I found the papers when I was 12 -- in a metal box tucked under my parents' bed. I wasn't supposed to be snooping all through their personal belongings; my mother had put a lock on her door, presumably to keep my brother and I from dipping into her stash of moon pies and discovering her and my dad's copy of "The Joy of Sex." But kids are experts at finding the hidden, and that little flimsy lock was no match for the wits of a curious preteen and her big brother. If we wanted to see it, it was going to get seen.

But this? This I wasn't ready for.

BABY GIRL...
DENENE MILLNER...
HEREYBY FORMALLY ADOPTED ON THIS DAY...

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I’m an African American mom with brown babies, and I take great pleasure in writing about the issues that moms of color and mothers of children of color face as we raise our kids. And while I happily co-sign the idea that at the base of it, all we moms want the same things for our children -- for them to be happy, healthy, smart, kind, honest, trustworthy, successful human beings -- we simply do not all parent the same, and there absolutely ARE issues that I deal with as an African American mom that white moms would never have to think about if they’re not raising a brown child.

 

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This is the story of all-too-many brown girls everywhere -- a story that some of us African American moms are desperately trying to change with our generation of daughters.

Which is why there was such an uproar recently when Newsweek’s Allison Samuels openly criticized Angelina Jolie, a white mom, for letting her adopted, Ethiopian-born daughter, Zahara Jolie-Pitt, sport hair Samuels said was “wild and unstyled, uncombed and dry. Basically: a ‘hot mess.’” 

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I don’t mean to holler and yell like a banshee when my kids get out of line. It just, like, happens.

Usually, I yell after I’ve asked them nicely five times to do something -- like move their crap off the kitchen table or straighten up their rooms or go to sleep already because it’s 10:30 p.m. and I put you in your bed two hours ago and I’m tired, dammit, and I want to give your father some so that I can pass out from exhaustion.

Or I might yell if they start sparring each other like they’re prepping for the next Tyson vs. Holyfield heavyweight fight.

I’ll definitely raise my voice at my kids if they’re defiant. Talking back gets my goat. Pretending you didn’t hear me when I know good and doggone well you did takes me over the edge.

And so I pump up the volume.

 

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It’s not that I hated how I looked, really. It’s just that after a while, it was hard to be judged, and not start co-signing the judgments. Maybe my skin was a little too dark. My hair a little too kinky. My affinity for books and dolls and sewing a little too nerdy. My butt and hips a little too big for a kid my age.

I wasn’t perfect.

Plenty of folks -- mostly adults -- stood at the ready to remind me of this. Picking on kids and their flaws was, like, a thing for the grown-ups in my life. Adult cousins thought nothing of saying I shouldn’t play in the sun because I was “dark enough as it is”; my mom’s grown friends often clucked that the chlorine from the pool would make my hair “even nappier.” One woman, the mother of my best friend, made a point of telling me every time she saw me that I was “getting fat.”

 

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