Zoe and I joined my brother and nephew for a sledding excursion in the mountains of snow outside their apartment in upper Manhattan a few weeks ago. Trudging, giggling, shlepping sleds, we made our way full circle around Inwood Hill Park from snowman to snowman, in search of the perfect slope.  As I watched my daughter scaling the jagged terrain of a giant snowball, I was struck by her perfectly round, beautiful brown, almost 9 year old face, bundled up in layers of fleece and thermal padding. 

“Look at Zoe,” I said, absentmindedly, to my brother, knee deep in a snow bank.  “In all those layers she looks like a little Eskimo.”  As soon as the words came out of my mouth I was suddenly, unexpectedly stopped in my tracks.   Frozen, literally and figuratively, I had just heard myself utter the exact same words a stranger in Fairway Market approached me with 8 years ago, almost to the day.  And the memory came up in Technicolor.  “She’s not really yours, is she?  She looks like a little Eskimo,” he snorted, peering down at her little face, pointing, scowling, scrutinizing, in an awkward attempt to put the pieces together of the oddness of our pairing. 

That moment is something I have pondered, obsessed over and written about more than once, and in this magazine.   I have carried it with me, trudging around and around the slopes of my parenting path, grieving, venting, in my own awkward attempt to process my anger, sadness and longing for a simpler, more mainstream family life and an easier path than the one Zoe and I were destined to tread.

As I uttered those words that have come to represent so much more than they were ever intended to, I was struck by how things change.  Of all the jagged edges and slippery slopes Zoe and I have maneuvered, I could never have imagined that this particular issue, so stinging and sharp for so long, would become such a non-issue for me. 

I haven’t forgotten the discomfort and sadness in that moment, and there has been something indescribably liberating about sharing it here in this magazine.  But it just isn’t nearly as painful any more.  Like the snow in Inwood Hill Park, the anger has melted away, replaced by our life.  The racially tinged rough edge in that initial interchange was muted by the real life experience of “really” being Zoe’s mother, every single day.

“Mommy, look at me,” she squealed, and hit me square in the heart with a mass of soft, furry white.  We laughed, I tackled her, we hoisted our sleds on our backs and got back on the path, in pursuit of the next snow bank, and we kept trudging…