Satiating Songbird

Okay, so now some funnier things about being adopted! See that beautiful Southern California woman in this photo? That's my mom. When she would proudly show me off to strangers, the normal comment was, "Oh! She must look a lot like her father!" My mother, getting her own private giggle out of it, would usually just reply, "Well, I suppose she does!" We made a strange-looking pair - the tall, blonde, blue-eyed goddess and the plump, knappy-headed street baby.

That curly hair? Well, it got MUCH curlier as I aged. I'll have to dig up some photos (now that I have a working scanner) of JUST how curly it got. I literally had an afro when I was about 18 months old. And my skin just got darker. To manage the hair, mom started parting it and braiding it - sometimes leaving it in braids when I went to bed. But my hair as a youth will have to wait for a different post, b/c that is an odd tale all by its lonesome. This photo to the right is one of my favorites of us - I had it blown up for her on Mother's Day one year. It shows the typical mother-daughter relationship. Me causing havoc, and Mom having to clean up after me.

Now for the story that Songbird mentioned. I live in a very rural part of Arkansas, in a town of 5,600 folks; the county population nears 20,000. At the time I got pregnant with the kiddo, I believe there may have been one black person in town. And I had heard stories of hangings in the late 1960's of the very few people of color that had dared make any attempt to reside here. At some point during my pregnancy, it just hit me. As Songbird so eloquently recalls, "It was just so hilarious because your panic happened so suddenly. It was like one day you woke up and this thought sprang into your mind. 'Holy Crap!!!! I could have a black child!!!!' Then, in typical Tiffany fashion, you couldn't shut up about it. You obsessed for the rest of your pregnancy about having a black child." Which is true. I was panicked. Terrified. I literally asked my husband how he would feel if, indeed, this child turned out to be noticeably black. Who knows what genetics could be lurking in my background? We were ready to move out of town, if need be. It became this worry, all through my pregnancy.

However, all my fears were laid to rest. Unfortunately, blogger is not cooperating with me on this last photo, but as you can see here, I didn't have a black baby. I was not run out of town, nor hung from the gallows.