Words by Mia McKenzie
Drawings by Ritapa Neogi
I’ve always wanted kids and, since I started identifying as a feminist at around twenty years old, I’ve wanted those kids to be daughters. The idea of raising little Black girls, of loving them and giving them everything they’d need to become free and happy Black women, made me really excited about the possibilities of motherhood. I imagined instilling in my little girls radical Black feminist teachings that would help them navigate an anti-Black, anti-woman, anti-Black woman world, including:
- Fuck you, pay me
- The art of breaking white people’s fingers when they touch you without permission (and how to make it look like an accident) and
- How to tell the difference between a notep and just a regular fuckboy
I don’t remember when wanting daughters turned into being absolutely sure I’d have daughters, but somewhere along the way I kind of forgot that there was even a chance that my future children wouldn’t be girls. I rationalized that my own mother only had daughters and that her mother mostly had daughters, too. Having daughters was in my genes. Obvi. When I met my wife and we eventually talked about starting a family together, she also expressed a desire to have daughters. Daughters were, in my mind, a sure thing. But…it didn’t actually work out that way.
