However pretty—and it is pretty—I think I’ve kind of had it with snow. Another inch or two is falling. Again, my world is lacy white and somehow just a little colder. There’s a mythic groove I could get back, if not for all this snow (and all these snow days and snow delays).
So it goes.
**
Remy was just five when Saskia was born and because of this, there’s so much about those early months—we experienced a pretty chilling possible legal situation that eventually resolved itself—he never heard about. We have very warm relationships to the maternal side of Saskia’s birth family (first family, family, there aren’t exactly great ways to parse this out clearly) and so Remy knows them. They are all white. Saskia’s first father isn’t; he’s Jamaican. We have never met him (or even seen his picture). Saskia is light-skinned enough to “pass” as white and thus I’m not sure Remy exactly realized she’s not.
Kate, who lives on our top floor, heard him telling Saskia that she’s white.
On the walk home—the very slow, icy, wet stumble home was more like it—Remy and I talked about how Saskia is biracial (like bicycle, I told him, two). It’s not really one or the other; you don’t have to choose (recently, there was a terrific piece about this in the New York Times). Remy said, “She doesn’t really look black.” We remembered together a picture book we have called Shades of Black. We decided to bring it back onto the shelf Saskia goes to most.
Like her recent taking in the news that she didn’t grow in my belly or her figuring out “I was a baby and now I’m a big gu-rrl,” this is big-ticket stuff and yet it’s not headline news. Identity comes more gradually than that—for everyone.
**
The important-est part of Saskia’s birthday of course was her joyful self, delighting in her friends and her festivities and her maple cupcake with chocolate fudge frosting. She is a big gur-rrl. And she’s still my baby.
