In the past week, my son Roo has made it through exactly two nights without waking up soaking wet and howling.

We use cloth diapers, so we switched to the thicker night covers. Then night covers with doublers. Then those brown disposables from Whole Paycheck. Then the good old-fashioned ultra-bleached, Bert-and-Ernie-on-the-front Pampers.

Leaks, leaks, leaks. One night we actually ran out of pajamas, and, at four in the morning, tried unsuccessfully to stuff him into pajamas he’d worn as a newborn (6 months ago), and ended up bundling him in a fleece baby sleeping bag thing since we could only fit the top half of his body into the pajamas.

Finally, NSG hit on the problem: we were neglecting to put his diaper on with his p*nis (avoiding the search engines, not the biology) pointing down. Was that a first-time parent mistake, or what?

Anyway, it reminded me again of what it really means to be parenting a child whose experiences will be so different than those we faced growing up.

When we were just talking about having babies, talking about transracial adoption, several people asked me about raising boys without a dad - what were we going to do, they asked, about making sure our son had plenty of male role models? One of the people who asked me this question was a white woman with a white husband who lived in an almost entirely white neighborhood and had almost exclusively white friends.

Huh.

Our culture is pretty used to mixing it up, gender-wise (men and women, that is - not so much with the in-betweens). Racially we’re a whole lot more segregated, and so it’s much easier for people to blame a lack of role models from different ethnicities and cultures on “how our society is” instead of seeing it as a responsibility.

When we bought our house last spring, we specifically looked for a racially and ethnically mixed neighborhood. We love it, but it’s only a start. And we’ve made an effort to have Roo spend time with our male friends, but let’s face it: most of them are gay or trans, and most of them are white. They’re incredible models for the kind of masculinity we’d like our son to see, but again, it’s only a beginning.

We’ve only experienced racism from the perspective of white women. So how do we get him ready for what he’s going to face? 

If we teach him to speak in certain ways and present himself in certain ways that will help him gain respect in the big wide world, are we equipping him with tools to be successful, or are we feeding into racism by encouraging to work within the boundaries of a white world?

This is one of those parenting challenges that, in the abstract, makes me feel tired, but in the concrete, looking at my baby son, makes me feel like I Am Mama, Hear Me Roar.

How do you plan to get your kids ready for what lies ahead?