QuirkyFusionbiracial | QuirkyFusion

Parenting Challenges: Race, Color, Identity and the Need to Belong

Christy — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 18:35:32 +0000

I’m biracial. I love being biracial. I love dancing in different worlds, being unique, leaving strangers wondering. I’m entertained by the many ways people try to ascertain my racial makeup, some with rude frankness and others with a subtlety so profound that I’m not even sure what they’re asking. It wasn’t always this way. There was a time – many times – when I was unhappy with my background and the color of my skin.

My biological father, who was black, was barely in my life. I grew up with my white mother and, when she remarried, an entire white family. It was a white neighborhood (and no, not predominantly white… just white) and school, and I clearly stood out. It made me self-conscious. It made me different. And it made me really uncomfortable.

It took me a long time to grow comfortable with and then proud of my own skin (literally). It took ages for me to get past a feeling of not being black – or white – enough. Whether you realize it or not, people place expectations on you the moment they see you. Being bi-racial means a broader set of expectations because people aren’t quite sure what box to place you in. Do I speak Spanish? (Nope) Am I a great dancer? ( Hardly) Do I come from some fabulously exotic location? (Absolutely not) You can safely assume that whatever you expect from me upon seeing me is not what I’m going to deliver. I’m not going to speak, act, believe, or dream in whatever manner you’d expect. It’s one of my super powers. And now, instead of feeling less because I don’t fall into some norm, I revel in it. My site isn’t called Quirky Fusion for nothing.

And now I have kids. Since my husband is also white, my kids aren’t sporting much of my color. I am sometimes a bit saddened by this because I don’t want them growing up forgetting part of their heritage. It’s important to me and a source of pride. On the other hand, I’ve assumed that perhaps they’ll find their lives to be a bit easier without a question mark over their heads. I was wrong.

What I didn’t realize was that quite a bit of my angst growing up was less about being biracial and more about the idea that I didn’t “look like” my mom. In reality, I looked just like my mom if you can get past the color of our skin, but I didn’t see that. I just felt different from the person who mattered to me most.

Bug, who is five, is starting to notice things like this and has become a bit obsessed. He doesn’t seem to notice or care that his skin is a shade or two darker than his dad’s. What he notices, and has become quite concerned with, is that his skin is much lighter than mine. When I comment on his tan, he anxiously asks if he’s going to be as brown as me. He holds his arm up to mine and drops it in disappointment when the coloring still doesn’t match. When he’s tired and frustrated, he insists that he doesn’t fit in our family. And I know that the color of our skin is partly behind his feeling.

I explain to him that we’re all different; each one of us is a different shade in the spectrum of our family. No one of us has the same coloring as another. I tell him that he completes our family and we couldn’t be happy without him there. But behind it all, my heart is breaking for my sensitive little guy.

A Happy Childhood

Christy — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 20:23:36 +0000

I just read a post over at Mom Spark that tugged at my heart. Amy was talking about divorce and suggested that parents need to work through their issues and stay together for the sake of their kids (she says it all much more elegantly, so please head over to read her post). Her post suggested to me that she has some pretty negative feelings about at least some aspects of her childhood and that makes me sad. I won’t get into my response to that because you can read it in the comments section of her post. But I decided that it was time for me to bite the bullet and write a few posts that have been on my mind.

I am the product of a “broken marriage.” My mom got pregnant at 22, got married, realized she made a mistake and got her marriage annulled. I saw my father intermittently until I was about four years old and my mother told him to stop coming around because he was irresponsible and unreliable. I’ll share that whole drama another day. Over the next few years, she dated off and on (I only remember one guy, Jim, who drove a van and had a motorcycle). Finally, when I was about 6 or 7, she met the man I now think of as my father. He has two daughters right around my age and we became an instant family. It was an incredibly difficult transition for me.

My childhood in some ways reads like one of those how-I-overcame-adversity books: broken home, absentee father, growing up black/bi-racial in a white neighborhood, dealing with re-marriage, growing up black/bi-racial in a white family, overcoming poverty, coping with two instant sisters, an overwhelming fear that my mother would die and leave me alone. And, in fact, it has taken me about 35 or so years to recover from some of it.

But despite the challenges I faced and the anger I had to cope with (mainly directed at previously mentioned absentee-dad), if you were to ask me without context about my childhood, I would tell you that it was fairly happy. In fact, I think I’m pretty lucky. As far back as I can remember, we had a comfortable place to live, plenty of food, more toys than I ever needed and a strong network of people who loved us. We took family vacations, celebrated holidays and did all of the silly things that kids do.

Were there bad things? Most definitely. But we weren’t abused or neglected in any way and for that I am very thankful. Yeah, my sisters and I fought. And, yeah, I definitely felt a bit betrayed at first when my mom remarried. And I felt even more so when I realized that my biological father was choosing to not come around. But those aren’t the things that stand out. Instead I remember riding bikes, singing songs, silly games we made up, birthday parties, Halloween costumes and school plays.

Now that I have kids of my own, I have a certain ongoing anxiety about providing them with happy childhoods. I am certainly not winning any parenting awards as I cope with a short temper and a need for a base level of alone time. And yet, when I listen to them talk and when I go back over our family photos, I have hope that they will remember their own childhoods with good thoughts. I know that we’re providing them with a stable and secure home environment and all the tools they need to grow up happy and healthy. And I feel strongly that, even if something should happen to me or my husband, or our marriage just doesn’t work out, we’ll continue to provide those things for our kids. Because that’s what parenting is all about.

Princess Dreams

Christy — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 01:51:50 +0000

We’ve had quite a lot of excitement this year with our first black (ahem… bi-racial) president. Regardless of politics and politicking, the event moved me to tears. It says something about our nation that we can reach a point where a black president could even run for office, never mind be elected.

But, and I am almost embarrassed to admit this, I am almost equally moved by another historic moment that has taken place this year. Disney introduced their first black princess, Tiana. I don’t recall ever dreaming about being a princess or wishing for a fancy gown and tiara. I’m sure I had my moments, but it didn’t define my childhood. In many ways, it makes the moment all that much more poignant, because I often wonder how the lack of women of color in childhood media imagery impacted me.

As a bi-racial child raised in an all-white family, I was profoundly aware that I wasn’t white, perhaps even more so than children who grow up in families of color. I wasn’t just aware that I didn’t look like most popular movie stars or politicians. I didn’t “look like” the person who was most important to me: my mother (in reality, we look quite a bit alike). As with most kids, my mom was my hero, my inspiration, my idol. Yet, we were visibly different. From the earliest moments I remember, I remember struggling with that and with what it meant for my own future.

When I thought about the things I wanted for myself, I was certainly impacted by skin color. Despite my love of theater and acting, I generally avoided that path because most of the roles I saw were for white characters (it never crossed my mind that many of them could have just as easily been played by a black woman). I stuck with more generic occupations like teaching, television repair (an aspiration of mine when I was 6) and, finally, Imagineering. Yep. I didn’t dream of being a princess. I dreamed of being a Disney Imagineer and of creating Disney magic from behind the scenes. And that’s how kids’ minds adapt.

But what if there had been a black princess when I was a child? Would I have pursued different dreams? Perhaps. Maybe I would have become an actress or gone after “girlier” aspirations than engineering, science and math. I can’t possibly know. But I’m happy with my life path so far, and so I celebrate having a black princess now, when I’m totally ready to embrace my girly side. And you know the irony? My daughter doesn’t look like she has any African blood at all (except for some wildly curly hair). She can happily enjoy the various other princesses without seeking out one to match her own skin color. As for me, I’m donning my imaginary tiara and strutting my stuff.

Spunky Princess Tiana has already made her debut at the Disney Parks, but you can catch her in The Princess and the Frog starting on December 11.

Oh, and by the way, I decided to veer from the engineering path and my husband refuses to move to Florida, so my Imagineering journey is currently on hold, but… To the folks at Walt Disney Imagineering, if you ever need a quirky, techie gal in the Boston area (or for telecommuting) with an anthropology degree and an M.Ed. and who has a background in non-profit and tech work, give me a call. I’m fabulous, trust me.

What Are You?

Christy — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 21:25:26 +0000

Well, since you asked so nicely, I’m bi-racial. It’s how I identify if given the choice. My mom is white (ethnically Irish and Russian) and my father was black (good, old-fashioned African American). I have been mistaken for everything from Hawaiian to Aztec and people seem to have this overwhelming urge to figure out which box I fit into. Good luck with that… I’m not a boxy-type gal.

If I am forced to choose, I identify as black, and I regard myself as a woman of color. I’ve got some of the great physical benefits of being a black woman (curvy figure and hair), as well as the drawbacks (curvy figure and hair). I love having a built-in tan year ’round and it irks me that my kids look like they’re white. Now that I’ve got that out of the way…

Back to blogging.

Me (on the right) at BlogHer '09 with Angela of mommy bytes, photo courtesy of Dove Clinical Protection

The First Race Conversation

Christy — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 22:18:31 +0000

I knew it was bound to happen sooner or later, but I wasn’t quite prepared for how it went down.

Bug ran up to me and said, “We’re all the same and you’re different. But you’re still my mama.”

And even though I knew what he was talking about, I was so shocked that I ended up playing dumb. I mean, I had envisioned some gentle questions about skin color, not an out-and-out division along color lines. “Different? Why am I different?”

“Daddy and Lady Bug and I are the same. You’re a different color.”

Anyone who knows me well knows that this is actually a sore spot with me. I was pretty bummed to have kids that can easily pass for white. There are a lot of reasons for why this bugs me and most are beyond the scope of this post. The least of which, though, is that having grown up the only brown person in a white family and a white neighborhood, I was kind of looking forward to blending in with my own family. Big Guy is as white as white can be so it wasn’t a surprised that my biracial pigment wasn’t enough to turn the kids brown, but I was still disappointed in the end.

“We’re all a different color, honey. Everyone is a little bit different.” Bug actually has an olive complexion. He tans well and looks like he may be Portuguese or Italian. LadyBug got my hair, but is more fair than even Bug.

“NO! Daddy and I are the same, but you’re not. You’re the same color as U (our cat).” As if I wasn’t already feeling saddened by the conversation, Bug seemed to be denying his black heritage. Plus, I got lumped in with our devil of a cat.

“You’re a bit darker than Daddy, honey. Go put your hand next to his and see.” At this point, I silently cursed out my husband for not joining in on the conversation. He doesn’t really understand, and I get that, but I was certainly in need of some support on this one. Out loud I strongly suggested that this was a conversation he might like to be a part of.

In the end, we managed to convince Bug that he was, indeed, his own color. It did not, however, take away the sting of having my three-year-old try to convince me that I am, once again, the minority in my own family. Or getting lumped in with the cat. The hardest part is knowing that this is just the beginning of years of difficult questions and conversations that are going to push all of my buttons. And then, as a parent, knowing that I have to leave most of my own baggage aside and allow my kids to self-identify just as I choose to do. After all, I have been fighting for years for my own right to identify as African American and Caucasian. It would be hypocritical not to allow my kids the same freedom. Even if it breaks my heart.