A Tale of Two Mamas

As I've written about before, Little Man has always been aware that there is something different about our family.  He naturally gravitates towards others who are Black, and we say goodnight to his birth mother's picture and his state of birth every night before bed.  Although we call his birth mother by her first name, he has called her "Mama" a few times; each time we reiterate that yes, she is one of his mamas and that he has two -- his birth mama and me.  In the back of my mind I realized his level of awareness was developing, but things have reached a new stage.

Upcoming travel for Thanksgiving necessitated a trip to Target on a Saturday afternoon (yes, I know.  But at least it was pre-holiday chaos, right?).  He was feeling particularly flush in his new yellow hat, and he was soaking in compliments here and there as we moved through the store.  We had just finished grabbing what we needed and were headed to the checkout when, out of nowhere, he leaned back and loudly proclaimed, "I have a birth mama!"  

"Yes, baby, you have two mamas including your birth mama!" I responded.

"I have two mamas!" he repeated, before asking if he could have a cookie.  (To be fair, it was near dinner time.  We didn't have cookies...but maybe some mini-cupcakes ended up in the cart).

This brief exchange took me by surprise -- not because of the subject matter, but because of the randomness of it all.  I looked around after his statement to see if someone had caught his eye; perhaps he had seen a woman who reminded him of his birth mother's picture, or a cover on a book in the nearby aisle connected to something in his mind?  Nope, nothing I could see.  There weren't any advertisements featuring models or even a family that looked like ours in the vicinity.  For whatever reason, that was the moment something clicked in his brain and he needed to process it aloud.

I suppose there's no trying to find reason with a toddler's thought process, but there's an overprotective part that is desperately trying.  He is going to question and find meaning in his own way and in his own time, and mine is not to interfere.  I just want the path to lead him to a place of peace instead of heartbreak.  The problem, though -- and I already know this -- is that there's no way to make that direction anything other than what it's supposed to be.  If it takes him to a random aisle in a random store on a random day, so be it; all I can do is be a source of support along the way.