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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Phillip and I attended the required marriage preparation classes at church before our wedding. We sat through these with fake-interested smiles on our faces, ignoring the couple who said they'd never had a fight in twenty-some years of marriage (PLEASE) and wanting to crawl beneath the tables for The Intimacy Talk. We totally tuned out the people who came to talk to us about finances because whatever, like we needed to take these stupid classes ANYWAY. But boy do I wish I had listened up for the money stuff, people. I have been in charge of the family finances for about a year now and I STILL DON'T KNOW WHAT I AM DOING.

I'm not entirely sure what my deal is, since I somehow managed to financially survive years Eighteen to Twenty-Three (those being the post-parents pre-Phillip years) on my own just fine. I paid my own bills, did not sink into credit card debt, paid my rent on time and deposited my very own paychecks. In other words, I was a Big Girl wearing Big Girl Money Pants.

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It's weird to watch someone become a person a little bit at a time, day by day. She came to us a stranger in her own body. She could think and feel, cry and poop. The rest was a blank slate. She'd stare right through you, seemingly unable to tell people from lamp posts, all but blind and totally startled and amazed by the world around her.

She made eye contact with me first, maybe recognizing in my eyes something that reminded her of herself, maybe fascinated by their wet shiny appearance. I had her strapped to my chest in the Moby wrap and she kept craning her neck backwards. Afraid her little melon-head would pop off, I kept trying to force her back into the wrap but she would have none of it. Eventually I realized that she was leaning back to correctly focus on my face. I let her head rest in my hand and her face lit up. She stared right into my eyes with her little lips pursed and her eyebrows raised in surprised recognition. "Oh! My mom!" she seemed to say. I won't forget that moment.

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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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Dear Swine Flu,
I am hauling my precious babies to the pediatrician's office tomorrow where they will be injected and sprayed with tiny bits of you, all to protect them from what the newspapers are leading me to believe is The Next Bubonic Plague. I am a little bit terrified, not least because I am taking two children to the pediatrician BY MYSELF, and I do hope you are going to behave yourself and leave them alone. Deal?
Respectfully,
Maggie Cheung

Dear My Eyebrows,
Now if YOU get swine flu, that's fine by me. About half of you needs to disappear anyway. Remember when we used to have a standing date with the nice waxer lady? Yeah, those were the days.
Wearily,
Your Owner

 

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Dan and I are not good at Netflix. We put a bunch of stuff in our queue and forget about it until we’re ready to watch a movie. Then we open up the red envelope and find that we’ve gotten some lame, stupid movie that neither of us admits to actually adding to our queue. When I’m stressed or anxious, we always end up with something scary or action-packed. When we’re feeling romantic, we end up with a kids’ movie. We cannot plan it right to save our lives.

In the last month we’ve sent back several movies without ever watching them. I even pulled one movie out of the envelope at the mailbox, took one look at it, put it back in the mailbox and lifted the little red flag. So, when Little House on the Prairie, Season One arrived a couple of weeks ago, I almost did the same thing. I loved the show as a kid, almost to the point of obsession, talking like Laura, dressing like Laura (my mom made me the complete outfit, bonnet and all), pretending in all ways that I WAS Laura Ingalls Wilder.

 

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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'm not a very observant mom. Actually, a better way to put that is: I am not observant AT ALL. I'm rarely the first person to notice if one of my kids has a bump or a scratch, and when I'm in the throes of dealing with a whiny, unhappy kid, it hardly ever occurs to me that he might not be feeling well. I'm much more apt to assume he's just being a brat. I know, I know. That's, like, forty Mom Demerits.

Both of my kids have been out of sorts for a while now. It started with runny noses. Molly had it first and I thought, "Teething!" because one time I heard someone with authority say that a runny nose without any other symptoms often means teething and I REMEMBERED. I have no idea if it's actually TRUE, but there I was feeling oh so proud of myself for 1) noticing and 2) coming up with a diagnosis. Parenting win! Then Jack came down with a runny nose and I had to reevaluate -- unconnected grossness, or a cold making it's way through my family?

 

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For the last two years we’ve adopted the tradition of sacrificing our sugary goods to earn the good graces and fabulous gifts of the Halloween Witch. She flies through the night sky two days after Halloween, collecting all treats that have not yet been consumed by the children of the land to add to her sticky, sugary, tooth-destroying stash. In return for these leftover treats, she leaves a toy for each child who gives up his or her candy completely.

Our dentist told us that it was much better for the kids’ teeth to eat a bunch of candy every day for a short period of time than to eat a little bit every day for weeks or months. The idea of fighting with them for weeks about when and how much candy they could eat was absolutely agonizing to me. So we told the kids to just eat whatever they wanted as fast as they could and let the sugar-high chaos ensue. In the end, we turned to the Halloween Witch for help when we realized that we absolutely could not handle what our children became each year as they barreled their way through a seemingly unending candy gorge-fest.

 

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This Saturday, I turn forty. Forty years old. The big Four-Oh. As in, OH my goodness, you must be kidding me. Moms are forty. (And we all know moms are old!) People who say things like, “I remember when I used to go out and do that!” are forty. In fact, when I was younger, forty was so old I was amazed that my parents actually knew how to go out and have fun without having kids show them what fun really was all about. Forty was so over-the-hill. Forty marked the difference between us and them. It was huge!

Today? Oh, today forty means something entirely different.

 

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