"Mixed" but not Confused

I don't know what book this is from, but I thought it a lovely piece of artwork that shows our lovely diversity :)

I just started hearing/learning more about parents who have adopted multi-ethnic/cultural children.  I am struck by the bigotry I'm seeing and the bondage there seems to be, things that will affect a mama's ability to bond completely with her precious adopted child.  And for that reason I will be addressing this issue here since I consider it to be important for the asceticism of mothers who have opened their hearts and homes to the little ones God has blessed them with through adoption.

I'm half black and half white but I do not make grey.  That was one thing I had to figure out as a little girl when I found that my white and black crayons did not make the color I am.  I wasn't really half black and half white, I was half brown and half manila :)  When the Twix candy bar came out it fully explained my family.  My dad was the chocolate, my mom the white cookie crunch and I was the caramel:)  When I was 5 years old we had a cross burned into our lawn.  We didn't live in the south.  We lived in the Bay Area in California, Cupertino, the birth place of Apple Computers.  What I learned that day was there were people full of hate in our world.  The focus wasn't the color of their skin, but the hatred in the hearts of people who would do such a thing.  My life experience showed me that racial hatred came in all shapes, sizes and colors.   My mom did a good job teaching me about others and myself. I know my brother, has had a somewhat different experience as a darker skinned mixed ethnicity man.

There seems to be a lot of guilt being place on these "mixed" families, families willing to accept little ones in the name of Christ.  Guilt doesn't promote the connection a mother should be able to make with her child, it produces an "us and them" mentality which shouldn't be present within a family. Accepting guilt as a parent because you are white, makes your non-white child a "victim" which does not promote joy or freedom and does not strengthen a family, it breaks it down. When we adopt we are not simply "hosting" a child from their country of origin or from their family of origin. We are to embrace them the same way God embraces us as adopted sons and daughters.  It is wonderful to explore the cultures of the children we adopt and to share our own cultural traditions with them.  When we have children, birth or adopted, we lay down our lives to become mothers. We embrace our children as our children, just as Christ embraces us, we don't separate them by color or cultural background. I don't think my mom spent too much time trying to help me "embrace" my blackness or my whiteness but to look to Christ, embrace HIM and appreciate the me He created. She taught me about me and also that it is not all about me.

If you are a mama with precious children who do not look like you, God bless you for mama-ing without bondage to a system that suggests parents and children should look alike.  Thank you for seeing your child as an icon of God.  Thank you for laying down your life, society's expectations and opinions, and sometimes even losing friends and family, for the sake of your children.

I am half black and half white but I am not grey.  I am the mixed, but not confused, mother of 8 children (black, white and brown).  I go forward as a mama with confidence, not because of  the color of my skin or the color of my children but because of the confidence I have found in Christ. 

May the peace of Christ be with you today!!!