It never fails, whether at the grocery store or a wedding reception, I get asked the same question: “Where is she from?”  The “she” is my daughter, a dark-skinned toddler with kinky hair and a very mischievous smile.  I don’t have to ask them what they’re thinking.  They assume my daughter is either from Africa or the Caribbean, but the answer is not so complex: she is from neither.   Born in a hospital only two hours away from our home, we became a family in the not so traditional way, through adoption.

On the day of her birth, the state of my family changed forever.  Before then, we were just an ordinary couple.  We went to movies, ate out at restaurants and lived in a suburb where too many houses were tan and too many yards were green.   Now we are a “multi-culti” family–a phrase that has come to define all sorts of families joined by multiple ethnicities.  Some families become multi-culti through marriage; other families gain this new definition through adoption. Either way, I am proud of my family’s differences, but I am also highly aware of them.  Suddenly, living in a mostly white suburban neighborhood isn’t as appealing anymore.  Movies and TV shows that poke fun at ethnic stereotypes bother me.  And when friends and family complain about an ethnic group, while claiming they’re not racist, I’m likely to defend the ethnic group instead of my friend. Because now it’s personal.  Now it’s my daughter.

The impact of becoming a multi-culti family isn’t just limited to my husband and me.  Recently, my mother shared a story about the inequalities of race in the South during the 1960’s.  Her roots are in the Midwest, but she moved South during a brief time in her twenties when my father was stationed in the military.  After settling there,  she was told that she could hire a black maid cheaper than a white maid.  The price: a dollar a day.  My mother, who had grown up in a largely Caucasian area, said she couldn’t understand why a black maid was paid less than a white one. It wasn’t right to pay someone so little.  She never hired a maid.  

Now that she has a black granddaughter,  she understands that these inequalities aren’t just about a race of people. This time it’s about family, which is why the question about my daughter’s birthplace bothers me.  It’s a way of figuring out our family, of classifying our kinship into a group.  Despite their attempts, what they don’t know is I do not feel any different than other mothers.  Her skin color is the color of beauty to me.  When I look at her, all I see is my daughter, a face that is as personal as my own heartbeat. Our hands entwine as we walk away together. Black and white, curved into one.  All I can think of is the real answer.   She is mine.

I am cleaning out the garage on Labor Day.  It is hot, like August, with no feeling of Fall in the air. My neighbor passes in his car and yells out the window, “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to labor on Labor Day?”  He is always saying those kinds of things to us, and then he goes and clips his lawn or cleans out his garden bed.  His yard is immaculately suburban.  Green.  Neatly trimmed. Weed-free.  Ours is just the opposite: shaggy and brown.

Our cleaning-out-the-garage day is one more task in the nesting syndrome.  We never had the chance to nest before our first child; we were caught up in cancer treatments and the rotation of doctor’s appointments.  Now we are mimicking the same preparation that birds go through: getting the house ready, finding the scraps and bits that should be kept and throwing away the rest.

With our first adoption, I didn’t want to nest too soon.  The thought of waiting until the last few months gave me something to look forward to.  Of course, the same month we were suppose to receive our referral, we got the news that my husband had cancer.  We spent the following months going to medical centers and chemo rooms and hospital beds.  We spent a lot of time thinking about what would happen with our adoption, if anything.  Plans to decorate the baby’s room and buy baby supplies seemed unimportant now.  Nesting became the furthest thing from our minds.  We just wanted to make it through that summer.

When we finally were given the all clear by the doctors, we resumed our adoption, not thinking that much could happen.  What birthmother would want to pick a couple whose recent history included cancer?  Normal life became our goal–the slow resettling that happens after life has been turned upside down.  There are a great deal of books about surviving cancer treatment, but there are few that tell you how to live life afterwards.   We thought it would be a slow decent, like a smooth airplane landing.  But normal life was quickly interrupted by the news that our daughter was arriving in a few weeks.  There was no chance to adjust to normal life.  I wasn’t even sure what normal was anymore.

There was just enough time to paint the upstairs bedroom. Celery green was rolled onto the walls as we listened to Broadway’s soundtrack to Monte Python and the Holy Grail.  Their operatic voices sailed through the air while we stretched painter’s tape across the woodwork and edged the corners.  A crib was assembled and the room suddenly looked less like a white postal box.  Even though there were cans of paint and a tarp lying across the floor, the room had more life than it ever had before.  Our nesting was a gallon of Benjamin Moore and an Allen wrench. There was no baby shower before the arrival.  No pregnancy pictures.  No slow metamorphosis into a family of three.  No nesting period of nine months.  Only a phone call, a few weeks to throw the room together, and then a baby.  I often wonder what it must feel like to have nine long months to prepare and then I remember:  I had eight years.  Wasn’t that enough?  Somehow in the end, it didn’t matter if there wasn’t time to prepare for a baby.  We didn’t need it.  When a baby is born, there is very little they need other than food, diapers and someone to hold them.  Mostly, the last one.

This second time around, we are making up for lost time.  We are spending a little more time nesting.  Maybe it’s my curiosity to know whether I missed anything the first time.  Or perhaps, it’s the discovery of finding what I need most of all.