"You Brought Me the Wrong Baby"

The first words I ever "heard" from my Aunt Frog were "You brought me the wrong baby!" Probably not the best words a infant should hear from a relative, even if she couldn't understand what that meant. In June 1982, my aunt came to visit my mother and me in the hospital. I'm not sure exactly how old I was at the time but I was probably a few days old. Mom had gone through the trauma of a cesarean and a stroke so she wasn't really coherent when her little sister came to visit.

When Aunt Frog asked to see the Puckett baby, she was not expecting me. When the nurse brought me out to her she looked at me and said, “You brought me the wrong baby. I’m here for the black baby.” Apparently at the time I was born, there were NO black babies at St. Mary’s Medical Center. My aunt had automatically assumed that since my father was black, I would be also. However, the paleness of my mother was a little bit stronger than the dark hues of my father.

"You brought me the wrong baby!" Even though it was many years after Aunt Frog uttered those words and even though I know I didn't understand them when she said them, that's how I have felt off and on my whole life. I've always been "trapped" between two worlds and not really sure how to get them to mesh together. I could be one way with my dad's family, but another with my mom's. As a kid it was really confusing for me. It still is.

I always felt like the "wrong" person. I didn't feel like I could be myself. I wanted to fit in and being biracial really wasn't the way to go back in the 80's and 90's. It wasn't until recently that I have started to feel like both sides of me are being to merge into WHO I am.

More to come. . .