"Where are you from, anyway?"

TK and I are in Iowa. Every summer, we travel to Colorado and then to Iowa to visit family. Every summer, our travel gets me thinking about home -- about where I'm from and where TK is from. Tonight, I sit on the stairs of my mom's deck in Iowa's hot humidity after everyone has gone to bed, watching the blackened sky flash with lightning, and I write to understand.

I am from this place. Iowa. I am from purple coneflowers, black-eyed susans, queen anne's lace, tiger lilies. I am from acres of undulating green corn and neatly rowed soybeans. I am from red barns and grazing cows, from green tractors with their enormous black rubber wheels. I am from brown-water rivers, toads in the mud, climb-able oak trees. I am from "Come in for supper!" and basketball games. I am from thunderstorms, billowing clouds, tornado winds.

No matter where I live in my life, no matter what experiences I add to this self, I am from Iowa. I grew here, from this dark brown soil, from these expanses of sky.

But what will my daughter say when someone asks, "Where are YOU from?" She was born in south-central Ethiopia, in the state of the SNNPR -- in a tukul shadowed by tall green false banana plants (enset). In her conscious memory, she is a southeast Alaskan girl from the temperate rainforest -- she dons her Xtra-Tuff rainboots and tromps through the forest searching for blueberries. In the summers, she is part Rocky Mountain girl, striding out up a rocky trail, collecting rose quartz, squatting to admire a paintbrush flower. She is also part Iowa girl, paddling at the front of a canoe on the Upper Iowa with a tiny paddle, munching on an immature ear of field corn, clapping at the "BOOM!" of thunder in a storm.

What other places will shape her? We may not always live in Juneau. Ali and I plan to teach abroad someday. In TK's heart, where will "home" be for her?

Last week, I stood in Gram's kitchen -- in Iowa -- stir-frying pork for dinner while TK perched on the counter beside me, concentrating hard on an avocado she was trying to chop with a butter knife. Mom and Gram sat in the next room in the rocking chairs, talking about the various homes in which they had lived when Mom was growing up. Suddenly my mom asked, "Sarah? What's your first response when you hear the question, 'Where is home for you?'" My emotions got tangled in my throat. I've been struggling to answer that question recently. All I could do -- in a true first response -- was gesture to Gram's kitchen. Here. Here is home.

But I didn't really mean that. If Gram sold her house today, it would be Gram who would still be "home" for me, just as it was my other grandmother -- not the farmhouse she traded for a condo -- who was "home" for me. My mother is "home", no matter what house -- or what city -- I need to go to find her. I'm from people, mostly -- more than places. I'm from Gram's full hugs, I'm from Grandma's sense of humor, I'm from Dad's observant eyes, I'm from Mom's listening ears.

I return from a walk along the cornfields' edge with my mom tonight, and TK (who had been playing with her grandpa Gerry) throws her arms around me in a sweet, full hug, "Mommy! You're home!" More than anything, I hope that is one way she answers when someone asks her adult self, "TK, where are you from, anyway?"

And maybe she will also say, "Ethiopia." Probably, she will also say, "Alaska." And maybe -- just maybe -- she will inhale and catch a whiff of Colorado sage; she will stretch her arms and sense the open promise of an Iowa sky.

Ethics 3.5

Mitike and I have come to the Juneau Arts and Humanities Center to watch her friend Carmen dance in the JDU dance recital. We settle ourselves excitedly into our seats, and we wait for the lights to dim and the show to begin. TK and Carmen are good friends in preschool; in her little hand, TK clutches a special toy she picked out to give Carmen after the show. But when it's time for Carmen's dance -- when all the little 4- and 5-year-old girls come twirling out in their black leotards and their blue clouds of tutus, my child begins to glower in the seat next to me. Anger rises from her like heat.

I lean over. "Are you okay?"

She mutters through clenched teeth: "Those blue dresses are UGLY!"

I'm so shocked I can't respond for a moment. My child never speaks this way. She's so empathetic, so kind, so loving. And the blue dresses are quite beautiful. I frown to myself, and then react with a stern whisper: "That is NOT okay, TK! That's your friend!"

TK tries to squirm out of her chair and begins to wail. I'm embarrassed. Why is she acting this way? I pull her firmly onto my lap, and prepare to mutter another stern whisper in her ear, when my Mama sense finally kicks in. On the stage, Carmen and the other little girls flutter around like blue butterflies.

"Sweet girl," I whisper to my daughter, "do you wish YOU had a blue dress like that? Do you wish YOU were on stage?"

And then she begins to sob -- great big tears rolling down her round little cheeks. "I want a beautiful blue dress!" she cries. "It's not FAIR that Carmen is four and I'm not!"

I hold her close, and we watch the show, and we even manage to congratulate Carmen at the end and hand her the toy. Carmen's mom and I quietly equalize everything by handing the girls identical frosted cupcakes, too, which fixes most problems. But I keep thinking about fairness -- about justice -- about ethics as my three-and-a-half-year-old struggles to understand them. . .

Like most preschoolers I know (and I know quite a few), TK believes everything in the world should be "fair". Out hiking in the woods, she wonders, "Mommy, wolves only eat bad rabbits, right?" On Memorial Day, when I try to explain all the U.S. flags on the veterans' graves in the cemetery, TK asks solemnly, "But they were all good guys, right?" When Easter rolls into our lives and TK wants to know why, I tell her the story of Jesus' death. "But that's not FAIR that they killed him!" she exclaims. "He was so GOOD!" (She is very satisfied by the justice of Jesus' resurrection). And one night at dinner, after listening as we discuss the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, TK asks, "Were the people who spilled the oil bad? Who did it? Will Obama put them in jail?"

Don't we all want glowing, absolute answers to those questions? Don't we all long for fairness -- for wars to be fought for just causes, for martyrs to die at the ends of truly evil people, for environmental disasters to happen because identifiable people committed identifiably heinous acts for which they can be punished?

Everyone above a certain age (possible three-and-a-half) knows: the world is not fair. Sometimes, you do have to wait until you're four so you can be in the dance class. Sometimes, deep-water oil rigs do break and millions of barrels of oil do spill out into the ocean.

But some of us believe the world IS capable of a little more fairness -- a little more justice. We fight for it, determined. I want to nurture that struggle within TK. I refuse to be the parent who merely shrugs and says, "Well, life isn't fair."

Last week, as Ali and I led a preschool storytelling class at Juneau's Fine Arts Camp, I attempted to narrate the story of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." Ali played the ostracized reindeer with the weird nose; the ten preschool-age girls were supposed to be playing the other reindeer. But while their peers happily turned their backs on poor Rudolph and refused to let him join in any reindeer games, TK and another little girl refused. They cheerfully sabotaged my story's plot, extended their little hands to Ali, and pulled her into the circle.

Now THAT'S fair.

I just hope my child would have included an ostracized reindeer wearing a blue-cloud tutu, too.

Empathy Girl

Mitike loves the Winnie the Pooh stories. She loves Piglet's timidity, she loves Tigger's unbridled energy, she loves Eyeore's wry humor, she loves Pooh's eternal optimism -- and she loves the way Kanga nurtures everyone. For all these reasons -- and because she loves to go to plays -- TK was excited to attend the high school's production of "Winnie the Pooh" last night. But as we watched, my daughter's brow became more and more furrowed. The high school actors had chosen to portray Pooh as depressed, Eyeore as bitter and -- worst of all -- Kanga as an aggressive, tough-love kind of mama who yelled to get others' attention. At one point in the play, Kanga actually hit Pooh over the head multiple times.

"Oh, Mommy," TK whispered in my ear, "that Kanga is so MEAN. The real Kanga doesn't do THAT!" She couldn't stop talking about it. On the walk home from the play, as her brother imitated Tigger's bounce and her sister talked excitedly about hugging the actress who played Piglet, TK kept asking why "the pretend Kanga" had been so mean. Finally, I scooped her up and hugged her close. "I love you, my sweet empathetic little girl," I whispered.

I think I used to think empathy could be taught. I think I imagined a parent -- or a teacher, or a pastor -- could model empathy for others and then guide children to emulate the model. But I did not teach my child to have this large of a heart. Even when she was barely talking -- just home from Ethiopia -- she sensed when others needed comfort. At a friend's house when TK was barely 2, the friend's voice caught as she told a difficult story, and TK climbed down from my lap onto hers. She knew.

At Gram's last year, TK's uncle Adam needed a nap after the 12-hour drive from Colorado, so he laid down in his room. He said he heard the pitter-patter of little feet, and opened his eyes just enough to see that TK had come into the room and settled in a chair next to his bed. She wasn't waiting for him to play (though she adores him); she just wanted to "keep him safe", she told me later.

Who is this child, who looks at me so lovingly sometimes that my heart catches in my throat? When we receive a wedding shower invitation for Aunt Katie and Uncle Adam in the mail, TK asks if she can take it into the kitchen. I follow her, wondering, and find that she is hard at work with her purple-handled scissors, cutting out the photo of Katie and Adam. She taped it to her wall in her room, "so they won't be lonely". When I show TK the photo of my mom's friend Lori, next to the news story of Lori helping build a playground for kids who didn't have one, TK rests her chin on her hands and gazes at Lori's picture for several minutes. "I'm so glad she's here, Mommy," she says finally.

At bedtime every night, TK pretends that her "friends" -- the stuffed animals with whom she sleeps -- are crying. Each night, she asks me to make up little stories about why the friends are sad, and then we work to help the friends resolve those problems. This is TK's favorite part of our bedtime ritual: she teaches Purple Bear that he has to share his toys with Dumbo; she explains gently to Monkey that it's okay that Sally's small, and that it's not okay to make fun of her; she asks Soft Bear to please let Purple have a turn sitting on her lap. Always, TK ends the little talk with each "friend" with a hug and a reminder that she loves them. I know I've modeled that for her, but I'm still amazed: how lucky are those stuffed animals!

She has an innate sense of justice, I think. I wondered why she was taking a different stuffed animal to preschool each day, curious about whether she felt a strong attachment to any of them. "Oh," she said seriously, "I want them to feel special, so I'm giving them turns."

Her empathy extends -- possibly most importantly, in these days of enormous discovery about herself -- to herself. TK has struggled lately as she's begun to realize that her skin color and hair are not like mine. She's especially begun to struggle with the dawning realization that she did not, in fact, grow in my womb, but in the womb of her birthmother in Ethiopia. We talk about it often, trying to understand. One night, TK sighed an enormous sigh and then said, "Mommy, I understand. But. . . I think I'm going to tell myself a stretcher and say I grew in your tummy."

Denial? Maybe. But I think the real Kanga would agree that everyone needs a little comfort sometimes -- especially those special people who spend so much energy comforting everyone else.

TK the BICYCLIST!

TK got her first "big girl" bike today. . . She biked all the way from home to library and back -- exactly one mile!

In the Grumpy TK's Brain

TK: "Mommy, I missed you when I was being grumpy."

ME: "I missed you! Where WAS the nice TK?"

TK: "Oh, she was hiding in Grumpy TK's brain."

ME: "Why?"

TK: "She was kind of tired. But -- she's back now!"

Sillinesses

Who is this beautiful, wonderful child? How did I stumble upon a life in which this amazing little person slips her hand into mine and yells "Yay! It's a beautiful day!" She's weird and silly, serious and attentive, observant and absolutely given to the world of imagination.

She is a poet. She tells her her hands are kissing each other in her sweatshirt pocket. She gazes up at the kite we are flying and tells me the birds will be happier now. She cups my face in her two hands and gazes lovingly into my eyes -- with a grown-up kind of wisdom -- and says, "I love you, my mommy. I DO."

Her imagination is a whole world. I bask in the innocence of it, the intensity of it. She tests out ideas: "Maybe, when we catch the leprechaun," (her older brother and sister were making a leprechaun trap the night before St. Patrick's Day), "we can cut him up and eat him?" She consoles herself: when Ali shows up at the dentist, where TK is trembling in the chair because the dentist holds a drill and is talking about getting rid of the brown spot on TK's teeth, TK lets herself fall entirely into Ali's story that this dentist appointment is actually for Purple (TK's beloved little stuffed creature, who has just two prominent and very yellow teeth). In an attempt to make Purple feel better, TK agrees to let the dentist drill. Ali dutifully pretends to drill Purple's tooth.

For a sensible, rule-following little girl, TK's imagination knows few boundaries. She asks sometimes, "But is it REAL?", but she whole-heartedly believes in fairies, in gods and goddesses, in monsters, in the ability of her stuffed animals to talk and feel and listen, in magic. I revel in her widened eyes. I love to tell her stories at night -- I love the way she follows the narrative (better than many of my middle schoolers, better than some adults), the way she wants to talk about it afterwards. One night, I told her a story about a magic door that let us into my grandma's house, where TK got to meet my grandma (who died several years ago). The next morning, TK asked, "When the magic door opens again, we could have a cookie, right?"

Each morning, we talk to the "friends" -- the crowd of stuffed animals TK gathers close to her at night, carries out with her when she wakes in the morning, puts to bed at night. Each night, a different friend has a sorrow -- we are doctor and assistant, interviewing the small stuffed animal, delving into his/her issues (I do all the voices). When we go out during the day -- to school, or for a walk, or to the store -- TK tells me what the friends are doing -- why they can't come, too. Today, they were watching a movie; sometimes they are at the pool.

I'm not capturing her essence in these words. My words fail me. She laughs, and I think I have never heard a sweeter sound. She tells rambling, random stories -- attempting the narrative structure of her older siblings and of her two mothers -- and I love every silly word. "We are full of sillinesses!" she proclaims, and I want to just hug her close and love her and be amazed forever. She reminds me to imagine more, to laugh more, to spread my arms more to the world and proclaim its beauty.

Learning to Love the Skin We're In

My daughter is beautiful. Her black hair sproings and curls from her head, wildly chaotic beneath her purple headband. Her chocolate-brown skin makes any color she wears look lovely. Her round dark brown eyes are twin pools, sparkling with her inner light of playfulness and empathy with every part of the world. When she laughs, she crinkles her nose and throws open her mouth and lets the laugh shake her whole body. Her tiny fingers shape "I love you" for me when I leave for work; she squints her eyes in that loving look I love. I am amazed at her beauty.

So why were Ali and I holding our sobbing three-year-old close one night after story-time, listening to her cry, "I'm not beautiful! I'm not beautiful!" over and over? We glanced at each other with fear. Isn't this too early? Ali's seven-year-old, Katie, has begun to compare herself to other girls, to try to define what is beautiful and what is not about her sweet little body -- but at THREE? We held Mitike closer, murmuring into the perfect whorls of her ears, "You're beautiful, we love you."

Moments before, we had finished reading the last book -- a book about bunnies -- and TK had snuggled close to us, happy. She held her hand against Ali's arm. "Aye-Ay," she pronounced, "you have light brown skin." Ali nodded. Then TK turned to me and held her little arm alongside mine. "And we both have dark brown skin, right, Mommy?"

I wanted to lie. This was the moment of her discovery, and I wanted to lie and prolong her blindness a little more. The research I've read says children begin to notice skin color differences far later than they notice differences such as body size or hair length -- at about the age of 4. My friend John, who spent his early childhood in Africa, recalls that his first memory of difference was not that he was the only pale-skinned child among his playmates, but that some of his playmates had outie bellybuttons. It was only later that he began to realize his uniqueness of skin color; he'd felt like he fit in with his innie.

So I wanted to lie, but I didn't. Mitike is smart, and I saw in her beautiful eyes that she already understood, that she knew -- and feared -- what I was about to say. "No, sweetie, I have light brown skin," I murmured. "You have dark brown skin."

"But Mommy," she frowned, her brow furrowing, "I want light brown skin like you."

"TK, your skin is beautiful!" I exclaimed, kissing her little hands. She wrenched them away and buried her face in them.

"I'm NOT beautiful! I don't LIKE my dark brown skin!"

My heart lurched. Both Ali and I wrapped our arms around our beautiful little fragile child. I murmured a litany of all the many similarities TK and I have: two eyes (both brown!), a nose, two ears, two hands, ten fingers!, two feet. She sobbed, inconsolable. We both need to control everything, I reminded her, we both love to dance in the kitchen, we both love to read books, we -- I paused. Ali jumped in to describe a Sesame Street conversation she saw once between Elmo and Whoopie Goldberg about loving the skin you're in. TK quieted and listened. She loves Elmo. I worried that she'd start crying that she doesn't have red fur, but she didn't. She calmed down and let Ali kiss her goodnight; she cuddled close to me in the darkness.

I told her a bedtime story about Purple Bear (one of her beloved stuffed friends) and his mommy, Green Bear -- about how sad Purple Bear felt to realize he was not green like his mommy, but how he began to realize how beautiful he was as a purple bear. TK only half-listened; she began to cry again when I ended the story. Her last words before she fell asleep: "I'm not beautiful." I responded fiercely: "You are beautiful, you are. I love you, little TK. I love you, love you."

This morning, she seemed sad -- she needed to take more special toys to school than usual. Already, I hate taking her to daycare -- I want to be a stay-at-home mom -- but this morning's drop-off felt unbearable. What if some child at preschool is telling her she's not beautiful because of her skin color? I keyed her teachers into my concerns and then drove to work feeling nauseated. All day, I watched my students of color -- especially the ones with healthy self identities. Do they like themselves because they look like their mothers, or because their parents have guided them to love themselves? What am I supposed to DO?

I rushed into preschool prepared to scoop up a sobbing, melancholy child -- and found my happy, beautiful TK sticking glitter and purple hearts onto contact paper. "Look, Mommy!" She held up her creation, grinning. We played all afternoon and all evening, and then we snuggled into bed again -- tonight, to read "The Colors of Us," "I'm Unique" and "Amazing Grace," all three familiar books shouting the theme that every person should love who she is, no matter her skin color. In the middle of "Amazing Grace," TK looked up at me and grinned, "Mommy, I LOVE myself. Do you want to hold Froggie?"

I hugged her close and shouted, "YAY!" to make her laugh; we finished reading. Tonight's bedtime story was a silly one, with no rhetorical purpose other than to entertain my sweet child. She fell asleep smiling, Purple Bear, Puppy, and Froggie held tightly as usual in her little arms.

I watched her sleep for awhile, her face peaceful, her mouth slightly open. I'm afraid. This is the beginning of her search for her own identity in a world in which her mother and, for as long as we live in Juneau, the majority of the people around her do not look like her -- and I will be a flawed guide. But I will love that beautiful little girl with all my heart, and with all my strength. I'm going to have faith that that will count for something.