While prepping for a Boys to Men panel where I was asked to speak about “The Challenges and Joys of Raising Boys of Color in a Predominantly White State (Maine),” I did my homework.  I had my outline planned out. I was going to cover what happens when black children’s behavior on the playground is called out disproportionately to their white counterparts, and the importance of attending a black church for starters.

I would call attention to my own internalized racism, and what I was trying to do on a daily basis to unpack it. I would emphasize the joys of  my open adoption relationship given the opportunity, and try to encourage members of the audience to advocate for their children whenever they needed to do so. Then it occurred to me that I didn’t even know what transracial really meant.  Since I used the word to describe my family in my bio, it seemed like a good idea to look up the definition.  I wanted to be able to look like an authority on something, since I figured people were going to take one look at me, and ask, “What is that white woman doing on this panel?” I would arm myself with data, and definitions, in case my personal experience paled in comparison to that of my fellow mother panelists from Puerto Rico and Sudan.

What I discovered was that the definitions just confused matters more:

Transracial: 1. to alter one’s skin or hair to change one’s appearance from one race to another. 2. (the more commonly used definition in adoption lingo) to travel across at least one racial boundary, as in a family of one race, adopting a child of another.

So, by definition, when I adopted my son Sammy (age five, African American, adopted domestically at birth), we became, because of our racial differences, transracial. Then, when I brought Marcel into the world (age two) with the help of an African American donor, I then conceived transracially according to definition.  Does the president who also had a white mother, talk about his family growing up as transracial? Perhaps the term itself was not one his mother had ever heard. The fact of the matter is that it is the only term I have ever used to describe my family, or heard used to describe it. With our heightened awareness over the choice we have over the words we use or don’t use to name ourselves on the census, I looked at transracial in a new light. What does using the word to describe my family mean about us, and more importantly what is it not saying?

This post was written for my debut post, as the debut guest blogger on Mixed and Happy. I initially posted only this “teaser” here. Please read the whole article there, and check out their site! Then come back and leave your thoughts on this topic here too!

So, by definition, when I adopted my son Sammy (age 5, African American, adopted domestically at birth), we became, because of our racial differences, transracial. Then, when I brought Marcel into the world (age 2) with the help of an African American donor, I then conceived transracially according to definition. Does the President, who also had a white mother, talk about his family growing up as transracial? Perhaps the term itself was not one his mother had ever heard. The fact of the matter is that it is the only term I have ever used to describe my family, or heard used to describe it. With our heightened awareness over the choice we have over the words we use or don’t use to name ourselves on the census, I looked at transracial in a new light. What does using the word to describe my family mean about us, and more importantly what is it not saying?

To be honest, transracial has always felt rather clinical, and scientific, to me. If I am the transracial one, then the child is another race than mine. Since transracial adoption is predominantly an act of white people adopting non-white children, that is exactly what the definition has come to mean. Does being the head of a transracial family give me a guest pass into my children’s ethnic background in a way that saying we are mixed doesn’t? For days I sat with this question: why is this word so important in the adoption community? What I came up with may not be unique, but it certainly rocked my boat a good deal.

With its focus on boundary and race, does it not stand to protect privilege and otherness? The “trans” is a journey. The parent is the captain. The child on the other side of that boundary is the what? The endpoint? The rescued being, who will be brought back from the journey to the captain’s homeland? In my case, adopting Sam rescued me from a previously all but unexamined life of white privilege and childlessness. When I adopted him on my own, as a single mom, he and I became a new other. Did we become a transracial family or a mixed one?

Upon reflection, I would say that the word mixed more accurately reflects what has happened to me since becoming my childrens’ mom. Parenting changed the rhythms and course of life, certainly. But, being the mother of an African American child, and a bi-racial one has taken those racial boundaries that I took for granted all my life, and blown them out of the water several times each day. When you remove a boundary, you have an open space. To me, that is what being a mixed family has become. An open space that we permeate between ourselves throughout the day, throughout our lives.

I stand to gain a great deal from looking at my family as mixed instead of transracial. For starters, it acknowledges the sharing of ethnicity between us as a family, stripping the adoptive parent of the power of their race as the boundary setter. Emotionally it might help me too. I often find myself feeling lonely on playgrounds, or at family functions at the boys’ school. I feel like I fit in nowhere. I am not a white mother raising a white kid. I am not a black mother raising a black child. As mom in a mixed family, I become one of us, instead of one of me and two of them. This is a not so subtle shift that I am long overdue to break out of.

In this age of blended families, multi-hued offspring, and increased numbers of adoptions of every ethnicity, isn’t it time we all just embraced our mixed-ness, and let go of our clinical terminology that simply seems to somehow preserve whiteness, rather that accept the torch of being mixed?