Enough

When you’re a mother to adoptive and foster kiddos, people often say that when you have a Black child you become Black, when you have an Indian child you become Indian, when you have a Latino child you become latino. And I understand the sentiment, because you begin to see the world very clearly through their eyes. The problem is however, that you become all of those things very poorly. You become a sub par Black mama. A sub par Indian mama. A sub par Latina mama. You embrace the ethnicities of your children, but you are none of those ethnicities well. 

You feel the weight of being on the fringe of their society, while recognizing that they may not feel fully comfortable in the society they find themselves growing up in. So your family forms its own culture to combat this loneliness. You have adoption days and form unique family traditions and pray that the love and comfort they find in being fully immersed in your own family culture, somehow compensates for what they’ve lost from the beautiful culture into which they were born.

It doesn’t, and never will, but you continue pouring love into their leaky hearts until they tire of hearing how much you love and adore and cherish them.

“I love you!” I shout behind Jalayna as she walks out the door to high school, the sky still dark, the temperature dipping below thirty degrees. She wears only a hoodie (and a single glove, which I don’t understand), but when she sighs out loud and shouts back “I know,” with annoyance in her voice, I trust that she will be okay, and though what I can give her is not what she should have had, I trust that it will be enough.