This is a hard post to write. I’ve needed to do it for a while, but I was avoiding the heaviness that comes with trying to explain something that I haven’t completely figured out myself. It’s hard to articulate what I do know, and it’s nearly impossible to explain the parts I don’t yet understand. I am committed to having this crucial conversation though, so here goes…

I joined a homeschool support group as soon as I made the decision to home educate. My oldest was nearly four years old, and I knew that I wanted to be part of a community as a embarked on this totally new adventure. The group I joined is a Christian group in my community, and everyone is white. There may be one other black family on the roster, but we are the only black people who actively participate and regularly come to events. The families in this group are great. The moms are nice. The children are nice. I enjoy spending time with them, and I miss them when we’ve gone too long without seeing each other. They have embraced us with open arms since the first day we met. There’s nothing wrong with any of them, and they are our friends. That’s why we’re still in the group today.

After being very active in the group and the larger local homeschooling community for a few years, my oldest daughter started exhibiting signs of emotional distress and anxiety – all related to race. She increasingly began to talk about skin color and make frequent comments about being different from everyone else.

She started hiding her black dolls because “the white ones are the pretty ones.” She fell right in line with the 1940s “doll experiments” that studied black school children’s attitudes about race by giving them identical white and black dolls and asking which one they’d prefer to play with. At that time, 63% of black children studied said they’d rather play with the white doll, and 75 years later my daughter was singing that same ol’ song.

I thought her obsession with race, or really with skin color because that’s all she understood, was a passing phase. I was concerned, but I thought she would outgrow it. I focused on the similarities with our white friends and continued to repeat that we were all made in His image. Rather than improving, she only got worse over time. It would take hours to share everything that happened, but here are some quick highlights. She:

• hated her hair and was constantly upset about wearing it braided.
• counted “brown people” everywhere we went.
• asked whether she would be the only brown child at activities every time we got ready to leave the house.
• said she didn’t enjoy ballet class but wanted to keep going because the teacher was brown.
• was shocked to find out that her tan Italian aunt was white “because she loves me so much.”
• complained that certain people didn’t like her and her sister because they had brown skin.
• developed a love/hate relationship with white kids. She desperately wanted to be like them but was also terrified of being alone with them.

I could go on, but the occasional tears became regular, and I knew something had to be done before my beautiful, spunky girl became permanently lost in a spiral of self-hatred.

My husband and I started evaluating our lifestyle and began looking for anomalies that would explain why our child found the world we so swiftly navigated to be crippling. I grew up in a white neighborhood and went to predominantly white schools, but I had a big extended family nearby and spent lots of time at our black church. Our families live 12 hours away, and our contemporary non-denominational church was mostly white. Was that the problem?

Why wasn’t my child around other black people? We live in metro Atlanta!

I had black friends, of course, but they either lived far away, didn’t have children, or worked full-time, making it difficult to coordinate play dates and such.  I knew one other black homeschooling family in our town – make that in our county, and she is a dear friend of mine to this day. But day in and day out, as we went about the community doing our homeschooling thing, we were nearly always the only black people. It never bothered me until it bothered her. When it REALLY bothered her, it REALLY bothered me.

So…what to do?

We considered moving to an area with more black people, but quickly ruled that out because the commute would be horrid for my husband. We decided that changing churches was the low-hanging fruit. So, we stepped away from the church we’d attended since my daughter was a baby and started attending one of the largest black churches in our immediate area.

My husband and I did not connect with the church at all, but we did see a little improvement with our girl, so we continued on there for a year – sometimes going to early service at our original church followed by a later service at the black church.

During this time, I continued to study my daughter and her behavior in every environment. I paid incredibly close attention to what she did and said and how others interacted with her.  And here’s what I came up with:

• She really liked being around our white friends, but she freaking LOVED being around black people – friends or strangers. Not just children, but adults as well. She beamed when the teenage girls doted on her, when the old grannies pulled her in close and doled out peppermints from the deep crevices of their pocketbooks, and when the other moms complimented her on her beautiful curls or gorgeous braids.
• She smiled and had a genuinely nice time with our white friends, but she was vibrant, chatty, and full of deep-down belly laughter when she tore through the playground with little black boys and girls.
• She started requesting more intricate braided styles with BEADS! Yes folks, this child who months earlier thought she was going to be the next Elsa, started asking for one of the most traditionally black hairstyles I can think of, aside from afros and dreads.
• The dolls that had been relegated to the back of the closet came out and started playing major roles in her imaginative play. She sought out black dolls at the store and adoringly spoke of how beautiful they were.

It was as if she was waking up from a deep fog and starting to live again. It became crystal clear that mere exposure to black people was a salve for her pain. But this utterly confused me. How can a young child, MY child, raised in a loving supportive home shielded from racism and negativity already be that impacted by skin color?

Where had we gone wrong? 

And if I had failed her so much, why wasn’t my second daughter exhibiting any of these signs of racial trauma or identity crisis?

Praying. Digging. Figuring. Thinking. Calculating. Wondering. Trying…to make sense of this. Deciding…how I could set up an IV drip full of this salve so she wouldn’t fall ill again. Questioning…whether I was willing to admit publicly that she needed black people – not a little, but a lot. Fearing…what others would think if I did something bold to help her thrive.

There had to be more black homeschoolers nearby. 

If I could find five other black families nearby for us to meet up with for activities and play time during the day, that would be enough. I knew it would be difficult to find that many, but I wasn’t greedy. Surely, I could find just five black moms who thought this was as important as I did.

So I stayed up until 3 a.m. three nights in a row (Yes, I can be obsessive like that.), and created a Facebook group and website with a lineup of upcoming events on the calendar.

A handful of families showed up to the first event, and I was ecstatic. I couldn’t believe it! I found a few families, and I was satisfied. We started meeting up for things here and there, and it went so well. The kids all got along, the moms were getting to know each other, and it was all good.

And then my email started going bonkers.

I was getting many daily requests to join the FB group, and people started paying to be members of the website. 10 families, 20 families, 48 families, 62 families. And today, two years and one month later, there are 79 paid members of Heritage Homeschoolers of Cobb County.

I guess I was wrong. 

There actually weren’t a few families looking for black community. There were A LOT of them. And they shared very similar stories and experiences.

Apparently, the salve that was soothing my daughter needed to be bottled up and sold.

Apparently, black kids needed each other.

Apparently, I was clueless.

In the process, I found out that black moms needed each other, too. How surprised I was to find just how quickly I meshed with these mamas! It was like we’d been raising our children together for years. But it had only been weeks. Literally, weeks.

Months in, they became some of my very best friends. They knew me. They got me. They always knew what to say, and they embraced my quirks and soothed my insecurities. They adored my kids and they LOVED me, and I felt it. It felt like I had been given a precious gift that I never even knew I wanted.

Oh, how wise my precious daughter was and is. What a blessing to be so wide open and perceptive. I thank God for her ability to discern exactly what she needed and for her strength to stand up and demand it from a foggy-eyed mom.

So that’s what happened. Simple and complicated at the same time. My daughter was broken and lonely and knew it. I was broken and lonely and didn’t know it. God used her to reveal to me a very simple plan, and it worked.

She’s happier than ever, and so am I.

Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other’s gold.

In Part 2, I’ll share the specifics of why I think a black homeschool group is necessary. Read it here!