foster parents at Nia’s school, those of us who are variants from the mom-dad-kids nuclear family seem to be the majority. 

I love that Nia’s fellow first graders were drawing superheroes and in addition to the capes and cowls you’d expect, there’s a Wonder Woman with a massive afro and another with a bright blue hijab. I love that our being out has been one factor in some of Mara’s young teachers being a little more open about their own sexual identities, though I don’t know that the kids are aware of much of that. I think it’s great that the girls are seeing lots of different kinds of families and that they have a huge number of people who count as the families who love them. As far as I know, Mara’s teen relative everyone assumes is gay hasn’t come out officially, but I’m glad our very presence was enough to to show that Grandma Joyce accepted our kind of family as being just as good as the others. There are many ways in which what we have to offer is a plus.

But I’m also realistic about how much we’re going to come up short. As I tell Mara now, I have white skin because I was born from the bodies of people with white skin whose ancestors mostly came from Europe. I can’t have brown skin and curly hair and the personal history that growing up black would have brought me. I can do all I can to foster their cultural health, but I can’t do it as an insider and that’s just reality. Going into foster care and being adopted out of it is not the ideal for any child, and adding an interracial lesbian couple as parents just makes it more fraught. I’m not saying all of this is easy on the kids. It wasn’t their fault they needed us and it wasn’t their choice that they got us. But they’ve chosen to love and trust us, and I’m grateful for that. And it was our choice to take on the hard job of dealing with the rest, too.

But Mara has also started complaining about having two moms. First she had plans about which of us should move out so her dad could move in and she could have a mom and a dad, but she realized that would be inadequate because she likes Lee and me to both keep playing the roles we already do. 

We’ve finally made it to the playgroup for kids with gay parents, and the only other child of color was also the only other child with a foster care history and the only other child whose parents were an interracial couple, so that was interesting. (There are other people who fit those categories in the larger group, but they just weren’t there that month.) Then last weekend we had our friends who run the potluck over, a black mom and her two black girls the ages our two will be in a few more years plus the mom’s white fiancee. This is going to be an ongoing thing because we all like each other a lot and had a blast, but also because each of us is the only other interracial-lesbian-couple-with-two-black-girls the other family knows. So I think once a month we’ll all go to playgroup and once a month we’ll do something with just our two families, and that’s both the weekends that their moms have custody. Even though all four girls are happy, healthy, well-adjusted, I think it will make things easier for them to see another family with the same or at least a similar setup. 

We had a family meeting earlier this week to address the “No two moms!” shout that’s been punctuating Mara’s interactions with us lately and also that Nia has started addressing some of her frustrations with Lee by saying that she doesn’t want to live with Lee. They loved the family meeting and keep asking to have one every night, but I think we’ll settle for one a week. We talked about parents’ jobs and judges’ jobs and who gets to decide who lives where and does what and why, and even though the girls didn’t get the answers they’d been requesting, they were happy with the outcomes of the discussion.

Mara snuggled up to me last night at bedtime and said, “It’s hard having two moms and it’s hard to be a sister!” I was sort of glad she’s picking up the language from me (“it’s hard” or “I’m having a hard time” being one of their standard ways of asking for emotional help because that’s how I always frame it for them, but also that HAVING two moms is a situation in which she finds herself but BEING a sister is about how she is actively involved in her relationship with Nia, which doesn’t involve a whole lot of parental control. When I talked to her about this, wondering whether she was jealous of the kids in her class who have a mom and a dad, which seemed weird since they’re definitely in the minority, it turned out that what she meant was that she misses her first parents and she wishes she could have been raised by them. Having a mommy and a mama is an ongoing reminder of that broken history for her. And so I hugged her and we talked about how of course it was hard and sad and that it makes me sad for her and for them, that when Lee was a little girl she was also sad about missing Leah and angry that Leah and Richie weren’t doing the work to raise her. Mara really seemed responsive and had a lot to say about all of that, 

And then there’s race, of course. At one point, Mara’s comment was that she wanted me to leave and her dad to move in so that everyone in the family could have brown skin. It seems that most of the time, Nia wants to have white skin because it makes her sad to see the shelves and shelves of dolls with white skin and the people on commercials with long hair she’ll never have while Mara wants me to have brown skin and curly hair because she wants us to match and wants my visible differences to disappear. They’re both having to grapple with a culture that values whiteness, and they’re doing it in age-appropriate ways, but it really is heart-breaking to watch sometimes. I had to stop at the drug store to pick up some more decongestants last weekend and Nia, in a very offhand way because she’s trying on how she talks about our family, told the woman sorting makeup, “I have a white mom!” as we walked by. All I can do is support them, let them experiment with how the feel and what they think, but from the outside it’s hard. 

Meanwhile, Mara is seeing her dad more often but not her mom as much, and taking her to her grandma’s grave seems to have calmed a lot of her concerns about death. Nia is not getting that same level of family connection, but for the most part she seems okay with that and is using the time to mentally separate her identity now from her history, which I think is good and bad but also only a step along her process to however she’ll end up seeing herself eventually. And Mara’s desires are complicated by the fact that seeing her dad means getting to eat her favorite cake at the restaurant where he works and her desires to see her mom are really about wanting to see the baby who lives in that house. She certainly gets something out of seeing her parents, but I think she takes that part of it for granted and is into the personal perks at this point!

So in case people want to know how we’re doing, it’s that. Nia wants to be white. Mara wants to be back with her parents. They both know that’s not going to happen. Lee has made big strides in interacting with Nia in a way that doesn’t trigger fears from her former life, and that’s led to a lot of unexpected hugs and happiness from Nia directed toward her. I’m glad I got in the middle of things and held a family meeting, and I’m reminded again how much being a parent for me means paying attention to what I think the girls are trying to say and help them find the words to say it without putting my own words in their mouths.

So we talked about “No two moms!” and why it’s not a useful rallying cry. If you want more chicken at dinner, you don’t get it by saying “No more french fries!” If you want more chicken, you need to tell me that you want more chicken, and even so sometimes we will have eaten all the chicken and you’ll have to wait until next time. If you say you want no two moms, that’s not going to happen in this family, and Mara knows about the judge who decided she’s a part of our family forever. (Yeah, someday we’ll get into the details on how I don’t actually have rights to her and that judge actually opposes families like ours, but for now we’re focusing on other things. She’s five. And Nia is already obsessed with the idea that we should and will get married since our friends are doing it, so we’ve got plenty of family pressure on our plates already!) One phrase we’ve had a lot of luck with is telling the girls, “If you need extra love, you need to tell me with your words rather than your behavior.” They do know that they can ask for extra love and do so regularly. Unfortunately what they’re telling me right now is that they want extra love from people who can’t necessarily give it to them, want things that they can’t have. And while that’s reality, it’s a sad reality. And it’s hard. And I’m not saying we’re doing any of this right or trying to set out a framework others should use, but we’re muddling through it. We have a long weekend coming up for these two moms and two kids and I think all four of us are looking forward to it.