The narrative memoir Seeking Forgiveness tells the story of interracial adoption in the United States today, from the perspective of a white mother who adopts a Black son, and finds she has no idea what the hell she is doing.
Rachel, the adoptive mother of Miles, receives a call from the police in the middle of the night informing her that her son has been arrested. She rushes to the police station to help Miles, consumed with worry that she has failed to protect her son from events beyond his control.
For the next eight hours, as Rachel desperately tries to get Miles out of jail, she recalls their life together and the events that have led them to their current situation. In so doing she questions her competence as a mother, the viability of interracial adoption, and whether her son will ever forgive her for the mistakes she made as his adoptive mother.
A rich commentary on motherhood, adoption, and race relations in America today, this suspenseful narrative memoir will linger long after the immediate tension of the novel has been resolved.
The narrative memoir Seeking Forgiveness tells the story of interracial adoption in the United States today, from the perspective of a white mother who adopts a Black son, and finds she has no idea what the hell she is doing.
Rachel, the adoptive mother of Miles, receives a call from the police in the middle of the night informing her that her son has been arrested. She rushes to the police station to help Miles, consumed with worry that she has failed to protect her son from events beyond his control.
For the next eight hours, as Rachel desperately tries to get Miles out of jail, she recalls their life together and the events that have led them to their current situation. In so doing she questions her competence as a mother, the viability of interracial adoption, and whether her son will ever forgive her for the mistakes she made as his adoptive mother.
A rich commentary on motherhood, adoption, and race relations in America today, this suspenseful narrative memoir will linger long after the immediate tension of the novel has been resolved.
I want him to know how sorry I am. I want to beg his forgiveness. For all I didnât understand, for all I never knew, for all I still have to learn. But the police have him and I canât reach him. My baby. My child. My son. Why am I hesitating to say it? To use the most obvious description? Because I generally gloss it over, try to act like it doesnât matter - why make everyone uncomfortable and bring it up? But it does matter. It is important. So here it is: My beautiful Black boy.
I married late. Thirty-four already when I met the man who appreciated my over-salted popcorn, my distracted housekeeping, my early 5:00 a.m. runs. I bumped into him in a bar, during happy hour, with half priced drinks and greasy appetizers that left misshaped oil puddles behind on the plate. Heâd smiled, brushed off the long island iced tea Iâd left behind on his shirt, as if liquid could simply be wiped off of linen. Iâd smiled back, and within half an hour heâd rescued me from the all-male table of colleagues Iâd been straining to have a conversation with.
I work at a bank and my co-workers are mostly puffy white men who shift their feet uncomfortably when I bring up stories about my son, Miles. Like the time Miles asked me why none of the comic books he brought home from the library had Black superheroes in them. Miles was only six years old at the time and Black Panther hadnât yet made it to the movie screen. When my son mentioned the concept of a Black superhero, Iâd literally been struck dumb by the notion. Iâd stood in the middle of the kitchen with my hand on the refrigerator door and my mind spinning, trying to both picture the novel idea of a Black superhero for the first time, while also deriving a reasonable explanation for why my son hadnât yet seen one. The story as I told it to my colleagues was meant to be funny. I had meant it as, Can you believe it? Had you even noticed that before? Who knew, but there are like no popular Black superheroes. I mean, in some books Hawkman is sketched a little darkly, but you can only pretend heâs Black if you look at the pictures sideways. How dumb am I not to have noticed this before? I had meant it as a revelation, like Wow! And wouldnât they share in the curiosity of my new discovery. But instead, most of my co-workers turned away at my stories, changed the subject, or most remarkably of all, got angry with me for bringing up irrelevant parenting stories.
The past sixteen years had been a lifetime of revelations about a world I hadnât known existed. And now it had culminated in this. My Black son, behind bars, alone, likely scared, possibly hurt, while I had to wait, impatient, angry, desperate, wishing I could make it all better, but not, at the moment, being enough for him. Had I ever been enough for him?
I remembered when I first researched adoption, thirty-five years old at that point and steeped in the knowledge that my eggs were antiquated and mostly dried up, like mini lima beans baked in the sun. I came across an article by a Black woman that told white women to stay away. Black Children Need Black Mothers, it was titled, and the essence of the argument was that white women should not even consider adopting Black children; that inter-racial adoption was, frankly, dangerous. At the time I was so stunned by the idea that someone would be against my adopting a child â a Black boy, for that matter, the child most likely to be left behind, looked over, passed by, left in the system until heâd aged out - that I thought I must be reading the article incorrectly. I must have missed something, an âandâ or a âbutâ or some other qualifying contraction somewhere. I had to read the article two more times before I understood what the author was trying to say. White women simply donât have what it takes to raise a Black child in America.
I had assumed up until that point that adopting a marginalized child, saving a life from the system, giving a kid a home and a chance, was a good thing. Admittedly, it made me uncomfortable when friends Iâd mention the idea to reacted as if adopting a Black child was profound and extraordinary (didnât people adopt babies all the time?), but at the same time, I never stopped them, never refused any accolades, never explored why it might be making me edgy to be praised for adopting a child. I had basked in the flattery of my mostly white friends, and entirely white family, as if my husband and I really were good people, about to do a great thing.
But then here was this Black woman, salt and pepper hair, large hoop earrings, earnest facial expression staring out at me from the computer screen, telling me to stay away from her kind. Informing me that, by definition, I would be a terrible mother for a Black child. My blood pressure ticked up as I reread the article and I thought, this woman doesnât even know me! If she only knew me, sheâd see that my heart was in the right place. Sheâd understand that I mostly tried to do good.
But after the third reading I felt deflated, in large part because it offered no hope. The article implied that there was nothing my husband nor I could do to remedy the situation. We couldnât work to change the circumstances. We couldnât not be white. We could only stay away.
Up until that point Iâd always prided myself on my work ethic. I was an A-type personality, determined, driven, resolute in my goals. I ran three miles a day, whether I was tired or not, I worked long hours at the bank until my evaluations rained down praise, I was even right this minute researching adoption like a conscientious person, trying to make a major life decision in an informed and thoughtful manner. Yet this very research was telling me that I was an inherently wrong person and that there was no way I could ever be right.
I realized later that it was the kind of message Black people had been hearing for years.
At the time, though, my reaction was to call an old high school friend from Detroit.
âHey girlfriend,â Tiffany purred, seeming happy to hear from me. Tiffany had been my best friend throughout my teenage years, and weâd spent countless hours on the phone in high school reassuring each other, supporting each other, trying to make sense of the world together. The sound of her voice was the sound of my past and her easy enthusiasm brightened my spirits. I asked Tiffany how her family was doing.
âThey good, they good, you know, getting bigger all the time, especially Cedric.â I laughed, recalling her husband Cedricâs increasing waistline. We were all getting bigger, older, more seasoned.
It took me a minute, but I eventually brought the conversation around to the purpose of my call. âNate and I have decided to, well, adopt. Through the foster system.â There. Iâd said it. Iâd spit it out. In the moment of silence that landed between us my hands prickled with sweat. I imagined Tiffany responding, Umm, why? Whatever gave you the idea that you could do that?
But instead she squealed approval. âIâd stopped asking,â she added, âbecause you got angry at me the last time I brought kids up. Even though, well, you arenât getting any younger.â It was true, itâd been a rather long time since Tiffany and I had last spoken, and it was because Iâd gotten sick of her always asking if I was going to have kids already. Just because so many of our friends had them, did that mean Nate and I had to too? Was it some kind of social obligation? What if I just didnât want to (though of course, I did)? I found out later that Tiffany kept bringing it up because sheâd just wanted us to have kids around the same time, so our children could be friends. She hadnât been trying to pressure me, so much as share something with me.
âI know,â I sighed. âIâm sorry. Well, we are looking into adoption now.â
âThatâs great,â she said supportively, giving me the space to go on.
âThereâs a lot of paperwork involved, itâs crazy. You have to check what youâre comfortable with, what you think you can and canât handle. The checklist is two pages long. Developmental problems, yes or no? Autism, yes or no? Drug exposure, yes or no? African American, yes or no?â Hearing myself say it out loud, I realized only then that âAfrican Americanâ came in a list of options that were mostly negative.
âYou can handle anything,â Tiffany said, without hesitation. âYouâll be a great mother, I know it. Just do it. And if itâs a girl, remember to name her after me.â
I smiled, recalling the time Tiffany had saved my life by pushing me out of the way of an oncoming school bus. Sheâd always been more aware of the world than I was; too often I stood oblivious, lost in thought. That belching yellow school bus had given me such a scare, however, that Iâd promised to name my first child after her, something sheâd never since let me forget.
âThanks,â I replied earnestly, âand you know it.â And with that affirmation, I chose to assume that my closest Black friend had just told me it was ok to adopt a Black baby. I decided to move forward, and disregard the salt and pepper lady with the extra large hoop earrings.
Looking around the waiting room at the police station sixteen years later, however, echoes of that long-ago article suddenly came back to me. A white mother will fail to teach a Black child his culture, it said. She will not understand his experience in the world, and he will grow up isolated, confused, and ill-prepared to protect himself in an America that will judge him harshly and do itâs best to keep him down. A white mother can not understand what it means to be Black in this country, and so it is dangerous for a white woman to raise a Black child. It is unconscionable for her to even try.
Staring at the gray tile floor beneath my feet, at the brown cement walls of the unforgiving police station, I finally had to admit that the author had a point. I never should have adopted my son. I was not a good mother after all. I had indeed failed to protect my baby from this not unpredictable fate. He never should have been given to me in the first place.
This memoir is told over the course of a single night as a white mother, Rachel, waits at a police station for word on why her Black son, Miles, has been arrested. During this dark night of the soul, she looks back over the mistakes she's made in parenting a Black child in a white world--and prays that none have been egregious enough to leave her son mortally wounded.
I am not sure if this is a novel or a memoir, as the author lists her last name as Rachel and says in her bio that she lives with her husband and son, while in the book, her husband is a lout who takes little interest in the boy they adopt and eventually leaves them. Either the way, the story is engagingly written and held my interest, though it was frustrating not to know if the book was a true story, particularly as the ending was tied up with incidents that seemed so neat and dramatized that I wondered if they had been fictionalized.
Still, all of the incidents Rachel recalls along the way seem horrifyingly real, from a dental receptionist who won't let her son see the orthodontist unless she can produce papers proving she is his mother, to her son being the only Black boy in many settings and often targeted for his race by children and adults, to an ignorant woman in a supermarket asking if she has any "real children." Miles' slow realization that he is different in a way that makes people like him less and treat him less fairly is heartbreaking. Many of the questions Rachel raises about whether white people should adopt Black children, who may then always feel like an outsider in their own lives, have no answer beyond the prayer that the love of a family is better than leaving Black children with no family.
I found myself annoyed at how long it took for Rachel and thus the reader to find out what had happened that had landed Miles behind bars. Rachel's decision to call a racist uncle to help her find a lawyer also seems questionable to me. But the ending, wrapped up with Miles' release into his mother's arms, is a fairy tale I wish was more often the ending of Black boys' stories.