White girls made me do it. All right, made could be a pinch too much. Sounds a bit…you know. So, no. Convinced? Cajoled? Conjured? Because surely only a crazy person under the influence of blond spell work would respond to a WhatsApp invite to “meet up” before 9 a.m. and below 40 degrees thusly: “We’ll be there!!!”
Blame it on the exclamation points. Their thirsty asses are the reason my fifteen-month-old daughter and I ended up bouncing for warmth around a socially distant circle of mostly white moms and their babies in the park formerly known as an open-air drug mart near the erstwhile frat house we call home. Robyn—that’s my kid—is here for none of this. The child is screaming her head off in an obvious attempt to alert CPS, while I try to make small talk about the pre-K lottery with the think-tank director who essentially leads this gang of moms I got jumped into a few years ago after the birth of my older daughter earned me the right to membership. It’s in this moment, as my baby’s cheeks ice over with tears and I go on and on about ELA scores, that I realize we’re like “a thing,” me and these moms, and also that me and Robyn should probably leave before her fingers fall off. Wait, did I mention that I’m Black? Like, Black all the way through (whatever that means). And that the Blacks don’t do this? The cold, I mean. Oh, and that stereotypes are still a thing?
Because if our collective common sense wasn’t innate, then I wouldn’t feel so ’shamed for depositing a popsicle disguised as a baby into the PPE-swathed arms of Miss Kim thirty minutes later. Miss Kim is the masked fairy charged with keeping my kid alive and who, I’m pretty sure, doesn’t know my first name. Today Miss Kim is wearing a unicorn onesie with her Senegalese twists done up in the front like a horn, and when I hand her Robyn, I play off my baby’s shrieking as monokerophobia. I’m two blocks away and this close to getting away with it when my back pocket starts barking.
“Hi, Mom!” Shit. “Mom? This is Miss Kim! Robyn’s teacher?” We’ve spoken almost every day for a year and yet Miss Kim never fails to introduce herself anew over the phone, as if I could forget her in the tetherball-string length of time we spend apart.
“Yep,” I reply, trying to sound super casual while hoping against hope that Robyn has an unexplained butt rash and not, like, hypothermia. “Everything okay?” See what I’m doing here? I know. I know my child is cold down to her bones. I know she is pissed about that fact. But I don’t want Miss Kim, a middle-aged Black woman who embraces “Spirit Week” with the fervor of someone in possession of multiple adult-sized onesies, to know that I know. Because I don’t want Miss Kim to know that I did it for the Mamas, a group of mothers I met on Facebook filled with the type of girls I used to make fun of in college and who, decades later, have clearly led me to forsake my Black-ass common sense.
“Weeelll.” Miss Kim is hesitant, afraid to wag her finger at me although I deserve it, because the three hundred dollars we shell out a week keeps her flush in furry one-pieces and whatnot. “Her little arms and legs are like ice! She just won’t stop crying! Poor thing! Was she outside for a really long time this morning?” I know Miss Kim wants to suck her teeth.
This is the part where I—a fully grown woman who does not own onesies in her size and whose older daughter, Sally, believes chill pills are daily vitamins—consider lying. I can’t tell Miss Kim that I was quite literally chilling with the white girls. She’d have my badge! Because it is cold today. So frigid, in fact, that when I told my husband, Rob, that I was strongly considering heading to the park to hook up with the stroller cartel for a pandemic-friendly “mom thing” and then walking the extra twelve blistering blocks to the Baptist church that houses our daycare, his response was an incredulous, “For what?” The better question would be for whom—the Mamas, Robyn, me? I’m still trying to figure out the new math involved.
Is the woman who has her baby out in the cold for no other reason than to cling to the fast-escaping steam of human connection the sum of all these parts—parenthood, race, class, status—or have they subtracted her? The real problem to tackle was a puzzle: How did a Black mom fit into the nearly all-white definition of motherhood that dominated the streets of her rapidly gentrifying D.C. neighborhood? Were these women I’d risk frostbite for my friends? Parenting colonizers? My competitors? Consider this book as the word problem to end all word problems. In the end, an answer should be forthcoming—or at the very least I’ll show my work.
But first, there’s this icy toddler to contend with.
Miss Kim, still trying to solve the mystery of the frozen baby, has had a stroke of genius. “Blankets!” she shouts. “We’ll try to warm her up with blankets.”
This woman is trolling me. I’m sure of it now. Because Black moms should know better. We see the temperature drop to “she needs a coat coat,” and then it’s a mad dash from inside to inside.Outside is a nonstarter, something to be avoided at all costs when the air suddenly goes visible. Let’s say it has something to do with our equatorial origins or perhaps just the good sense God gave us. Either way, I’ve failed on both fronts, and Miss Kim, the same woman who must remind me to bring wipes for Robyn’s asshole at least three times before it sticks, won’t let this shit go.
“Matter of fact,” she underlines, “I’m going to put some in the dryer right now. That should do it.” She pauses, waiting for me to fill up the rest of this conversation bubble with self-flagellation.
Here’s what I say: “Ugh, my poor little Robyn Bobbin. I’m sure she’ll be all right. Thanks for calling. Have a great day.” And here’s what I want to say: The child is fine! The Swedish leave their children outside in subzero temperatures while they get their hair done. It was in Time magazine. Google it! I’m a good mother! What’s even worse is the fact that my hypothermia hypocrisy is very hard-won.
See, in the Before Times (pre-children, pre–having cares in the world, pre-Covid), whenever a happy tribe of unapologetically white Maclaren moms crossed my path—bogarting the sidewalks, infiltrating cafés, touching things with their breeder hands—I’d do the sign of the cross, roll my eyes, and seal it with a heavy sigh. There but for the grace of God go I. I saw none of myself in them. White parents doing pirouettes with their hatless children on snowy sidewalks? I’d press my lips together, shake my head, and turn to Rob: “Ooowee, white people just love the cold, don’t they?” “Ummhmm.” Brandishing my imaginary fists at these insane parents, I’d TED-talk them in my head: “Get that baby in the house! It’s freezing out! What is wrong with you?”
How’d it happen? How did I go from Judge Snooty Fox to what my husband called “full-on suburban white lady”? First off, he was joking. Obviously! Despite spending hours in the mirror stroking my fraying bath towel “hair” as a six-year-old, trust I ain’t ever wanted to be anything but Black with a capital B, and I’d rather eat mayonnaise sandwiches every day for a year than move to the suburbs. See what I did there—the code-switching? That invisible seesaw is what parenthood is like for mamas like me who technically have more in common with the good white folks living in the million-dollar flip next door than the skinfolk barbecuing on their stoops down the block. Because there is no denying that being a middle-class Black mother to Black children in a neighborhood wobbling drunkenly on the gentrifying cliff of a thinned-out Chocolate City is a…different experience. An experience other parents are having around the country. An experience we hadn’t really prepared for. An experience untold.
That’s what this book aims to do. To “tell it,” as Grandmommy would say. The story of what it’s like being “the only one” in a Polly Pocket world of postracial parenting that primarily concerns itself with baby music class and not class divides. How hiding out there was both a welcome breather and a constant reminder. Because of course the world writ large came rushing in with a vengeance. A global pandemic both downsized our lives and expanded our world view. And just as we were wrapping our minds around what that meant, George Floyd happened. A man was murdered. A father who called out for his mama. And being a Black mother hit different. We were different. These women and I. Women who were raising the children my two baby girls would grow up around, play with, fight with—and one day hopefully survive. Sure, we were alike. They obsess over silly shit; they think their husbands are lazy; they work too much, feel guilty about it, and then feel guilty about the guilt, because feminism. But we’re not the same. Not at all. Was admitting that fact unnecessarily divisive or desperately necessary?
For as long as I’ve been a mother, I’ve been on the hunt for “mom friends,” collecting ladies with babies like grown-up baseball cards. When some dude (okay, fine, my husband) put a baby in me, my operating system (the one with the unwritten code about never being one of those moms) completely rebooted. Instantly the idea of a mom gang seemed like a smart survival tactic—like how they do in prison. And if there was one thing our neighborhood did not lack (aside from expensive-ass houses) it was ladies with babies. Filling up the long days of my privileged maternity leave by evil-eyeing the other inmates in the yard didn’t seem like the best use of my sentence. Remember: do the time, don’t let the time do you. We were all in this together, right? I jumped in.
That got me to the Really Big Question: Did motherhood truly connect us? And by us I’m not just talking about Black moms and white moms—although the dividing line there is sharp—but also Black moms of the Jack and Jill set and Black moms who set trip, moms across class divides, mothers from different sides of the aisle, you get the picture. Can we ever truly be friends, like really real friends? Not just mom friends or park friends or “Hey, sometimes I see you at the bodega struggling with your Boppy wrap too” friends? Or would there always be a chasm between us, whether it be cultural or cultivated, real or imagined? Would our tribes always win out? Would we be forced to choose? Did we need to in order to survive?
This book is me trying to answer questions I hadn’t thought deeply about before double-Dutching in my midthirties to the nursery rhyme: “First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage!” Oh, and on the downbeat come gentrification, a global pandemic, racial justice, and my mom moving in. (Actually, no. This is a safe space. Guys, I never learned how to double-Dutch.) This book is for all the mamas trying to make sense of all that racket without getting tangled up in those ropes, falling flat on their faces. Field guide it is not. It is not a book explaining Black motherhood to white mothers. Or skewering Karenting. Or clapping for parents with #BLM signs in their front yards but zero Black friends to invite through their front doors. It’s a story. My story. At its heart this book is about how the people surrounding us reflect the many versions of ourselves—whether they look like us or not, whether we want them to or not. It’s about a tightrope walk, a mental load, a struggle unseen. It’s the silent backstory we pack with us on trips to the park, the playground, the PTA Zooms. It’s for anyone who’s been “the only one” and for those who claim not to notice.
The mamas. Who gets to decide membership? Who holds the annual meetings? The mamas. They’re the amalgam of women I’ve clung to—the white moms of my changing neighborhood, the Black mom friends who sit together in the café, my own insane mother, and the one I look at in the mirror. All that is to say, I’m telling the story of finding my own identity as a woman with children through the women I leaned on, laughed with, and learned from. They’ve taught me that the lady I previously ignored on the street could be the same one I text my secret anxieties to, that all the measuring up we do just reveals more of our own shortcomings, and that kids scare us all shitless and make us brave. They’ve also taught me that mothering isn’t a monolith and everyone isn’t out to get us. And to never let your Black Mama guard down—ever. That true friends of any color have to earn your trust and prove themselves. Oh, and white people love the cold, don’t they?