ABSTRACT
My youngest daughter inherited something from me that I’m not particularly proud of. She is always late—for everything! In the mid-1990s, when she was in high school, I had to drive her to school more often than I care to admit in order to sign tardy passes. On one of those mornings during her sophomore year, the assistant principal asked me to come into her office. I braced myself, expecting to be warned about possible consequences for Ebony’s habitual tardiness. Or, I thought, shuddering, that she may have wanted to talk about the protest my child recently led against her science teacher whose teaching methods she and her classmates thought were incompetent. Instead Ms. Rudel shared that she had been observing my relationship with my daughter. There were a lot of other African American girls at South High who could benefit from having a mother figure like me in their lives, she said, and then asked if I would consider taking one or two of them under my wing.
