This is a commentary about racial slurs.
But only in part (and only at the end).
It’s also a commentary about my family, which is a picture of many things: divorce, death, adoption, foster care, chronic illness, multi-racial family life. It’s a lot of sadness, triumph, and joy mixed into our little family of six.
Back in 2015, I was healing from the effects of Lyme Disease. I had been bedridden for months and my body was still weak but growing stronger when my ex-husband and I discussed starting a family. Natural birth was too risky, potentially passing the disease to the fetus or disrupting my sensitive recovery.
More inflammatory problems plus pain and hormones? It was a truly terrifying thought.
We decided together. And we went slowly, taking our time with home studies, classes, and finding lawyers as we looked to adopt from the Marshall Islands so that I could share my own Pacific Islander heritage with my baby.
It was a time of waiting until all of the sudden…it wasn’t.
I got a call on a Wednesday asking if we could be in Hawaii on the following Monday.
We dropped everything and left.
We didn’t meet Remi in the hospital or an office building. We met her at a restaurant where her birth mom arrived alongside an attorney and her biological children. Remi was only 3 weeks old.
I sobbed and held her while I ate. My mind was still grappling with the fact that I was going to be a mom while still fighting this disease.
We were new parents for four months before my husband decided to leave and we began our divorce. I felt like I was being buried under the weight, but sometimes the greatest adversity has a bittersweet edge.
I grieved that I’d never experience a child inside my body or that a woman’s baby is the only one who can feel her heartbeat that intimately. But every night, Remi slept beside me when I was alone. I would cry and tell her I was sorry our family was not whole. I placed her close to my chest to feel her heartbeat next to mine. That fulfilled me, and I felt that feeling of her heart beat next to mine. I would imagine that it was soothing her the way it soothes a baby to sleep.
Six years later, I remarried and was having a similar discussion about expanding our family through adoption, even another Marshallese baby so that Remi could share her heritage with a sibling.
Plans changed when a fostering opportunity became available, and our sweet M. came to us.
When we go out, we get looks these days. This isn’t the 1950s. People aren’t scandalized, but kids notice differences in hair and skin color. People size us up.
“How did this come from that?”
Or when Logan, one of my two boys whose mom passed away seven years ago, gets asked whether his athletic ability comes from me or his dad, we stay quiet or laugh it off and let a more complicated story slip away.
We’re all a FAMILY even though we all might come from different places.
That’s why when my daughters were both called the N-word, by different classmates and acquaintances, it stung in a way that you might not expect.
It stung because my family life had centered around crossing lines and believing the world to be a place that would accept that and accept them.
It stung because young kids, innocent and vulnerable in preschool and first grade, had already been touched by something historically painful and baked into our very culture.
When young children use racial slurs – children as young as THREE – it’s time to do some soul searching. We as adults have a duty to educate and protect our children.
Who surrounds your child?
What media are they exposed to?
What rhetoric do they hear from you?
We must take very seriously that our experience is not the only lived experience. Reinforcing in the home that our skin color, hair type, family structure, disability, and community are the only “right” or normalized features is to limit your child’s ability to relate to the world as a whole.
Relying on children to absorb this thinking from the world will be a losing battle. We, as parents and as adults, have to confront it head on. We have to teach our children to love and accept others just as we would want the world to love and accept them. It’s too important.
Our circle is a little smaller these days, but I don’t let it change much. The funny truth about struggles and adversity is that it enlarges your thinking, making it more flexible, patient and sensitive to others’ pain. We all face adversity, so let’s use it to lead our kids to be the most empathic, ethical people they can be.
Cary Apothecary opened in June 2024 with a vision to offer natural and homeopathic health solutions, non-toxic alternatives to home and self-care products, and unique products for people to explore for their daily beauty regiments. Nearly 90% of items are bought from independent brands and small women-owned businesses in the United States. The shop is located at 395 Cary Algonquin Rd Ste G.