The air in the office was thick with the kind of tension that only happens when you’re about to hear something you’re not ready for. My then-husband sat beside me, his hands folded tightly in his lap, eyes locked on the day care director. Her lips were pressed together, tight and clinical, as she waited for the owner to join us.
“We wanted to talk to you about an issue we’ve been having,” she began, her tone sterile and direct. She paused for a moment, like she was weighing how to phrase what was next. “It’s about your son… biting.”
I felt the room tighten. Biting? Not the words I was expecting. We were discussing a 2-year-old, after all.
This was our first meeting, and if I’m completely honest, I really did not know how to react to the news. After all, it’s normal for children to teethe. Why did this require a meeting?
Turns out we would be called in for another meeting after that.
“The rest of the class is teething now, so the biting isn’t as big of an issue,” she said, her voice softening slightly. “But there’s something else.” Of course there was something else! What now?
“He grabbed a handful of my hair—” She hesitated, eyes meeting mine to gauge my reaction. “—and ripped some of it out.”
The room seemed to tilt. What had started as teething — just a phase — had turned into something else entirely. My stomach dropped as I struggled to process it.
For a moment, I held my breath. A handful of hair? My little boy? I glanced at my husband, whose face had gone still, as though he, too, was grappling with the image of our son as some kind of wild force yanking out a grown woman’s hair.
I looked back at the director, still searching for any trace of humor, of anything that might turn this into a misunderstanding, but there was none. Only the cold weight of reality settling between us.
I struggled to keep my face neutral at the idea that this pale, blond white woman saw nothing wrong with allowing a small child to get a hold of her hair and hold on to it to the point that he ripped it out. Actually, I found it absurd. Did he rip it out from the root? Or did she just have bad extensions?
I refocused just in time for her to disclose. “Your son... he’s so strong.” She almost sounded impressed, and the words hung there in the air like a heavy weight. “He’s going to be a football player or something.”
I was so sick of these people.
In the last conversation, they’d mentioned his strength and said he would be a football player, too. I had the strength to challenge them this time.
“Honestly, given the fact that we currently have a Black president [Obama was in office], as educators, you of all people should know that Black boys have far more extensive career opportunities beyond sports and entertainment. For the first time ever, I can actually tell my son that he can be the president and it not be just something to say. So why are you relegating him to sports??”
My biracial, European-born husband shot me a look of disbelief. I shrugged. Fuck these people.
The day care owner, who was also part of the meeting, laughed nervously and said, “Oh, we should have said soccer.” Still completely clueless.
Turns out, it would be the first of many disappointing meetings.
I cried on the way home. Maybe a bit melodramatic, but these people had set up a whole meeting to discuss a toddler teething and grabbing onto an adult’s hair. My husband thought I was overreacting. That dismissal stung worse than the meeting itself.
It felt like I was in this alone, not just against the school, but in my own home. He didn’t see the pattern I was watching unfold. He didn’t carry the generational weight of knowing exactly where this was headed.
Perhaps I was in denial, but I really did think that we had at least until middle school before the microaggressions would begin. I was wrong. My husband quickly changed his tune when those meetings became the first of many, all before my son turned 4.
There was the phone call at work alerting me to a “potty accident,” followed by a question about whether everything was OK at home. I was confused. It’s an age-appropriate incident; what would be the correlation to our home?
There was the incident of him using a “bad word” and how he might be “negatively influencing” the other children who aren’t exposed to “this kind of language.” How would they know he wasn’t the one being influenced by someone else in the school?
When confronted with their ignorance or challenged in any way, they apologized profusely. I was taking it the wrong way. That’s not what they meant.
By age 4, my son was being sent for ADHD testing. The school requested that I or someone else come and babysit him in class.
It was nonstop.
Then came 2020. I watched George Floyd’s life drain away on my phone with my son asleep in the next room. While the world grappled with a pandemic, Black people in America were handed a double trauma. They faced a convergence of racial injustice and systemic neglect.
While the nation was under lockdown, several high-profile police killings —including that of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, and Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia — ignited worldwide protests and exposed the persistence of anti-Black violence. Beyond law enforcement brutality, Black Americans were hit hardest by the virus itself, suffering higher infection and death rates due to inequities in health care, housing and employment. Many worked in front-line “essential” jobs without adequate protection.
Black-owned businesses were more likely to close, and unemployment rates soared disproportionately. Black people were fined or arrested more often than their white counterparts for violating lockdown mandates, reflecting unequal enforcement. The national conversation about systemic racism was further inflamed by political polarization, with movements like Black Lives Matter gaining momentum while “All Lives Matter” propaganda sought to minimize the much-needed spotlight and attention these disparities and injustices deserved.
Together, these events turned the pandemic years into a parallel public health and racial justice crisis that revealed the depth of America’s structural and racial inequities.
I felt drained by the weight of it all. My ex-husband and I had talked about moving abroad when we were together, but after we split, the idea became mine alone to carry. I just wanted a different existence.
Four years later, in 2024, I was on a reconnaissance trip to Lisbon with my son when America reelected Donald Trump. Watching the results come in from an ocean away confirmed exactly why I needed to leave.
The backlash against 2020’s brief racial reckoning wasn’t just swift — it was systematic. Trump called for states to ban books about Black history. School boards stripped lessons about slavery and Jim Crow from curricula. African American Studies was deemed too “woke” for classrooms. DEI programs — the bare minimum effort at equity — were being dismantled across corporate America and college campuses. White supremacy wasn’t just emboldened; it was being legitimized, normalized, written into policy and championed from podiums.
Trump signed an executive order to “restore truth and sanity to American history.” In plain terms: Erase Black people from it entirely.
How do you raise a Black boy in a country that criminalizes his body while erasing his history? How do you tell your son he matters when the government is actively erasing proof that he ever did?
“That was the breaking point: Realizing that no matter how much I loved him, America wouldn’t.”
The cruelty isn’t just in how this affects Black children in the present. It’s the dogged determination to rewrite history and script a false narrative — one that denies Black children knowledge of their truthful past while negatively impacting their future. America doubled down on raising a generation of Black children who don’t know where they came from, so they’ll never know their power.
Meanwhile, I realized I’d gotten out just in time.
Every headline reminded me that Black children are not always seen as children. That innocence could be stripped from my son before he even hit middle school. Tamir Rice was 12 when police killed him. Twelve.
It was knowing that one day I would have to give him “the talk” — not about the birds and the bees, but about how to survive a traffic stop. How to keep his hands visible. How to stay calm even when his heart is racing. How to make himself smaller, quieter, less threatening just to make other people comfortable. Just to make it home alive.
I wanted to believe love could shield him, that my guidance could be enough. However, deep down, I knew I was asking him to grow up in a place that would put him on trial before he even got a chance to be. The weight of America wasn’t just political — it was personal. It pressed against my chest every time I watched him sleep, knowing that in this country, his safety could never be guaranteed — and that fear would only grow as he did.
That was the breaking point: Realizing that no matter how much I loved him, America wouldn’t, and I refused to gamble his childhood on the hope that it would.
The decision wasn’t sudden. It was cumulative — every meeting, every microaggression, every news alert, every moment of having to explain to my ex-husband why I wasn’t overreacting when our son was being labeled and limited before he could even read. Co-parenting with someone who didn’t share my fear, who couldn’t see the danger I saw, added another layer of exhaustion. I was fighting for my son’s safety and dignity on every front — at school, in public and even at home.
People ask why I didn’t stay and fight. Many of them don’t understand the particular exhaustion that comes from defending your humanity every single day. It’s not just fatigue — it’s the bone-deep depletion of constantly proving you deserve basic dignity, of being an involuntary freedom fighter. Every day in America as a Black woman raising a Black son required a level of vigilance, of code-switching, of managing other people’s discomfort with my child’s existence. I didn’t even realize how drained I was until I left.
I left because I needed to remember what it feels like to simply exist without layers of protective armor.
Portugal isn’t perfect, but I can breathe here.
I thought about James Baldwin’s words often in those final months before I left: that to be Black in America is to be in a constant state of rage. I was tired of being angry. Tired of carrying that rage and still having to show up, still having to smile, still having to prove my son deserved to be treated like a child.
So I made the hardest decision of my life. I packed up and said goodbye to the familiar and boarded a plane with my son to build a new life in Lisbon.
Leaving America came with its own grief. I left behind family, cultural shorthand, the comfort of places that had shaped me. There are days I miss the familiar rhythm of home — the food, the laughter, the way the community holds you in Black spaces back in the States. That ache is real, and I carry it with me.
I miss my friends most of all. We still talk, but I miss being able to hang out with them in person. Especially now, being single and starting over, it would be amazing to share some of this with a friend face to face. There’s a loneliness that comes with starting fresh in a country where you know no one.
At home, my ex-husband and I shared custody. My son spent every other week with me, which gave me time to recharge. I had my parents to help. Here in Lisbon, it’s all me. While I work from home and structure my day around school drop-off and pickup and extracurricular activities, I still feel spent. The burnout has surprised me. I hadn’t anticipated what it would feel like to be a single mother with no break, no backup, no village.
There have been many moments when I questioned if I made the right choice and wondered if I should just go back home. The sacrifice and isolation are real.
But then—
I watch my son run freely through a park or down a street, his laughter echoing without fear chasing behind it, and I know I made the right choice.
The gift isn’t just in his freedom — it’s in mine. I love my son more than my comfort. More than familiarity. More than the fear of the unknown. So I chose a different home. I don’t know what the future holds, but at least here, my son gets to be a child — and I get to breathe.
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