“I never saw myself how others did: as a little white girl. It was small occurrences that slowly illustrated my difference: the story my mother told about an older woman in a grocery store asking if she was the nanny, the cafeteria lady who wouldn’t let Mom pick me up early from elementary school because we “didn’t look related,” the inferences or outright inquiries about whether I was adopted. For a while I wished so badly to be brown, my abundant freckles an omen of future darkness, but I was a jumble of black-white-brown, neither one thing or another. As I got older our visible differences stopped mattering so much, my struggle with Mom became deeper, closer to the bone.”