THE BREAKS

In this epistolary memoir, a queer, biracial scholar writes to her daughter about what it’s like “to mother at the end of the world.”

Born in Canada to a Punjabi immigrant father and a White mother, Singh, a professor of English and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, simultaneously celebrates her child’s ability to embrace her own “Brownness” and decries the “whitewashed” education she receives in the American public school system. Recalling her daughter’s drawing of a Thanksgiving scene, she writes, “I admired the craft of your book, a swell of parental pride coursing through me as I witnessed the evidence of my progeny doing and making things in the world beyond me. And I relished that you had colored all four children brown like you.” The author recalls meeting her Punjabi relatives in India much later in life, a trip that helped solidify her understanding of her racial and ethnic identity and also forced her to reckon with the historical, inherited violence that she feels led to her father’s abusive tendencies. In addition to her ethnic awakening, Singh describes coming into her queerness and, subsequently, building a queer parenting relationship with Nathan, the biological father of her child. For Singh, a key part of this journey was reconciling with Nathan’s Whiteness and her own desire, as a child, to be White. By the end of the book, the author appears confident in their unconventional partnership and living situation—she and Nathan now co-parent in a duplex that she describes as a “queer collective”—and her ability to parent through patriarchy and White supremacy. Singh’s clarity of thought, vulnerability, and passion for social justice all render this well-structured essay a pleasure to read. Although she writes exclusively about her specific experience of queer parenting, her anxieties, fears, and triumphs will resonate with parents of all identities and backgrounds. The book’s only weaknesses are some of the transitions into second person, which occasionally distract from the otherwise sharply honed prose.

A well-argued book-length essay about queer, multiracial parenting.