Reflections of a young mother
It was a bright fall day in Brooklyn. The late afternoon sun streamed into our apartment and the rug was strewn with Magnatiles and Legos. My 2-year old son was playing at full throttle in our compact living room: climbing all over me, building towers and smashing them down, and narrating his progress to my husband, who was cooking dinner in the kitchen. And amid the chaos, I was stretched out on the couch – completely asleep.
It’s one of the new skills I’ve gained since becoming a parent a few years ago: the ability to fall asleep anywhere, for any amount of time.
“Mama!” my son exclaimed, jumping up upon seeing me finally wake. “We saw you! And we saw that you were sleeping!”
“Oh yeah?” I mumbled, still adjusting to the noise and light of the afternoon. “What did I look like?”
“Brown!” he replied cheerfully before turning back to his Magnatiles.
My husband and I locked eyes, stifling outbursts of laughter. To this day, we’re still not entirely sure what he meant. He still refers to passersby by the colors they’re wearing (“that green lady over there” or “that blue man there”) a tendency that leads to many inaccurate proclamations if the subjects of his attention are wearing white, brown, or black, as New Yorkers are wont to do.
But this time, he wasn’t wrong. My features are decidedly South Indian, probably even Malayalee to a discerning eye: wavy black hair, rounded nose, dark brown eyes, and medium brown skin.
My now three-year-old son is brown-ish, ambiguously so. He has olive skin that tans generously in the sun, black hair, and chocolate-brown eyes. If you didn’t see him walking with me, his heritage might not be obvious. South American? Greek? Middle Eastern?
My daughter’s coloring so far completely favors my husband: light skin, almost green eyes, and hair a lighter shade than mine or her brother’s.
Last week, I was riding the city bus with her strapped into the baby carrier. She cooed at the Brooklyn grannies sitting across from us, showing off her toothless smile.
“Isn’t she a cutie,” one woman fawned, “She must look just like daddy.” I laughed. It was equal parts touching and blunt – she wasn’t wrong.
Growing up, I spent a lot of time wondering what the future might look like. Maybe I’d become a Broadway star or a chef. I longed to go to an all-girls boarding school in England à la Enid Blyton and dreamed of snagging a small role in the next Harry Potter movie.
I thought I would probably get married one day, maybe to Prince William, or Mark from my kindergarten class. I wasn’t picky. I even spent time thinking about how many children I‘d have and what to name them (Lyla, Lillia, and Lena – three girls, just like my family). But I didn’t spend much time thinking about what my future kids would look like. I just assumed that if I were to have children someday, they would look just like me.
It wasn’t until my twenties, when I got engaged to my college sweetheart, born of hardy German Lutheran farming stock, that it finally hit me – if we had kids, they would be half-white.
“You guys will have the cutest kids!” friends would say, the standard remark to a mixed-race couple. Outwardly, I laughed and thanked them, but privately, I felt a sense of sadness. I loved my fiancé, and knew I would love any kids that we were lucky enough to have, but couldn’t help but mourn the fact that they likely wouldn’t bear outward resemblance to my family – the sprawling web of aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins and even family friends who had poured so much love and care into me in my early years.
Eight years later, my husband and I are happily besotted parents of an earnest and curious three-year-old boy and a busy and cheerful eight-month-old girl. It’s often not more than five minutes after they are mercifully tucked into bed that he and I are swapping videos and stories with each other of the day’s antics.
I sometimes find myself feeling self-conscious when I’m around other young South Asian families, whose children sometimes remind me more of my baby photos than my own children do. I wonder if they’re judging me for marrying outside of our community, or if it seems like I gave up on my heritage, minimizing my own “Indian-ness.”
When I see aunties and uncles in the neighborhood, I find myself trying to talk to my kids in my broken Malayalam in a louder-than-normal voice. “See??” I want to shout, “I didn’t give up on this part of me.” But the feelings of self-doubt are mostly about how others perceive me – if I feel like I’m “Indian enough” for them, whatever that means.
I know that I’m trying to pass on the things that are close to my heart – I speak to my kids in my childish Malayalam, make them proper Kerala chicken curry and rice, spend lots of time with extended family, and visit India when we can. And my husband, knowing that these things matter to me, does his best to amplify – calling milk paal and yogurt thair, addressing my parents as Amma and Appa, learning how to make cabbage thoran and erachi ularthiyathu, and schlepping a toddler without complaint to my grandmother’s village of Mylapra, a four-hour drive from the nearest airport in Kerala.
I couldn’t have asked for a more ardent supporter.
And still, at best, I’ll only be able to give them fragments of my culture. I don’t know how they will feel growing up mixed-race, second-generation Indian-Americans on one side and and Mayflower descendants on the other. It’s hardly notable in Brooklyn, where more kids than not are half-something, but it’s new to me.
Will they feel self-conscious that they don’t look like either parent? Or will it be a non-issue? Will they feel annoyed at having to explain their Indian first names and Anglo last names? Will there be times when they feel out of place, or unsure of where they belong? Probably. I don’t know.
There’s a selfish little part of me that sometimes wishes that my kids looked totally like me, just me. But that’s a bit like saying I’d rather fall in love with myself than somebody else.
Parents throughout history have raised children who don’t look like them, for a multitude of reasons: adoption, blended families, and the beautiful puzzle of genetic differences. It’s not a new phenomenon. But the thing I’m realizing is that all parents everywhere are learning to raise kids who – outwardly or inwardly or both – are different than they are.
And it seems that the magic, mystery, and challenge of raising kids is that they’re something different, someone new.
There are little flashes of myself or my husband that I see in them – in the way our son says “so” at the beginning of a long explanation or the way our daughter sticks her tongue out when she’s focused on something. It warms my heart to see my dark eyes combined with my husband’s long eyelashes on someone else’s face – it feels both familiar and new.
But it’s even more fun to marvel at all the ways that they are totally and uniquely themselves: the belly laughs, the questions, the interests, and the ways that the gene pool from Kerala has blended with lineages from Scotland, England, and Germany to create two tiny people who are new, totally themselves, and completely mine.
At a Christmas dinner a year ago, my close friends were reflecting on the ways we had grown in 2022. My son had just turned 2, and I was a few months pregnant with my daughter. “I realize,” I mused, breaking off a piece of still-warm pita bread, “that I don’t know if I always love being a mom. But I love, love, love being his mom.” And that statement continues to hold true.
It’s not always easy or fun being a parent of young kids: I miss staying out late on Fridays and sleeping in on Saturdays or going to a birthday party without feeling distracted about who might be getting chocolate icing on the neighbors’ expensive couch. But I adore being their mama.
They may never turn out “looking Indian” – and most likely they won’t – but I can keep passing them other tethers to our families: a shared love of puttu and banana for breakfast and pot roast on Sunday nights, singing the same hymns that our grandparents used to sing us before bed, and continuing to surround them with the people who adore them and are proud to claim them as family – from the Midwest to Mylapra and back. And I hope, more than anything, that they always feel rooted and grounded by how loved they are and how glad I am to be theirs.
This resource is supported in whole or in part by funding provided by the State of California, administered by the California State Library in partnership with the California Department of Social Services and the California Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander American Affairs as part of the Stop the Hate program. To report a hate incident or hate crime and get support, go to CA vs Hate.
Photo by Jordan Whitt on Unsplash
Photo by Dottie Di Liddo on Unsplash