Bread and Bread

I don't think anyone has ever heard about the Hart family without being horrified. But if the story hasn't faded into the True Crime file folder in your mind since it happened in 2018—if it has instead stayed fresh and insidious—maybe you are an adoptive parent. Maybe you are a foster parent. Maybe your children are a different race from you. Maybe you are a parent whose children were taken into foster care under the guise of safety, only to encounter its opposite. Maybe you survived foster care yourself.  If you don't remember: Two white lesbians adopted six Black children (two sibling sets) from foster care. They were the picture of social media love-makes-a-family perfection. A photo of their son Devonte hugging a white cop went viral for its "Black AND Blue Lives Matter!" vibes, presumably. Jennifer and Sarah Hart moved around a lot, leaving a trail of abuse accusations and open CPS cases behind them, but white savior narratives and the failures of inter-agen...

Sometimes moms post pictures of their nine-month-olds to celebrate "nine months in, nine months out." I've never been sure whether to count Dash's gestation in our lives as two weeks or four and a half years, but here he is, four and a half years out, about to start elementary school (technically "extended transitional kindergarten," but it's part of LAUSD and there is a principal and we downloaded an app, so). It's late summer--finally hot after months of mild weather, strangely balmy in a way that stirs my sense of possibility. New life phase? I wonder. I'm always a sucker for new starts, even though much is not new: Dash, a veteran daycare kid, will still be away from me for the same number of hours each week. "Mommy, draw me a Southwest airplane." My sister got married two weeks ago. Dash cried through the ceremony and acted like a crazy drunk throughout the reception. Her husband is kind and clever and has the kind of dark...