Performing Family (p. 4)

We don’t look like a family. I’m white, and Victoria is black. So we’ve learned, over the years, to make you see us as a family. I learned to stand behind her with my hand clearly on her shoulder when we rang the violin’s teacher’s door. “Hello, I’m Barbara and this is my daughter Victoria,” I say before the teacher can so much as open her mouth. And put her foot in it. I call Victoria “my daughter” like a newlywed on a fifties sitcom said “my husband.” Often. With a big smile. Straight at you.

Victoria and I “do” family, “present” as family, the way that a transsexual does gender, presents as female [sic—or male] We’re just doing what normal people do, but we know we’re doing it.

Rothman is talking about something that people who live near boundaries, or transgress them, have in common: the need to assertively self-define, and the burden (and gift) of having to be aware of what people who dwell in the middle have the luxury not to notice.

It can be necessary to assert who you are, when you live on a boundary, or people will invent a story about you that they are more comfortable with, and they can go to great lengths to do so. When I was a young lesbian in college, my lover and I used to hold hands around campus. Eventually, a classmate of hers told her that, for some months, she had seen us get on the bus together holding hands, and thought, “Isn’t that nice of Joey, to help that blind woman.” Eventually, she had a lightbulb moment, but this is one of my favorite stories about how far people will go not to see what they don’t expect—or in some cases, want—to see.

One of my female lovers used to introduce me as “my lover Su,” always, to everyone, by way of saying, “Just so there’s no mistake, just so you can’t pretend you don’t know, just so this doesn’t have to be on of those unspoken things between us..” I used to have a business card that said, “Su Penn: Writer. Storyteller. Lesbian,” for much the same reason.

This idea brings up so much for me that I was about to veer off here into more about being a lesbian, about my experiences with transsexualism, about what it’s like to be a queer woman in an opposite-sex relationship and how hard it is to make that visible to people. But this is supposed to be about interracial adoption, so I’ll rein myself in and focus on that.

So far, I have been fascinated by the variation in how Yehva and I are seen. When we’re out alone together, we are (so far as I can tell; this is based on people who make comments to me) universally seen as mother and daughter. When we were still in Chicago, the two of us waiting for clearance to come home to Michigan after she was born, people didn’t even assume she was adopted. “What are you doing up on your feet?” more than one solicitous person asked me, after stopping to admire her. Back home in mid-Michigan, “adopted” seems to be the first thing people think of, rather than “black male partner,” but in Chicago the latter possibility seemed more available to people.

I have three kids altogether, two boys who are my biological children, and white, and my daughter, who is black. They are spaced neatly, at three-year-intervals, like the proverbial stair-steps but with a very high rise. So far as I can tell, nobody mistakes us for anything but what we are: a family with two biological children and one adopted child (though I could digress—again—to my own mistaken assumption about another racially-mixed family I know, that their white daughter was biological). But if we have one extra kid with us, I start getting asked if I’m a daycare provider, and I wonder to what extent Yehva’s race contributes to the perception that we might not be just a family, or that I might be a professional caregiver rather than a mom with an extra kid.

It’s also true that the assumed tie between me and Yehva attenuates remarkably fast with distance, and seems to disappear completely if she gets ten feet or more away from me, or about the width of one aisle in a big-box store. This is the distance at which, twice now, a concerned and angry employee has mistaken Yehva for an unattended toddler, and I have had to speak up and say, from just a few feet away, “I’m her mother! She’s with me.”

Another digression: I can’t help wonder what the presumed race of the missing mother has to do with the mix of anger and concern the employees display. It makes me want to abandon a white toddler in the same store and watch through a hidden camera as the store employees interact with her. More concern, less anger? Or do they deal with so many unattended toddlers that they have a build-up of frustration about it that has little to do with race?

I wonder, too, to what extent I’ll have to be more assertive about “performing” family with Yehva as she gets older.. A woman with a baby or toddler seems presumed to be the mother—at least around here, where nannies aren’t common—but as Yehva gets older, it seems to me that more options would come to people’s mind: daughter of a friend, Little Sister, something else unspecified. Perhaps I’ll have to perfect the hand-on-shoulder, the dazzling smile, “this is my daughter….”

I don’t think those of us on the edges should be too hard on people who make mistakes. Of course people are going to revert to the most available possibility. We should be honest about our own mistakes in this regard; besides the above-mentioned assumption that a certain couple’s white daughter was not adopted, when I knew that their black children were, I have in the not-too-distant past assumed that a lesbian couple’s child was conceived by donor insemination—only to learn, to my chagrin, that at least one of them didn’t identify as a lesbian, that they were polyamorous, and that their son was a happy mistake resulting from a relationship one of them had with a man. So, gentle with the people whose assumptions we bump up against, OK? Gentle—but firm. Oh, so firm.