I used to worry about this. When my oldest child (a biracial, biological son) was also my only child, I scoured libraries, bookstores, and booklists to try to make sure that his books would not only be windows into others’ experiences but mirrors of his own. Fat chance of finding such a mirror that went beyond a reflection of surface appearance and into a fully realized story. In the end, despite my best efforts to find books to celebrate his nontraditional familial reality, Rory didn’t much care that Heather had two mommies or that black is brown is tan; he was far more interested in The Adventures of Captain Underpants and Sylvester and his magic pebble, thank you very much, and I couldn’t really blame him.

I began to think that much of my fretting over building a multicultural, LGBT-inclusive children’s book collection was the product of visiting adult preoccupations on my child. I had the good intentions of wanting to provide a literary world that reflected the life experiences that we shared as a multiracial, two-mom family. But I realized that this was the world I’d built as an adult. My son was included in that world, but he also had a world of his own devising: informed by me and by his other mom, of course, but more and more uniquely his as he grew up and made his own friends, followed his own passions, tastes, and interests, and formulated his own visions for the world.

Of course, following such a line of thinking is itself an argument for the creation of books that tell stories from different vantage points. A child, raised by straight parents, who will grow up to be gay would be well served by children’s books that depict families with two mommies or two daddies, right? After all, my son’s world, occupied as it was by the stuff of preschool, was also one in which he imagined the adult he would become. Once, while reading Homemade Love by bell hooks and Shane W. Evans, Rory said something to me along the lines of, “I like reading this book about a family with all brown people because maybe someday I will grow up and have a family like that, too.” Eureka! I exhaled alongside overburdened Heather and her mommies and the black and brown and tan family and realized that Rory had a point. Reading children’s books isn’t all about looking at the here-and-now; it’s also about thinking about up-ahead-and-later.

But there are limits to this vision of aspirational children’s literature, based on a child’s perceptions of adult life. One day Rory announced that he was going to marry his friends Andy, Tim, and Rose. Never once did it cross my mind that I was raising a future bisexual polygamist. What I understood from this declaration was that four-year-old Rory really liked his friends Andy, Tim, and Rose. A preschooler doesn’t really get what marriage is, because it’s an adult institution. That’s why when King & King came out (as it were), I felt that this was a book aimed more at well-intentioned, anti-homophobic adults than at children.

Nevertheless, I think there is space for children’s books that address what it is to grow up and what it is to be an adult, books that move beyond glorifying and romanticizing childhood with a nostalgic tone that smacks of a tragic loss of innocence; after all, one of the main tasks of childhood is to leave it. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that I believe the children are our future. It’s more complicated than that: I believe the children are their future, and yes, I guess I believe the children are our future, too. But I am leery of songs, children’s books, and platitudes that focus only on this last belief. It’s all just a little too “and a little child shall lead them” for me. I don’t much like burdening children, real or imaginary, with the expectation that through their perceived innocence and charming naiveté they will save the world as they inherit it. This is different from acknowledging, celebrating, and supporting the fact in literature and in life that growing up is not a tragedy but a birthright.

And, just as importantly, I believe the children are our present, too, and their present. And that’s why I am still on the lookout for books that depict different kinds of families and different kinds of being in the world. Even if it’s a stretch to imagine that my particular family (Puerto-Rican-Caucasian-Jamaican-African-American-biracial-two-moms-with-five-kids-foster-adoptive-with-some-bio-ties) will ever see itself in print, I like to think that if there’s room for Heather and her mommies, there’s room for more of their friends, too.

From the May/June 2008 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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When my oldest child, Rory, was a toddler, I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell him about Santa. “You wouldn’t rob him of that!” my mother scolded. Rob him of what, I thought, but I knew she meant the wonder of it all, the belief that a magical, benevolent being would grant your wishes. In the end I caved and told Rory the big merry lie; he ate it up like so much gingerbread.

My childhood self scoffed at the idea of flying reindeer, but my son gloried in the magic of beasts that could fly without wings. As a girl I’d noted that even if Santa were to come down our chimney, it was blocked by a woodstove; Rory didn’t care that we had no chimney and said Santa would probably come in through the heating vents. I was charmed by his imaginative openness and fed into it, even as I felt a twinge of guilt about lying to my kid. “It’s not lying,” my mother insisted. “It’s about including him in the story.”

Picture books played a big part in perpetuating the Santa myth in Rory’s life, and we soon amassed a broad library of stories to indulge his fascination. After just a few listens, he flawlessly imitated the British accent of the readers of our audiobook version of Bruce Whatley’s The Night Before Christmas, and he was baffled by the ending of The Polar Express. “Why can’t his sister hear the bell anymore?” he demanded. “She stopped believing in Santa Claus,” I told him, “but the boy kept believing.” “Me too,” said Rory emphatically. “I will always believe.”

Rory made good on this promise well into elementary school. He doggedly resisted peer pressure until one autumnal night. “Mom-Mom, is Santa real or do you and Mama put the presents under the tree?” It was the moment I’d dreaded. “Why do you ask?” I dodged carefully. “The other kids say I’m a loser for believing still. Just tell me the truth. I can handle it.” I took a deep breath. “OK, Rory, Mama and I do put the presents under the tree, but Santa — ” “All of them?” he interrupted and burst into tears. No, not tears — heaving, racking sobs. I tried to channel some inner “yes, Virginia” muse and explained that it’s the spirit of Santa that we hold onto, the joy of giving, the celebration of childhood…but Rory would have none of it. He whispered, “It’s like I know the words to the song, but the tune has slipped away.” A knife to the heart, I tell you! But then he said, “We can’t tell Emilia. She still believes.”

Yes, two-year-old Emilia did believe in Santa, since we had to include her in the story that her brother had loved so well. However, she did not adore Santa; she was terrified of him. Just a month or so earlier, Emilia’s toddlerhood fascination with babies had led to an attendant love of trains when I read her New Baby Train, Marla Frazee’s picture book version of the Woody Guthrie song. She firmly associated babies and trains from then on, doggedly looking for infants in any book about a little engine; this included The Polar Express. Seeing no babies, Emilia fixated on the jolly old elf — and was struck with horror.

It took me a while to figure out why Emilia was suddenly refusing to go to bed. Finally, after much prompting, she explained, “If I go to sleep Santa will come and Santa is scary!” Emilia had no sense of the passage of time, so telling her that “in a few weeks” Santa would come to her house meant that he could come any minute. She was, after all, the same child who was frightened by masks, clowns, and the potato mascot who ran around our town fair each fall lauding the benefits of fruits and vegetables. It made perfect sense that she would be terrified at the prospect of a big, bearded man prowling around while everyone was asleep. I told her that Santa would leave presents in the garage that year and staged a phone call to the North Pole to tell him not to enter our house.

When, in the space of one year, baby Caroline (now five), Natayja (now thirteen), and Stevie (now six) joined our family, we half-heartedly went along perpetuating the myth, with the thought that if Natayja and Stevie had any belief in Santa, it wouldn’t be fair to say, “Guess what? In our family he doesn’t exist. Happy adoption day!” And, just a few days after Natayja, nearly eight, came home to our family, I curled up on the couch with her to read Christmas books. “Which one do you want me to read?” I asked. “That one,” she said, pointing to Trina Schart Hyman’s illustrated edition of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales. I wasn’t sure she’d have the attention span for the long text, but I started reading, “One Christmas was so much like another…” and we read the book straight through. This longer story allowed Natayja the uninterrupted time she needed to let her body sink into closeness with mine. Just as the mistletoe hanging in our dining room gave her an excuse to open herself up to kisses, shared reading of this book afforded her the time and space to cuddle. It didn’t matter how much she understood of the metaphor-rich language, or that Thomas’s Christmas memories were completely different from her own, or that in her experience of moving from family to family, one Christmas was so unlike another. What mattered was the sound of my voice reading to her, the images before her eyes as she pointed to them and said: “Look. It’s snowing,” or “Firefighters,” or “What’s that?”

When we reached the end she asked, “Can we read another one?” It was the first time she’d asked me for anything. We read for more than two hours on that couch, moving from eccentric aunts and candy cigarettes to a train traveling to the North Pole, and yes, to flying reindeer and good old Santa Claus. She delighted in these stories and later in visiting Santa at a local park, where she shyly told him what she wanted him to bring for her and her brothers and sisters and her two new moms.

I’m not sure when or how Natayja discovered that Santa is a story rather than a real person. She’s an ideal big sister, protective and kind, and she has played along every year for the benefit of her younger siblings. Stevie still believes in Santa Claus, but he can’t hold a Christmas candle to Caroline’s devotion, which seems to have surpassed even Rory’s belief. Caroline wants to read Christmas books all year long, and I indulge her in this, particularly in her favorite one, another Marla Frazee title, Santa Claus: The World’s Number One Toy Expert. “I just love his little underwears!” she says mischievously every time we read it and she beholds Santa romping around in his crazy Frazee boxers. But it’s not just Santa’s fashion sense that appeals to her, it’s his power. She regards St. Nick with what seems like an emphasis on his sainthood and worships him, perhaps filling some spiritual void born of growing up in our non-churchgoing household. Once, when she was being bossed around by her siblings, I said, “Ignore them. They’re not in charge of the world.” Without missing a beat she responded, “You’re right. Santa is.”

It seems that Santa, Mrs. Claus, and Rudolph form Caroline’s personal holy trinity as surely as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost formed mine when I was a devout Catholic girl who said her rosary every night, praying to be as good as Mary and delighting in taking part in my church’s Christmas pageant. If I allow my lapsed Catholic self to surface, I can admit to a personal preference for nativity stories over Santa ones, in part because they tie me to a heritage of faith that in other ways has slipped away from me. I grew up on Tomie dePaola’s pop-up book The First Christmas, and it, along with Margaret Wise Brown and Floyd Cooper’s A Child Is Born, are favorites in my family’s library today. The nativity book we turn to most often, however, is Julie Vivas’s The Nativity. Vivas’s art makes the text — straight from the King James Bible — accessible and wondrously human for her audience. She said of working on this book, “I’ve been pregnant. I couldn’t do a pretty Christmas book.”

Amen to that! Vivas’s pictures of a very pregnant Mary mounting and then riding on a donkey drive this point home with great humor and a subtle feminist panache. Reading this book when Rory was three, in preparation for attending Christmas Eve services with my mother, called for a certain amount of explanation of the text. Vivas’s angels wear work boots and have tattered, tie-dyed wings, and Mary, during the scene when the Archangel Gabriel comes to tell her that she will bear God’s child, is hanging the wash out on the line, oblivious to his descent. On the next spread Mary and Gabriel are seated at her kitchen table having their important conversation. The expression on Mary’s face is one of pure incredulity as she takes in the angel’s words: “Fear not Mary: for thou hast found favor with God. Thou shalt bring forth a son and call his name Jesus.” I paraphrased for Rory, “So here the angel is telling Mary that she is going to have a baby and Mary is really, really surprised about this news. Look at her — she’s like ‘Are you kidding!?’”

Rory loved this book. We read it dozens of times and brought it to the church so he could follow along with the lector. All was well until the “Fear not Mary” line resonated throughout the quiet sanctuary. Rory, taking this as his cue, called out in full voice, “And Mary was like, ARE YOU KIDDING?!” I gasped. But my mother whispered, “Oh Megan, don’t worry. Kids are what Christmas is all about,” and gave Rory a kiss on the top of his head.

When I think about the story of a long-awaited child born as a symbol of hope, my mother’s sentiment is something I want to celebrate in every season, but perhaps especially at Christmastime with all of its seemingly unavoidable family baggage and chaos. The holiday books I’ve shared with my kids hold more than just stories. They hold the memories of shared time together, and the conversations they’ve provoked have seen us navigating the emotions that come with being a family comprising people with different dispositions, hopes, and fears. I still question whether I made the right decision in telling my kids about Santa, and I am dreading the day Caroline confronts me about why the Polar Express hasn’t stopped at our house, or in some other way catches me in the big jolly lie. But I have reason to hope that she’ll come through it all OK based on how Rory’s feelings have evolved over time:

When Rory was twelve, he stayed up after his siblings went to bed to help stuff stockings and wrap presents. He was delighted by his new role and announced, “It’s even more fun to be Santa than to believe in him.” I looked at my son and recalled the night he wept over losing his belief in Santa Claus. Maybe he couldn’t hear a bell from the Polar Express, but it seemed that the tune that had slipped away from him was back. Joy to the world, indeed.

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One of the books our committee chose to honor was Dave the Potter: Artist, Poet, Slave by Laban Carrick Hill and illustrated by Bryan Collier. Less a comprehensive picture book biography than a meditation on the triumph of the human spirit and artistic expression in the face of oppression, this picture book is an exemplary offering of poetic text, enriching information, and downright gorgeous and emotionally powerful illustrations. Although my older children had looked at it, and I used it with great success in mock Caldecott sessions that I led with sixth graders at my partner’s school, it wasn’t a book I read with my younger children at home. In retrospect, I think perhaps I shied away from it as read-aloud fare for then four- and five-year-old Caroline and Stevie, thinking that they didn’t have the historical knowledge or maturity to grapple with the reality of Dave’s life as a slave. However, when I returned home after the awards were announced at the ALA midwinter meeting, I knew that I wanted to read all three of the books we’d honored with all five of my kids in order to share the experience with them.

Medal winner A Sick Day for Amos McGee illustrated by Erin E. Stead and honor book Interrupting Chicken by David Ezra Stein were titles that my kids already knew and loved. As I picked up Dave the Potter to read aloud that night, I began to second-guess the reasons I’d neglected to share it with them earlier. Ultimately, Caroline wasn’t particularly invested in the book, but as I witnessed Stevie’s enthrallment with the story and art, I rediscovered it as a brilliant introduction to some of the hard truths of American history for young children, rather than a book that demands broad historical context or the sophistication of an older reader.

As a white mother of children of color, I’ve found myself continually striving to shelter them from the painful facts of historical and contemporary racism while instilling in them a sense of pride in their heritages and truthfully exposing them to the realities of oppression and prejudice in developmentally appropriate ways. I haven’t experienced racism as they have or will, so the best I can do is act as an ally to them, much as a straight parent of a gay child might emerge as that child’s advocate and ally on personal and broader levels. This isn’t a perfect parallel, but it’s something I’ve held onto as I’ve read books like Dave the Potter with them, explaining that people with skin like mine enslaved people with skin like theirs, while also acknowledging that as children of Puerto Rican, Jamaican, African American, Irish, and French Canadian heritage, they have individual biological family histories that align and depart from this particular history in different ways. It’s complicated! But books like Dave help tremendously.

“It is so amazing that Dave learned how to read and write,” I told my kids as we looked at the closing picture of him etching a poem into the side of one of his pots and read his words.

“Why?” Stevie asked. “He’s a grownup.”

“Remember how we talked about what ‘slave’ means?” I asked. Stevie nodded, as did Natayja sitting behind him, and then Emilia piped up: “It means you’re not free. And it’s really bad because that means people owned other people.”

“Yes,” I said, watching Stevie’s face as he absorbed all of this. “Because way back then, when white people enslaved black people in this country, they also made laws to keep black people from learning how to read or write because reading and writing could make them more powerful.”

“That’s not fair,” Stevie said.

“No, it’s not. None of it was fair. But Dave learned how to read and write anyway, and he learned how to make these pots. He was very smart and very brave.”

“I’m learning how to read and write now too,” Stevie said proudly, and I felt him forging a connection between himself as an African American boy beginning to grapple with knowledge of racism and Dave as an enslaved African American man asserting his own dignity and worth in a society that railed against it.

“Read all of Dave’s poems,” Stevie insisted when I reached the back matter of the book, which features italicized bits of boldface text with words that Dave wrote on his pots. And so I did.

I doubt that Stevie grasped the meanings of every short poem, but I know that he was moved by the power of the story that Hill and Collier made of this man’s life and art. “Let me see that book again,” he said, reaching for it. And for the next twenty minutes or so, I tried to give him space for a private communion with the book, as the girls and I shifted gears and read from Natalie Babbitt’s The Search for Delicious—though I couldn’t resist stealing glimpses of him as he traced his fingers around the edges of the pots in the illustrations and studied Dave’s face from page to page.

Although we keep most of our children’s books on the built-in bookcases of the room we call the “children’s library” at home, Stevie brought Dave the Potter to his bedroom that night, and I’ve since read it with him and seen him looking at it by himself many times. One night, as he struggled with a particular injustice of the institution of slavery, he said, “It isn’t nice to make people work and not pay them.” Later he asked, “Why didn’t they run away?”

“Some people did,” I told him, and then we talked about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad as I made a mental note to share some of the many books we own about that part of American history with Stevie and his siblings. Emilia was already familiar with Tubman’s name, and she said that she was very brave for helping so many people escape to freedom.

“So did she get everybody except for Dave?” Stevie asked, his face falling as he thought about this particular person, one of myriad nameless people in his new, limited knowledge of history.

“No, she didn’t get everybody; there were too many people to help. But she helped lots and lots of people.”

We kept talking about how proud he and his siblings should be of the heritage they share as biological descendents of people who somehow made lives for themselves within a system that denied their humanity. Stevie beamed as we talked about pride and bravery, hope and rebellion, but I know how deeply he felt the injustice of it all as well. As I reflect on this awakening in my little boy, one step in many he will take from innocence to experience, I am grateful for books and the discussions that they’ve provoked because they’ve helped me be the mother my children need and deserve as they grow up and discover where they’ve come from, who they are, and who they might yet become. Of course, I want to protect Stevie, and I ache to see him trying to wrap his mind around the idea that a person could own another person; but I’m deeply moved by his reaction to this book’s affirmation of Dave’s triumph and by his proud sense of identification with it:

“He has dark brown skin like me because we are both African American,” Stevie said as he looked at Dave for the umpteenth time, and I recalled his earlier fascination with the differences in skin color that exist in our multiracial adoptive family and in the broader world around him.

“I know how I got this dark brown skin,” he told me when he was three years old.

“How?” I asked, wondering if he would talk about his birth parents.

“Well. When I was borned, I just got to choose, and I choosed this dark brown skin because I thought it was the most beautiful.”

“Like Beautiful Blackbird?” I asked him, referencing Ashley Bryan’s picture book.

“Uh-huh!” Stevie quoted, then quickly added, “But I am not black. I am dark, dark brown.”
Later, when he was anticipating the start of kindergarten, he asked me, “Does my teacher know I have brown skin?”

“I don’t know,” I told him. “Why?”

“I just wondered,” he said, very matter-of-fact. “And does she have skin like me, or you, or in the middle like Emilia?”

“I don’t know,” I said again, and I reflected on the erroneous adult goal of raising “colorblind” children. Was Stevie’s questioning about skin color in this instance really innocent of the value society places on racial constructions? I couldn’t be sure, which is all the more reason I am dedicated to the discussions we have at home about race, skin color, racism, oppression, and resistance, and I hope that they will play some role in contributing to Stevie’s positive self-concept. Meanwhile, I know that other factors are at play too, including an inner core emotional resilience that he displays. Acknowledging this strength is something I try to do in my parenting in an effort to avoid letting misguided, overprotective impulses get in the way of their individual forays, intellectual and otherwise, into the flawed but beautiful world they’ve inherited. Sometimes, as in my not-so-well-thought-out failure to read Dave the Potter to Stevie before it won the Caldecott Honor, I fall short in this effort when I underestimate my children’s resilience and capacity for reading and thinking about such complex and difficult issues.

Of course, I’m not alone in this struggle to balance honesty with protective impulses. A few years ago the Eric Carle Museum hosted an exhibition of illustrations from Julius Lester and Jerry Pinkney’s The Old African, and curators decided to place small signs outside of the gallery warning visitors with young children about the graphic nature of pictures depicting scenes from the story about the Middle Passage and other scenes in which enslaved people were tied and beaten. The impulse was not censorious in nature but intended to provide a head’s up that the pictures would likely demand contextual conversation. Some pictures are worth more than a thousand words.

Based on my observations in the gallery, I know that some people did not see the signs and were caught unaware when they walked into the gallery with their young children. Others had only cursory conversations about the pictures with the children in their care. They didn’t seem to know how to talk with their children about pictures presenting such horrors. But most parents and teachers who spoke with me about the exhibition were grateful for its content and for the rich, if difficult, conversations it elicited.

“It’s not like there should be a pretty, gentle book about slavery,” one mother said to me.

And I couldn’t agree more. Although Dave does not present as harrowing a depiction of slavery as The Old African or, say, Tom Feelings’s Middle Passage does, it is not gentle, as it does not flinch from the reality of Dave’s bondage even as it depicts his expressions of resistance against it. And, as much as our subsequent readings of Eloise Greenfield’s poem “Harriet Tubman” from Honey, I Love and Other Love Poems and Ellen Levine and Kadir Nelson’s Henry’s Freedom Box proved inspirational and enriching in their own right, I value the fact that Dave the Potter is a book about a person who did not escape slavery—because, as Stevie learned, so many did not. It is heartbreaking to talk with children about slavery and about other times and ways in the past and currently in which humans have behaved so inhumanely to fellow humans, and perhaps it’s more complicated in families like mine that include members of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. But to avoid such conversations, or to address them in ways that minimize their tragedy, is to engage not in heartbreak, but in heartshrink. Reading with my children has shown me that books like Dave the Potter can enrich their visions of the complex world they’ve inherited while also preparing them to, in time, perhaps write their own chapters in history, as surely as Dave penned his.

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