M y daughter arrived from Ethiopia at the age of two. I had begun the process to adopt her before white celebrities had adopted children from Africa and the media circus had begun (and before international adoption had ballooned in Ethiopia and become overwhelmingly corrupt). Only a few years before, I’d been the jaded New Yorker making the same snide remarks and ironic jokes made concerning the aforementioned celebrities about a white friend who was considering adopting an African baby. (I wonder if those snide remarks would be made if a black celebrity adopted an African child; somehow I doubt it.)

In other words, I was the last person you’d imagine would adopt from Africa. Until I’d been through the year and a half emotional irrational ringer of trying to adopt in the U.S. Which, back then, had been a slower, even more ridiculous nightmare than adopting internationally if you were single and neither loaded nor a celebrity.

The relationship between a single mother (who isn’t in a position to hire indentured servants) and an only child is intense and hard to describe. One way to describe it: it never lets up. Another way my daughter describes it: I’m her white slave. The natural parent/child divide that usually occurs when there are two adults in charge, even if the parents behave more like children, does not happen. Especially if the so-called adult in the equation, that would be White Mama, is an introvert who works at home and the child is an extrovert who has inexplicably begun to like hanging out at home too. Only one of the warped doors actually closes in our tenement loft where the aesthetic is more Grey Gardens than, say, Modern Family or black*ish. So it follows that the two of us converse quite a bit since there’s no one else to talk to (unless you count the two cats and the tv, and maybe you should because we do talk to them). During our frequent long-winded conversations, one of us tries to get a full sentence or two out and the other one interrupts or I begin to drift and my daughter says, “Gee, Mom, you’re really listening,” or she begins to drift and pulls on her headphones.

Consequently, my daughter gets in trouble at school for calling out and interrupting. It probably didn’t help much when I told her, “Oh, all Jews interrupt.” It just slipped out. In my (weak) defense I hastily added, “But don’t interrupt in school and I’ve told you, stop shouting out. Raise your hand! And you have to listen!” When she came home another day and said, “Mom, did you know that Jews laugh at their own jokes?” I said, “Who the hell told you that?” “I did,” she said, “Because I’m always laughing at my own jokes.”

Oh no, I thought, I’ve created a monster. My only flimsy excuse is I have reiterated to her time and again that we come from a really weird family and we can only make remarks such as these at home or with other family members.

I can only hope nature overcomes nurture when all is said and done.

“Hey, Mom, why did you adopt a black kid?”

“Good question!” I replied heartily. Since I’m a rather impulsive person who operates almost entirely by instinct and rarely thinks of consequences, I don’t have pat answers to the big questions. I had once explained to a black mother-friend who had been one of the few to ask why I’d adopted a black child — which I appreciated after initially reacting, yes, defensively — and she had subsequently told me it was a great explanation. Unfortunately the two of us have long since forgotten my answer. Damn, I should have written it down.

So I told my daughter the first thing that came to mind. I hadn’t realIy thought about it when I adopted her; I just did it, an explanation that received a broad smile. It would have satisfied her, but it seemed like the easy way out. So I continued. I told her that I’d known that more children of color were up for adoption when I’d initially tried to adopt in this country and that I’d just assumed my child would be anything but white which made no difference to me. The only reason I could come up with as to why it made no difference was that I’d grown up and gone to school with kids of different races and different classes so black people weren’t some kind of exotic ‘other.’ I’d grown up as comfortable with American black culture, whatever that means today, as I was with American white culture, again, whatever that means today. And then I’d hemmed and hawed because I really don’t know exactly why I adopted a black child. In hindsight, as a child of the sixties and seventies, maybe there was a little bit of “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” to it but I wasn’t conscious of it at the time.

By now, my daughter was no doubt wishing she’d never asked and was starting to tune out. Meanwhile, I began thinking, ‘Why is it so important that I have a clear answer to this question?” There are many choices I’ve made in this non-traditional life of mine (as an artist and then a writer) and I don’t have clear-cut answers to why I made most of them.

Recently she woke up, first thing out of her mouth was, “What happens if black people want to adopt a white child?”

“The parents are probably mistaken as nannies or criminals constantly. Their life is hell.”

“Mom, how come you get along so well with black people?”

“What?” I said. “I do? How the hell did you come up with that one?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I just noticed.”

I didn’t know where to begin. What depressing pathetic state of human relations in New York City, the so-called melting pot, had led my daughter to come up with this observation. Was it that noticeable that white adults, in general, don’t engage with black adults in public — on the subway, for example, or on the street — or that there weren’t many genuinely close friendships among black and white adults. Apparently. The social circles we traveled in were either almost completely white or almost completely black so that may have been a factor. Or was it simply that she was trying to figure out how to cross the racial minefield with more ease in this abomination of a race and class stratified city as a black girl who did not want to be boxed in as anything unless she chose the box. This is a girl, after all, who when asked to talk about her identity in school, said, “Mom, they were all just waiting for me to talk about being black or Ethiopian and there was just no way I was going to, no way.” To which I replied, “Well, did any white kids stand up and talk about being white?”

Meanwhile, I stalled. “Hmmm,” I said to my daughter, “I don’t really know what to say. It’s such a weird thing to notice. I mean, it’s not on purpose.” Then I launched into my familiar rhetoric. I repeated that I’d lucked out with the upbringing I’d had and continued stumbling on in my usual stream-of-consciousness illogical way.

“To many white people, black people are either invisible or scary, and it’s never been that way for me,” I continued. “I guess…”

“Oh god, not another speech,” she said.

“Well, you asked.”

Around the same time when I mentioned to my daughter, “Hey, I got tickets for a concert this weekend,” she stopped, looked at me and replied, “Oh let me guess. It doesn’t happen to be black music, does it?” “Well, yeah,” I said, sheepishly. “Oh let me guess,” she continued, “Is it by chance African?” “That’s right,” I answered.

Another day, more seriously, she asked me if I took her to “so many black things because I’m black.” Eventually I came up with another convoluted answer that ended with, “You don’t realize you go to white things most of the time and besides I like black music because I grew up with it and you might like white music better but right now you’re stuck going with me to what I like. And you know what, I would take you to just as many black things if you were white!” I’m not sure she stuck around to hear that last part.

These days my daughter loves to go any cultural event. She’s involved in dance and music so she loves almost any kind of performance. I didn’t grow up with much culture — not that I’m complaining. I grew up in a college town where the main culture embraced was college sports although I myself was not very athletic. My very tall originally very athletic unable-to-sit-down daughter came home one day in fourth grade and said, “I’m not playing basketball and I am not running track — ever.”

“Mom, guess what! The black girls like me!”

“Hey, that’s great!” said I, “So what happened?”

“Well, this one girl likes me and I think the rest of them do too. Except the rich one. She hangs around with the white girls mostly.”

“Be nice to the rich one; it’s not her fault.”

“She brags too much. Anyway, my friend is really funny. We were talking about our families and I had to tell her that I had a white mother.”

“So what’d she say?”

“She said, ‘Well, I hope you take advantage of her!’”

“That’s hilarious; what’d you say?”

“I told her I really couldn’t. Then she asked me what school I went to and I told her and I said I had a learning disability and she said, ‘Oh no, you have a disorder!’ So I tried to explain it wasn’t really a disorder and she said, ‘No, no, ,no, you have a disorder!’”

“Wow, she sounds hysterical!”

A little back story. My daughter dances in a company that’s thoroughly mixed, class-wise and race-wise, mainly because the dance school is affordable and is located in a neighborhood that has only recently become gentrified. What’s a miracle is that it is still relatively affordable. Let me just say I am indebted for life to this oasis in a sea of whites only or blacks only dance schools. At a summer session maybe three or four years ago, my daughter had come home and reported that she was being “bullied” by some girls. I asked her if the girls were black or white and she said, “Black.” “Well, get used to it,” I told her. It didn’t sound so bad, so I tried to explain that I was just guessing, but these girls probably looked down on her partly because she had a white mother and probably didn’t think she was ‘black enough.’ Lord knows how I tried to explain that plain silly tired trope, but I did my best. By the end of the session, she was running upstairs to tell me bullying stories, giggling as she told them. “Tell me you’re not kind of enjoying this,” I said. She nodded reluctantly. Personally, I think the term ‘bullying’ should only be used when blood is shed.

My daughter didn’t used to like to talk about race (or its inextricable cousin, class) but now she often initiates the conversation. Well, not all the time, sometimes when I start in on something, she sighs and repeats the aforementioned, “Oh no, she’s going to start in with one of her speeches” and I shut my big mouth. Understandably; racism is not exactly an uplifting topic and conducive to nightmares. But my feeling is, you’ve got to know the history, black and white, especially if you’re going to be opinionated. And, wow, is she opinionated. So black history in America is a big topic. (Ethiopia’s history is a topic too — but that’s a different ballgame). The more my daughter understands, the harder it is to tell the truth. When we watched To Kill a Mockingbird together a while ago, I’d forgotten the plot and every time she wanted to turn it off, I stupidly promised her that Bill Robinson would be fine at the end and she had nightmares for two nights straight, clinging to me.

Another more recent nightmare: She had a bat mitzvah and no one came — not because she didn’t have any friends but because there was too much traffic. Then suddenly people were in the audience, but they were all white and she had to do a minstrel act — and she ended the act, saying, “This is like slavery!” Inappropriate or not, we eventually howled over that nightmare — especially at the idea that she would have a bat mitzvah.

“Mom, why didn’t you tell me about Malcolm X?”

“I did so tell you!” I replied, “You just refused to listen.”

“Huh?”

To atone for my sins (and because we’re often in Harlem where she is afraid for no good reason except that the kids in school have convinced her it’s scary) we went to a four hour long movie about the history of Harlem. I figured we’d last a few hours, but she was determined to last the entire four. Afterwards as I attempted to further explain W.E. B. DuBois’s theory of double-consciousness, before I could finish, she said, “Yes!! Yes!”

Even more successful has been our study of black sit-coms and other sit-coms of the 70s, 80s and 90s before Nick and Disney took over children’s television under the auspices of the PC police and the stereotype mongers. All I can say is Sherman Helmsley who played George Jefferson, is one of the greatest, albeit under-appreciated, comedians of the past several decades.

When it comes to Ethiopia, we skip the usual woe-is-me stories about poverty and disease and the accompanying visuals because it’s already like an intravenous drip into my daughter’s brain. White Mama’s not much of a cook so, especially on weekends, we kind of wing it. One weekend I noticed she had skipped dinner twice in a row. I’d told her to heat up some food and had probably escaped to my office, said good night when I’d emerged, assuming she’d eaten. When I eventually discovered she hadn’t via a quick glance into the refrigerator, I said, “Hey, did you skip dinner the last two nights?”

“Oh yeah, I guess I did,” she replied.

“Oh my god,” I said, “You can’t do that; they’re going to arrest me!”

“Mom,” she said, “I’m Ethiopian; I’m not going to starve to death if I miss a few meals.”

We also talk about my daughter’s own history in Ethiopia, mostly conjecture, since all we know is that she was born in Adwa, a town far north near the border of Eritrea. That’s where the famous battle took place in 1896, when the Ethiopians beat back the Italians for the final time. One thing I’ve learned that is indisputable: Ethiopians think they’re better than everyone else. One reason is because they are the only country in Africa that has never been colonized. Consequently, my daughter’s vanity knows no bounds and once she really learned to walk, she developed a don’t-mess-with-me strut that quickly evolved into a sashay more suitable for the red carpet than the sidewalk.

But it’s not all jokes. My daughter was with my sister in her car recently and they were stopped by the police for something minor. Everything went smoothly but my daughter was terrified. Needless to say, we talk a lot about what’s been going on for the past year (rather what’s finally surfaced in the media) — Ferguson, Staten Island, Baltimore, the massacre in North Carolina, Texas and on and on — although my daughter stopped watching the videos after the first one. My daughter did not want to go to a Black Lives Matter march in New York last spring; crowds often scare her. But after a few blocks, she was thrilled to be there. Of course, when I began to reminisce about the olden days, she mumbled, “Here she goes again,” and began to sashay fast as she could, pretending she did not know me.

“Mom, you know I used to be scared. And then I was sad. But now I’m just angry,” said my daughter, when I told her about Sandra Bland.

“Good,” I said.

No speeches necessary.