The Musings of a Mixed Girl's Mama

One of my biggest fears in life is not being able to relate to my daughter. Lately, that has manifested as me sobbing over not knowing how to braid. Because while working with my own stick straight texture is something I’m comfortable with, managing Raelynn’s curls is something I’m working on every day. 

I don’t take being the mother to mixed children lightly. I try to continually have my eyes opened to my own biases and privileges, and I am continually learning about the culture and life experiences of my husband and his family.

As a unit, we navigate through small town southern racism, where I have to question the feelings of the person flying the Confederate flag down our street, and where annually Easter reminds me that I chose love over my extended family as my decision to marry my husband removed my seat from the table.

We also, in the same breath, work to keep communication open and real with my husband’s family in the city. Recognizing that their struggles, while different from our own down here, are still largely in part due to injustices of our society.

We ebb and flow from rural to city, southern drawls to language that flows with a rhythm, strict and stressful parameters to an approach at life that is much more relaxed. And every moment of every day I stare into the sweet faces of my children knowing that regardless of my love for them, their walks through life will contain struggles I never have, and never will experience.

Moving back to Southern Illinois has been a struggle.

I have friends, who while they love my children, just don't get it. They don't understand that there is literally no one else that my kids see or play with that looks like them. They don't understand that while we have gained a tremendous amount of family within a few hours, we lost a rich and diverse community that surrounded us at our home in Wichita. But the loss that resonates with me the most is the loss of strong, beautiful, confident, passionate, God-fearing women of color that spoke into my daughter's life on the regular. Women who I entrusted with guiding my daughter on a walk through life that I will never step foot on. It is a loss has left me weeping, desperately praying to God to just send me someone Raelynn can not only look up to occasionally like her family in Chicago, but a woman who she sees and speaks with regularly in her daily life.

It's a loss that has left me struggling to connect with the women of color I have met at places like the library because I am afraid I will start rambling like a maniac of how all my black female friends live in Kansas and I just need someone to be present in my daughter's life, but I don't just want them to be my friend because they are a woman of color, because I am honestly just looking for friends period, but it's great that they are black because I actually do need women of color in my life and in my children's lives because did I mention my children are mixed?

Seriously.

The word vomit immediately starts to build up in my mouth as my inadequacies flood my soul and the fear of never being the mother my daughter needs tears my heart to shreds. So where do I begin? I'm not sure.

But today, I started with trying to teach myself to braid, and with every strand of hair I held, I prayed that Raelynn would see and know how desperately and fiercely I love every caramel colored inch of her and that God would hear my prayers and fill my life with women and children who experience their lives from the perspective that my husband and children do, a perspective that is rich and full of color.