From a Mom of Two: It’s Okay to Have One Kid

Have you seen the movie This is 40? It’s pretty funny and definitely one of those pop culture moments where I saw myself, ticking ever closer to that particular milestone, up on the screen, with the lines coming straight out of my mouth. Not that my daily dialogue is that witty, but the conversations were eerily familiar.

One particular line stuck with me, when Paul Rudd responds to a question about whether he wants a bigger family, “No, never for a second. Never. I love what we have. One? Breeze. Two? Brutal. Three? Put a bullet in my head.”

There’s a kind of unspoken but overwhelming expectation that every American woman will have two kids. Why do parents of two participate in this pressure, knowing how brutal it can be? Why don’t we tell parents of one that it’s ok not to have another baby? It really is.

A while back, there was something going around on Facebook that went something like this:

It’s not nothing to have another kid. Only hearing that from parents of only children isn’t exactly enlightening. The only-child stigma is strong, so it just sounds defensive.

It feels hard to say, “Just have one!” when you have more. As if someone will hear it as, “My second kid is a nightmare.” That’s not what it means.

As one of four kids (with siblings I love deeply), and now as a mom with two kids of my own (who I love deeply), I would just like to say: It’s ok to have only one kid.

While I don’t have anything to add to talk of whether or not only children grow up to be more selfish-evil-weird than kids with siblings, I can share what I went through as a mom going from one to two kids.

When I was pregnant with my second, a man in a restaurant wished us good luck, "You're gonna be outnumbered!" I corrected him, "No, this will be our second." He repeated himself, "Yeah, outnumbered," and laughed. Somehow, I can't explain, he was right. And he was the only one I’d ever heard that from.

It’s so much simpler to keep one little kid happy than two. After our second was born, I was surprised to discover how much easier it is to single-parent one kid than to do almost anything with two parents and two kids.

Just because they’re both kids doesn’t mean that they will ever want or need the same thing at the same time. They have the nerve—both of them!—to be actual real live little people. And each kid demands a slightly different parenting approach day-to-day, moment-to-moment.

Since becoming a mother of two, I have learned (from a friend—thanks!) that I am “not one of those moms that make it look easy.” With two kids, I can’t fake carefree. I don’t have a baby: I have a family. We eat in family-friendly restaurants (when we go out at all). We are home for bedtime. We don’t plan to travel the world anytime soon. We plan kids activities for the weekends. There’s no going back.

And speaking of no going back, many moms find it harder, either financially or emotionally or both, to return back to work after the second baby. Women who leave the workforce after becoming mothers are more likely to do so after the birth of a second baby than after the first. 

My two.  

Why do I feel the need to pause here and say this? I love my kids! No regrets.

I’m not a love at first sight kind of girl—with men or with my babies. Not that I didn’t feel anything when my babies were born—of course I did. But whatever I felt in those early days was nothing compared to how much I love my no-longer-babies today. I remember very specific moments when I fell a little more, and a little more, and a little more in love with each of them. Then one day, I looked up, and I was absolutely knocked over by how much I loved them.

It’s not easy to tell someone else not to have a second once you’ve fallen in love with yours. But in those blurry postpartum days, I kept thinking: Why didn’t anyone tell me how hard this would be? Why isn’t it more ok to just have one?

When we signed up for baby number two, I was full of joy at the idea of another baby for our family. When my son was born, I went through a deep period of—loving him, yes, but also—wishing other moms of two were more candid about how hard it is.

I’m delighted to have two kids. I love them unimaginably. They are two wonderful little beings, each an amazing presence of in my life. I wouldn’t change a thing. But the second kid changed everything at least as much as the first did.

And I didn’t expect that.

When we were thinking about having a second baby, my husband talked to one of his only friends with one child. His advice: If you’re only planning to have one kid, just know that you’re going to have to be ready to talk to them about why they don’t have a sibling. Here’s my advice—try this: “You’re enough for us!”

My husband wasn’t as ready to sign up for two as I was, and that was essentially his question to me, “Aren’t we enough?” There’s no way to really justify this—it’s highly personal. I just felt like our family wasn’t complete and now I feel like it is.

Before my son was born, I would look at friends’ photos of their kids together, and there was something about the way they would reach out to each other that I found deeply moving. I wanted that for my daughter—someone to love her for life no matter what, not just us but someone who would get her, understand what it’s like to have the life she has and someone I hope will be there for her when we cannot, whether that’s while we’re alive or after.

I’m so happy my kids have each other. I believe there are many good reasons to have more than one kid, but I also think there are good reasons for having one. And I think parents of two or more need to chill with the whole, “Come on, jump in! The water’s great!” thing and be real about what it’s really like.

If one is great, two isn’t necessarily better.

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In Defense of Getting Less Sleep

Last week, my parents gave me the most amazing gift. They took my kids for three days and three nights. It’s the most time I’ve spent without kids since becoming a mom. Unlike our summer trip to the beach, this time at home alone was a real vacation.

Given how sleep-deprived parenting is, what surprised me most about what I did while they were away was that I didn’t get any extra sleep. What I did was better (and don’t get me wrong, I love to sleep). I used every waking moment exactly as I wanted and I enjoyed every last drop of time to myself.

Because, even more than sleep, what’s really exhausting about parenting little kids is never being alone.

And the less time I have to myself during the day, the later I stay up at night. It’s like I need to steal from those night hours a little of what I miss during the day. It's like all the parts of me I needed to get through those busy days, the parts I gave to everyone else or that were scattered to the wind along the way, I need to wait until they float back into my body and I can take at least one breath as a whole person. I need to feel like a real person again before I can agree to shut my brain off and sleep. I need to be who I am without anyone else around.

If I crash off to sleep before coming back to myself, I’m dizzy the whole next day.

Because each day I drift apart again... Arms and hips to my son, who needs to be held all the time… Ears and eyes to my daughter, who needs to be seen and heard all the time… My feet and legs and every bit of my heart so I walk toward my husband instead of away when he walks through the door, so we remember at least to say hello… And my hair, my face, my armpits, not sure where they disappear to but clearly there are days when they do not belong to me.

And that’s just a regular, plain old day.

It’s hard to pin down exactly why the days are so hard. In any given minute, the what-needs-to-be-done is mostly mundane, mostly not overwhelming, mostly easy-to-do stuff. And then time ticks on, minute piling upon minute, each minute assigned to something, to someone else. If I take a breath, it’s only to remember which of the things I’m not doing need to be done already.

In parenting, 90% or more of the time is easy enough, relaxed enough, manageable enough. And then there’s the other 5 or 10% that’s so unbelievably hard that it leaves traces of its hardness on the rest of the day. When I can let go of that small amount of hard stuff when it’s over, the rest of the time is so much easier. I can’t always do that.

It’s actually something I learned in labor. If you can let go of the pain of the contraction when it dissipates, you’re in a much better place when the next one comes along. If you can’t, that next contraction will be much harder. If you can’t allow it to ebb and flow like a wave, it will pull you under.

Days with kids are like that too. Little kids are kind of like crazy people with ups and downs that can give you whiplash. I find that I hang on too their bad moods—crying or yelling or whining—a lot longer than they do. If I could learn to let go as fast as they do, there would be a lot more happy in my days. For me, it’s hard to let go without a little time to myself. It’s hard to get back to neutral.

The hardest thing about having little kids is that it's constant, no breaks, no breaths, no brain space. Every day—no way out but through.

The feelings of obligation--to be there all the time, to be there completely, to be perfect—are intense. Sometimes I feel like I’m constantly bracing for the next disaster. When there is calm, it always has the air of the calm before a storm.

At the end of those days, when everyone is finally asleep, I need a little time to not-sleep. I need to be alone, lights low, doing something stupid and slow. It may look like reading or watching tv or social-networking, but really it’s breathing my own breaths and letting go of everything.

I may be a little more exhausted the next day with the sleep I lose during those late nights, but what I gain is more valuable: a little piece of sanity to hold onto through another long day spent not-alone.

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Post-script to Formula vs. Antidepressants

This piece was written over a year ago, just before I stopped nursing my son around 9 months (which I posted on Facebook, forgetting that not everyone sees that first). It's still hard to remember that time, but kind of amazing that what got us through--more sleep when my husband took over nighttime parenting and ultimately medication for me and formula for the baby--feels so much less anguished now. I got better, such as it is, and my son is fine. It was so hard to give him that first formula bottle. And then it wasn't. Almost exactly like starting medication was for me years ago. But I'm also still glad, hard as it was, that we made it to 9 months with nursing. And he still takes a bottle at bedtimes, because I still feel just a little like I took something away from him and I want him to at least have the bottle as long as he wants. This kind of decision is different for every mother and I don't pretend to know what's right for anyone else. I just try to tell the truth and hope that helps.

Formula vs. Antidepressants : How Hard Will It Get Before I Stop Nursing?

“I’m not such a bad mom to have,” I think to myself as I cuddle with my three-year-old daughter in her bed while my husband sings to her, “You Are My Sunshine.” She nuzzles my head, her curly hair falling into my face. But today was another bad day, so even this happy thought makes me begin to cry quietly, my face hidden against her fleece pajama-covered belly so she doesn’t notice.

For about two hours today, I didn’t speak to my daughter. I didn’t even notice until the clock said 6 pm and I looked down at where she was on the floor, playing and talking quietly to herself, having long given up on getting me to play along with her favorite activity: feeding me lines. “Mommy, you say, ‘That’s a beautiful outfit, Angelina Ballerina,” or “Mommy, say, ‘Don’t cry, Angelina.”

A simple request and an easy way to keep her happy, but today, I can’t play. The trigger this time was naptime. Instead of sleeping, she wouldn’t stop talking, so I didn’t get a break from the constant noise of her sweet but incessant three-year-old voice. Then her baby brother was fussy, she threw something at him, the dirty diapers were endless, I hadn’t had a break in days…

On and on until I was so far down that the best I could do was to numb myself. I could be angry or I could cry or I could just shut down. To talk would be to fall apart. I didn’t want to cry, I didn’t want to yell at her, so I just didn’t speak.

But how much better is that, really? To have a silent mother? To be three and feel alone and ignored? Instead of a stay-at-home mom, I began to feel like a bad babysitter, just keeping the kids alive until the real parent gets home.

I have struggled with mild depression and generalized anxiety for years, if not most of my life. Like many people with mild depression, there are periodic episodes when things get much worse. Antidepressants have helped immensely for the last five years, but I stopped taking medication while pregnant with and nursing both of my children. During both pregnancies, I felt happy and managed well without my medication—maybe the hormonal changes helped, maybe I was just really happy to be pregnant, I don’t know.

With my first baby, nursing was also protective. Until she began to wean herself around one year, I felt fine without the drugs. As she nursed less, I did less well, until I stopped nursing at 15 months and went back on my medication. By most measures, quite nursing success.

With my son, it’s a different story. Nursing doesn’t have an anti-depressant effect. He’s just four months old and it’s been a long four months. Maybe the hormones are different, maybe it’s something else, but I’m struggling so much more this time.

When I would nurse my daughter, I remember feeling a deep calm wash over me. I was happy, like what I was doing was the best thing in the world and I could just focus on nurturing this beautiful baby. When I nurse my son, I just wish he would hurry. I feel like I have other things to do and his needs are getting in the way. My daughter needs me. I need time to myself. In the beginning, he felt like a tiny little stranger who was keeping me away from my beautiful child. As I developed a bond with my son and a deep love for every little thing about him, this has faded some. I no longer want to cry every time I nurse. Just sometimes.

This is what the early days of a second baby look like: sloppy nursing. 

I have come to hate nursing… until I think about not nursing. I gave my daughter over a year of the best nutrition, the best nurturing, the best of everything I could. How could I give my son some fraction of that? What if I stop and he gets sick more often than my daughter? Has more allergies? Isn’t as smart? I practice my new mantra: Formula isn’t poison. Formula isn’t poison.  

And then there’s the financial aspect of it… I know I would want to buy the best, most expensive organic formula available and estimates I’ve read put the cost of formula-feeding at as much as $4,000 a year. So, even if I make it to six months, we’d have to spend about $2,000 on not-nursing. Just think of all of the things I could buy with that much money, things to make me feel just a little happier. Like up to 200 hours of babysitting help. Twenty-five deep-tissue massages. Eighty pedicures. Maybe those would keep me sane enough to keep nursing?

My son’s pediatrician won’t advocate continued nursing while I’m taking an antidepressant, but she won’t tell me to stop nursing either. What she does unequivocally advocate is that I get back on my medication if I’m not doing well. It’s not good for children to have a depressed mother. As for nursing, it’s up to me. Take the risk of exposing him to medication or switch to formula.

But how well do I need to be? How depressed can I be without being a bad mother? Is one bad day a week too much? Two? What if the other days are fine or even good? How much longer can I make it? What bad thing needs to happen before I know I can’t wait any longer?

According to Thomas Hale’s Medications and Mothers' Milk, the best medication for me does go into the breast milk. One six-month-old breastfed baby whose mother took it seems to have had a seizure. Chances are slim that would happen to my baby, but slim enough? Maybe I should try one of the anti-depressants that’s cleared for breastfeeding, even if it’s not the best one for me. Maybe that would get us to six months with fewer bad days.

Not that there’s any medication that can make easy the overwhelming job of being the mother of an infant and a preschooler. All moms—stay-at-home, working, depressed, perfectly healthy—have bad days. My daughter will still talk nonstop, refuse naps, throw toys. My son will still cry, have three dirty diapers in a row, wake up at night. But I need a longer fuse. I need to be less depressed if I can be. For me and for them.

I want to nurse as long as I can. I do my best to balance my needs with what’s best for my son. For now, I’ll do all I can to be as happy as I can without medication—exercise, sleep, get more help with childcare, take breaks, use all the cheating parenting short cuts to happy days that I’ve learned in three years of motherhood.

And still the day will come when I will call my psychiatrist with an urgent plea, “Today is the last day I can be without medication. Actually, it was yesterday, but I just realized it today.”

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On Being a Pro-Choice Mom

I read something recently by a woman who wrote that becoming a mom made her politically prolife. At first blush, I get that. It makes some kind of sense. Babies and all.

But I disagree completely. Being a mom has made me adamantly prochoice.

The piece also got me thinking about this question—when did you begin to feel like the pregnancy inside your body was something other than your body... that it was an actual baby?

My husband and I first heard our daughter’s heartbeat when I was about 8 weeks pregnant. He cried. Listening to the sound of the fetal heartbeat was moving to him. For me? Not so much. It was weird and hard to process. I felt little scared and a little excited, but I didn’t feel like there was a baby in my body at that moment.

Six months earlier, I’d been pregnant for seven weeks. It was an ectopic pregnancy that ended with a dramatic emergency room visit. When I lost that pregnancy, it was a real loss. I was sad. I mourned. It was not devastating, as I can only imagine the loss of a child or the loss of a full-term baby during childbirth would be. Of course, anyone suffering from any of those losses will feel the loss in their own way.

For me, it’s really hard to pinpoint when my pregnancies felt more like a baby than my own body. In some ways, I’m not sure it really sunk in until the baby was out of my body, in my arms and breathing, with a face and a voice and a name. Even with my second baby, when I should have somehow been more ready for that moment, it still felt like a surprise when I gave birth and saw this little person, exactly as he had been inside my body moments before, now outside me and in front of my eyes.

The question of when life begins—when a pregnancy becomes a baby—may be a controversial political question, but it’s also a deeply personal experience for every pregnant woman living in her own body. And while I don’t think public policy on a woman’s right to an abortion should be decided based on my—or anyone else’s personal experience, it isn’t exactly separate either. (This article is a must-read discussion on the question of when life begins and the prochoice movement.)

For most people, when it comes to deciding whether to call themselves prochoice or prolife, they’d rather answer, “It’s complicated.” As Robert P. Jones wrote in his Figuring Faith column in the Washington Post last May, “Support for legal abortion has remained steady even as Americans’ identification with the politicized “pro-choice” or “pro-life” labels has fluctuated.” My personal stance on abortion has changed throughout my life, but my politics have always been prochoice.

My most deeply held belief about abortion rights is that if you can’t become pregnant, you’re welcome to call yourself prochoice or prolife, but in terms of advocating for legislation that will never impact you, just don’t. If you have no way of ever knowing what you might do if you were pregnant and didn’t want to be, then you’re in over your head.

When I was a teenager in high school, learning about all of this complicated life stuff, I thought that women should be free to decide for themselves what they believe and what’s right for them. But, of course, I thought, I would never make "that" choice. I would never have an abortion.

And I continued to believe that until I had barely exited my teens and got pregnant. I was 20 and halfway through college when I chose to have an abortion. Despite my previous thoughts on the subject, and how sure I was of them, I knew my decision from the moment I knew I was pregnant. I'm so grateful that I had a choice and grateful for the choice I made.

Because, you know what? You don’t really, truly know what you’d do until you’re staring at a positive pregnancy test.

When I got pregnant again in my early thirties, I was happily married and the baby was well-planned. And when that pregnancy turned out to be ectopic, I was really scared the whole baby thing was never going to happen for me. I thought constantly about the decision I'd make a decade earlier. I felt cursed, I felt punished, I felt bitter at the irony, but mostly I just felt really, really sad. And then I got pregnant again and gave birth to a beautiful baby girl.

Finally and very happily a mother, it started to sink in how hard this parenting gig is. I knew more deeply than ever that I had made the right choice with my first pregnancy. How could I ever have managed a baby at that age, with that guy or more likely alone? How could my life have moved past that point, to any happy place, after an unplanned baby was born and took over everything? As they do.

As a mother, I was lucky to be able to be at home full-time with my daughter, with the support of an amazing husband and everything we could possibly need, and it was still hard. Amazing, beautiful, magical, wonderful, yes, of course all of those things, but also hard. Really, really, really hard. The lack of sleep, the crying, the isolation, the every day, in-and-out, the same thing and no way out ever. Not to mention the “can I really do this and not screw-up this beautiful little human being?”

In all seriousness, we did ok. We did our best. We had love more than anything else, for our baby and for each other. And as someone put it to me when I was pregnant, "You'll do fine. You're not a crackhead and you have the Internet."

Just before our daughter turned three, we welcomed a second baby into our family. Our son was also planned—we were ready and we were thrilled. With my son’s birth, I experienced sleeplessness like I never knew, and for this and other reasons, I went though a really tough postpartum depression.  Somehow, I made it through that time, but I might not have. The hormonal changes that happen during pregnancy are powerful—and for some, especially those with a history of depression or anxiety, they can be scary.

Being pregnant is a little like playing Russian roulette—you don’t know what’s gonna hit you when you pull the trigger. It could be that the baby you get needs more from you than you imagined or the changes could be within yourself. No one knows what’s on the other side of pregnancy when they decide to have a baby.

I used to think I wanted to have three kids, but I know now that I’m done. If I got pregnant again, I would not, could not, choose to have the baby. To have a third baby would be wrong for me and for my family. I'm not sure I'd survive it. Not in a strict "life of the mother" kind of way that abortion restrictions have in mind, but I came too close to the scary bottom last time and I won't go there again. I love my kids too much to risk them losing their mother.

And I have made every effort to ensure I won't get pregnant again, but 98% effectiveness is not a 100% guarantee. We can do our best to avoid pregnancy, but unless anti-abortion crusaders think I should stop having sex with my husband, we can't be certain.

I never want to have another abortion. I’m sure it would be harder to go through now that I know firsthand what happens when a pregnancy ends with the birth of a baby. But I know that’s the choice I’d make. Or, rather, I think I know. The truth is, it’s hard for anyone to know what they would do if they became unexpectedly pregnant.

I wish no woman ever needed to have an abortion. But I live in the real world, with billions of other women, and we all deserve the right to make our own choices about our lives and our bodies, even if those decisions end up being different than we could have ever imagined. Life in the real world includes birth control failures, rape, medical problems, human imperfection and all kinds of decisions that are unimaginable until they are facing us.

The experience of becoming and being a mother may change the way a woman feels about ending a pregnancy, but I would hope it would also bring with it deeper understanding for women who face that decision. As mothers, we know what it feels like to be pregnant and to give birth and to love our babies. We also know how hard being a mother is and how much change comes with a baby, how much they need and how much they deserve.

No one should have to take on all that being a mother requires, or even all that pregnancy requires, if they don’t desire it fully. And that any baby would be born unwanted into this imperfect world is heartbreaking. And that's why being a mom has made me more pro-choice than ever.

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Ten Reasons Why It’s Ok for My Daughter to Play Princess

My little princess.

1.      My daughter loves pink, fluffy, sparkly princess stuff and I love my daughter.

2.      I trust my daughter—she is strong and smart and funny and, yes, beautiful, and none of this is diminished by her love of pink, fluffy, sparkly princess stuff.

3.      Princesses are to girls as superheroes are to boys. It’s a costume that makes them feel powerful and happy and fun.

4.      If she has decided that she loves everything princesses and we show our adult disdain for what pleases her, we do a little bit of damage to her confidence in what she believes and her trust in her own mind.

5.      Girls who dress-up like princesses don’t know that we’re worried about how they’ll dress in 15 years and we have no idea who they will become or how they will dress or whether how they’ll dress will have anything to do with who they’ll become.

6.      Wearing fancy dresses doesn’t hold them back one bit. They will still go on a Bear Hunt.

7.      Princess is just a jumping off point, they are never just-a-princess—add a cape or a hat or a cardboard box or a wand or boots or a mask or layer anything else on top of that fancy dress and you have a fairy-princess-ballerina or a princess magician or a princess-cowgirl or a princess-mommy or a princess who runs a lemonade stand or who takes a rocket ship to Mars or puts out a fire in a fancy, fancy way. Endless creativity is possible from here.

8.      Imaginary play is imaginary play is imaginary play, even when there are princesses. And creative dramatic play is important for kids—they have a lot of stories they need to tell.

9.      Princess stories are rewritten every time they are lived by strong, smart girls who are raised by parents who teach them that they are strong and smart and can do anything. And when we read those old princess stories that trouble us to our daughters, we get to talk about why they trouble us.

10.   Condescending to pink, fluffy, sparkly princess stuff shows our cultural bias against all things feminine and girly, and contributes to a world in which “gender-neutral” skews boyish and masculine and is never pink or purple. And that diminishes our daughters and our sons. 

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On Raising White Kids

I’m a white mom. I have two white kids. There’s a lot I can ignore and avoid with them. I try not to avoid everything, but I get to make that choice. I get to decide when I want to turn a comment into a teaching moment. And when I’m tired or can’t think of what to say, I get to let it go.

At preschool, my daughter’s teacher spent several months working with her class on a self-portrait project that focused their attention on how to mix paint to match each of their different skin colors, their eye colors, the colors of their hair.

My five-year-old daughter calls her skin color pink. She doesn’t understand why we call someone’s hair “red” when it looks closer to orange. When she’s talking about someone in public, she identifies people by the color of their clothing. Once, she saw a tall black man walking down the street dressed head to toe in white, complete with a white hat, and said, “Look at that fancy white man.”

I didn’t correct her. Should I have? If I told her he was a black man, she would have looked at me like I didn’t know my colors. I’m pretty sure I’ve told her that people would call her skin color white, but I don’t even remember what she said to that.

What would it be like, as a parent, to have to tell your kids that some people will hate them, fear them, treat them badly because of the color of their skin? I don’t know. But it’s important that I try to imagine how that would feel.

As a white mother trying my best to raise children who embrace the diversity all around them, what are my obligations? My mother, raised by parents with racist ideas, chose color-blind as a better path, saying racial diversity was a revelation to her, that it confused her that there was any difference. It was a big leap for one generation.

My generation has been taught to look at things in a different way, to reject the idea of a melting pot as a failed attempt at seeing everyone as the same. Call it a salad or a rainbow or whatever you like, but we grew up in an era of different as beautiful. What will our kids see?

Children notice differences from a very early age, including racial differences. If we—especially white parents—try to ignore racial difference or pretend we’re all the same, they will get confused and navigate these questions on their own.

At two and five, my kids are still so young that talking about racial injustice would likely just confuse them. We’re in the take-it-as-it-comes stage, though I don’t always seize the opportunity when it pops up, always in an unplanned moment.

The first time my daughter ever verbalized anything about race was during a playdate when she was about two. One of her closest friends at the time was an African-American boy, just a little younger than her, who had been adopted by white parents. The kids were dressed in tutus and wings and sitting across the room from us, side by side, looking out the window. She turned to him and gently stroked his naked shoulder, saying, “Your skin is so… dark... and beautiful." His mother and I stared at each other, speechless for a moment. Then the kids started running around like two year olds again and we knew that we missed an opportunity. What should we have said? I still don’t really know.

I’m sure a lot of white parents have stories like this, maybe just as charming and sweet and innocent. I imagine that there is a different kind of moment that African-American parents share of their children’s first encounters with racism, not charming or sweet in any way. It’s heartbreaking to imagine this kind of moment, when a small child’s world is penetrated by the hateful thoughts of another person.

All parents will eventually witness their children learning about evil in the world, but I imagine non-white children don’t get to keep their innocence quite so long as my kids will.

When my first was a baby, I remember reading something about a study that showed that white babies get more attention from strangers, more people smiling at them and telling their parents how cute they are. I thought of that often as my little white girl was being doted upon. And I think about it when I see black or brown babies and try to remember to smile at them and tell their parents how cute they are. I know it helped me through hard days as a new mom to get that kind of attention and it sucks that not everyone gets that in the same measure.

More recently, my daughter said to me, “Everyone is nice, right mommy?” I did my best to say no in the least scary way I could. She’s old enough now and without me often enough to need to hear about stranger danger and other kinds of badness she might encounter.

I walk through the world with a lot of fear. I have intrusive racist thoughts that I have to acknowledge and fight against. I try not to cross the street to avoid imagined danger from people who are used to watching people cross the street away from them. But as a white woman, my natural anxiety is constantly reinforced by a world that tells me that I have every reason to be afraid.

As I absorb the events following the tragic death of Trayvon Martin and worry about the impact of his killer’s acquittal on the world in which I raise my children, I am left wondering what I can do.

Perhaps the best thing I can do is to teach my children not to be afraid.

Last summer around this time, a national conversation reverberated from the ignorant comments of Rep. Todd Akin about “legitimate rape.” I think a lot of people learned for the first time that nearly every woman lives their life afraid of being raped, that it is something on our minds all the time.

I hear echoes of that conversation in the wake of the Zimmerman verdict. Just as women began to more publicly talk about rape and the fears that women face that their bodies are never fully safe, African-American men are stepping forward and talking about the fear they live with every day. And parents are talking about the fears they carry with them constantly about their black children, especially their boys.

It’s not that this is a complete revelation, but I can’t remember another moment when so many black men talked about the fears they live with in such a public way. I’m sure there are many white people who are seeing this, really imagining what it must be like, for the first time. More than I believe anything else about the world, I believe that the world gets a little better every time we honestly share our different experiences.

Listening to another parent talk about how my internalized anxiety is a part of what has built a world in which they don’t feel like their kids are safe is very moving. I want to be less afraid. I want to remember Trayvon Martin when I look at the young black men walking around my neighborhood.

Just as women are talking about teaching their sons how not to rape, instead of only teaching our daughters how not to get raped, white parents need to teach our children how not to be afraid of people with darker skin than ours. And, judging from some online dialogues I’ve read, I need to teach my son to recognize his white, male privilege, not to believe his advantages in life are because he works harder or his dad works harder than someone else’s.

There will be time when they’re older for them to learn the truth about American history. For now, I wish I better understood how to talk to my children about racial prejudice without introducing the idea of racism before they ever experience it. I could wait until there is a moment where we encounter some injustice, but I feel that will be too late. As I work to figure this out, their white innocence continues.

Like with much of parenting, I suppose I will stumble my way through this with as much love and good intention as I can manage. With Trayvon’s mother in my heart, I can promise that I will do what I can to teach my son and my daughter to not fear different faces. Not to be afraid of someone else’s child. So that child may live with a little less fear that my child might do him harm.

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