Professor of English Phyllis Mannocchi was well into the process of adopting a child nine years ago when she asked the agency with which she was working to suspend its search. "I had to stop and ask myself, `Can I raise a Haitian kid in Waterville, Maine?,'" she said. The answer, it turns out, was an emphatic "yes."
Mannocchi adopted her daughter, Jackie, from a village near Port Au Prince when Jackie was 10 months old, starving. "She already had the beginnings of a sticking-out, undernourished belly," Mannocchi recalled. "When I saw her picture, I knew `This is the kid.'"
Jackie has grown up surrounded by love and support, which appear to have more than compensated for her difficult beginning. But Mannocchi, who is lesbian and who adopted Jackie along with her ex-partner, says she almost didn't go through with her plan because of the challenges she knew the child would face growing up. "I delayed the whole process for a year and just needed to think about what [adopting her] would mean, especially for her. I mean, how much can you burden a child with?" she said.
A white, lesbian, single mother raising an Afro-Caribbean child confronts more than the typical complement of parental challenges. First, there is the issue of race. Mannocchi says that she has educated Jackie about her heritage, shared the story of her biological family--her mother died two weeks after giving birth to Jackie--and continues to talk with her about one day meeting her father and siblings.
"I knew that she would be very exotic looking [compared to other Maine children] and that she might face some problems. When she was four, a group of boys chased her on their bicycles and yelled the `N' word," she said. "Jackie had never heard that word and didn't know what it meant. I hate it that she has to live with that."
Mannocchi says Jackie is pretty much like any 9-year-old kid. "She's more interested in whether I'm going to buy her the new Whitney Houston album than she is about where she comes from," she said. "She knows about her family in Haiti, and she loves to tell her story. But she sees herself as a kid from Maine."
Mannocchi always has been open and honest with Jackie about her sexuality while insisting that her daughter follow her own feelings. "She asked me recently about when I was heterosexual and what my boyfriends were like and why I didn't stay with them," she said. "She wanted to know if it was okay for her to have boyfriends. I told her that that was fine, that she doesn't have to make the same choices her mom did. I think she knows that it's okay for her to be different from me."
Mannocchi says her orientation should not affect Jackie's sexual identity, but she worries about how well her daughter will be accepted by peers and their families. "When she's sixteen, will parents let their sons go out with Jackie? I hope so," she said.
Despite the many differences between them, Mannocchi says her and Jackie's relationship is like that of a lot of pre-adolescent girls and their mothers: "Pick up your dirty clothes, comb your hair, that's what we usually are dealing with, not the other stuff."
Jackie has a sophisticated understanding of people's differences, which Mannocchi thinks stems from the diversity in her family and friends. "She has spent a lot of time around adults, including older people, and kids from all types of families, so she's very aware and sensitive to those differences," Mannocchi said. "She has a kind of political correctness without me even cultivating it. She's very aware of the poor kids in her class, for example. I think part of that is hanging out here with me, seeing what I teach, hearing discussions with my students. Meeting my students, too, who oftentimes are different themselves, has been a positive influence."
However, her students were shocked to learn that Mannocchi allows Jackie to play with Barbie dolls. "She has about 35 of them, and a bunch of Kens," Mannocchi said. "I'm not going to inhibit her. I can't impose anything on her. She has to be who she is and what she is. If she grows up and wants to be a hairdresser, that's fine."