My ONE LOVE life

We were late and swim lessons were beginning. One child in the pool and the next almost in, I am focused and in full mom mode. Until a woman, a white woman in her 40’s, gets really close to my body as she’s passing and asks in a low voice, “is your daughter adopted?”

Huh? This throws me off my game. “No.” I reply with a look that says, “What the …”.
She is flustered by this and says, “Oh, well mine is and we’re always looking for other adopted children.”

“O.K. lady,” I am thinking. I’ve heard this before and just keep going on about my business.

The next day she greets me at the front door of the pool, as if she’s waiting for me, and gets in my face again. “I’m sorry.” She says. “I have been thinking all night about what I said to you and I feel bad. I’m sorry.”

Hummph here’s my chance, I don’t even think, I just react. “Well, it was pretty racist, don’t you think?”

“Yes”, she admits. “It’s just that we’re always looking for adopted friends for our daughter. I’m sorry.”

I say, “thank you for the apology,” and walk onto the pool. For the rest of the summer she avoids me.

I know I have talked about this a handful of times here, but it still irks me when people ask if my children are adopted. The funny thing is I was retelling this story to a girlfriend yesterday, who had more than a decade-long career at an adoption agency, and she said well, “she’s just looking for friends for her black child”.

I laughed and said, “But the child was white!”

So I wonder now to myself, would it have made a difference to me if the child was black. Yes, I think it might have, even though I hate it when people ask me if my children are adopted. I guess in some way I’ve joined this club of mixed race families, adopted or not.

But there was also this secondary rage that bubbled up in me from this interaction. It came later when I marinated on the fact that I was almost knocked down by a complete stranger at the YMCA as she sought to fulfill her agenda of finding all the adopted kids in the class.

At first I thought, why does she need an adopted playmate for her young daughter? But then I realized that was a subject I really couldn’t deeply understand.

Then I became angry with the fact that a complete stranger was asking me such a deeply personal question? So if my child was adopted, aren’t you now asking me about my journey into how this child arrived in my life? This was no longer about “Mr. Pasedena.” This is about a painful period of time where perhaps I wanted children and couldn’t conceive them. Or worse this child was a victim of being unwanted or abandoned. The speculations are endless, and this woman feels she has the right to ask because my kids don’t look just like me?

I understand that people are just trying to make sense of what doesn’t look “naturally” true, a white mom birthing brown children. But where does the line of being curious and being respectful end? My daughter came home from school the other day and reported that a girl walked up to her and asked, “Are you adopted?”

I look forward to the day when there’s no longer a question about our children’s parentage; the day when mixed race families are the norm, and its unusual see an all white family.

Imagine this, it’s been about 20 minutes since school has let out and my daughter is playing on the monkey bars with some friends as I watch.  There are four of them.  A man approaches and with a friendly gesture says, “is that one yours?” pointing to the blonde boy not playing with my daughter.

“No, that one is,” I say, pointing to my brown-skinned girl as she gracefully skips bars showing off her skills.

“Oh,” he says.  “That could have been me.  I pretty much only dated black women my whole life.  I’m from Pasedena.  I’m not sure how I ended up with a white woman, but I did.”  He then proceeds to explain in full detail about how he met his wife.

Meanwhile I am drowning out his nostalgia with my own thoughts, as I pause to remember this You Tube video I saw a few months before where this woman preaches her ideas of traditional marriage, breaking up couples that don’t exemplify her idea of a “straight marriage”. She includes inter-racial couples and there is this scene where she says it “bothers” her to think about the inter-racial couple having, as she gestures with her hands, implying sex.

For some reason his comment sort of brought me to this place of remembering the woman’s gestures. How is he seeing me right now as he babbles on about nothing really? Why do I remind him of the fact that he doesn’t have inter-racial children? When he looks at me, and my inter-racial family, is he immediately reminded of sex?  I know that children are, on some level, living reminders that couples have sex.  Do you suppose that inter-racial families serve as an even greater reminder that couples have sex, and that people go there in their minds, imagining us doing it?? Well, I suppose they do. So I am happy to report that yes it is true, we are happily married and have sex. We have even made babies… twice.
Imagine that?

It’s a very exciting time in our lives.  We are moving.  We just bought our first home.  It’s not a big move, but it pushes us outside of city limits and into a new school district.  Arrrg!

As you can see I am hinting at the fact that I am not happy about changing my daughter’s school.  It was an arduous process choosing the one we are at, an alternative, parent co-op Charter School.  I spent years worrying, wondering and exploring options.  At one point I had hooked up with a group of moms ready to start their own school.  But parted ways in the middle of the process when I learned that our priorities were not aligned -they, pushing diversity lower on the list than I.  In the end I found a school filled with mostly like-minded families and mostly multiracial.

While there have been incidents that have caused sudden pain and premature growth around issues I was hoping to delay on, such as slavery, we are happy there.

And now, onto a new school, a much smaller charter school, and nearly all white.  How do we decide our priorities?  Do we continue renting when we can own, just so our children can attend a more multiracial school?  I think there’s some validity to that.  But I also noticed that academics at our current school are not as strong as I would like.  The current school lacks structure while boasting organic garden, performing arts, and creative student-lead learning.

In our current school we have managed to carve out a comfort zone with our identity, a way of being that doesn’t elicit endless racial questions.  Though they still happen on a regular basis.

Yesterday on our way home from school the boy we car pool with asked my daughter why her eyes are black.  He wanted to know why there was no differentiation between her eye color and her pupil.  She just told him that’s the way her eyes are, and was quick to joyfully point out that her sisters are the same.  He kept saying, “weird.”  I was getting annoyed, but stayed quiet.

He was saying “weird” because he didn’t know what else to say, not because he actually thought it was weird.  Do you know what I mean?  But it put me at a loss.  How could I capture that moment and make it a learning opportunity for an immature 6 year old boy?  And do I make every moment like this a learning opportunity?  There are so many.  How exhausting.

I wonder how many of these stupid sort of questions does she gets everyday?  She didn’t seem annoyed so I wasn’t going to pass my annoyance on to her.  Certainly it wouldn’t help her, at age 6, to get annoyed with every child who asks her ignorant questions.

So I ask myself, will I ever be happy with the school I send my children?  Is it better to enrich her mind with academics, while subjecting her to the ignorant inquisitiveness of her peers?  I am not ready to go through all of those questions and comments just yet.  I am certainly not ready for those bigger moments that happen on the playground, and hope that the teacher handles them appropriately.

My thoughts for this new school is to be up front with the teachers in the beginning of the school year.  Utilize the moment to educate our new community.  Have a conversation like this, “hey, this is how we handle racism or racial identity in our family…”; much like the conversation, “hey, these are the foods my child is allergic to.”  What are your thoughts on this?

In the meantime I am grateful that we will continue with her current school through the school year and then migrate in the Fall.  Perhaps by then I will be prepared to face yet another round of educating an ignorant group of children about my inter-racial, inter-cultural family.

Just in case you are wondering just how much I love this song….

I could not have said it better.

Contrary to what many believe being in an interracial relationship does not, by itself, magically make you anti racist or race conscious. It does not make you colorblind (nor is that desirable). In reality, when you are in an interracial relationship it is even more important to constantly examine yourself, your actions, and your beliefs. In an interracial relationship it can be even harder to be race conscious, because you have to be able to separate your interpersonal relationship from society’s race realities.  for more visit Anti-Racist Parent.com

In the beginning of my relationship with my husband I would say this sentiment prevailed.  In fact I thought a lot about race, his race and race relations, in the beginning.  Some days I would obsess over it.  I became keenly aware that I was on public display.  I projected the idea that I was somehow under a microscope, that everyone was watching us, and when our kids arrived, especially them.  I spent time playing out their possible thoughts in my mind.

Are they together?  He’s really dark?  Is he from Africa?  Do those kids belong to her?  Is this just a lust thing?  Why is he with her?  People starred, and looked away.  When I caught their gaze I filled in the gaps.  I let my mind wander, was I setting the right example?  Was I behaving like the perfect anti-racist?  I put a lot of pressure on myself, censuring my words, and even my thoughts.

There was a time, when I first moved back to the US after living overseas for many years, that I did not feel comfortable in rooms or crowds of white people.  Spilling over from my time living in the Caribbean I gravitated toward brown faces.  I cannot explain why it was more comfortable to me, it just was.

Then I went through a time when I felt weird without my inter-racial identity.  When I’d go to the store and the same black cashier who was so friendly to my children and me last week didn’t even notice me the next.  Who was I if I didn’t have this badge on my arm that said, “no really, I am not a racist, see!”

Then there was this time, maybe I am still in it a bit, when I felt conflicted about hanging out with other interracial couples.  Sometimes I would wonder, am I perpetuating the belief that ‘we all stick together’?  My daughter’s third birthday party was Sunday, with the exception of one Latino family, we were all interracial families.  Well, except for my one single friend (in case she’s reading this), who doesn’t have children, she’s black.  I looked around at the beautiful group and appreciated the rarity of such a gathering, my family’s intimate group, a mix of colors, cultures and races: African, Caribbean, Japanese, Jewish, Mexican, and English.

Somewhere along the line my preoccupation with getting it right, and being the perfect anti-racist ceased to prevail in my mind.  A couple of years ago I stopped wondering and then eventually I stopped caring so much.   Now much of what bothered me, has become barely noticeable.  Thank God for maturity, wisdom and expereience!  I was soon able to blur the line between my racial thoughts and my relationship thoughts.  Somewhere I along the way I got comfortable enough with myself to stop caring so much.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/20/sasha-and-malia-obama-ina_n_159499.html

“Let’s play slaves,” my oldest said to my youngest.  I could hear them in the other room.

“I’ll be the slave and you be my owner.” she said to her.

I interjected from the other room (trying to be casual).  “What are slaves?”  I asked.

“A long time ago black people were taken and owned by white people.  The white people made them work for them.”

“Where did you hear that?” I asked.

“At school,  we learned about it today at school.” She said.

“And how do you feel about that?” I asked.  She looked at me with a blank, yet uncomfortable stare.  I reiterated, “How do you feel about white people owning black people, and I am white?”

“It’s O.K. Mom.  It happened a long time ago.  You’re white, but Daddy’s black, and you love him.  There are three black people living in our house, and you’re just one white person.  It happened a long time ago Mom, slavery is over now.”  Then she proceeded to tell me a very 1st grade version of a lady who was tired and didn’t want to sit in the back of the bus… and there was this man (MLK) who helped stand up for her rights.

And that was that.  My baby is no longer a “virgin”.  She now knows what sets her apart.  That was yesterday and then tonight I heard her muttering something about slavery to herself as we sat down to dinner.  She’s processing it all, in her six year old mind.  I feel helpless, and I know too that this is her path.  I have no control over her process, her lessons, her life.

And I know that “every little thing is gonna to be alright”*.

*Bob Marley -Three Little Birds.