What about the children?

Over the years I've been asked countless times by new friends and even a few strangers if my parents are still together. With the places and adventures I've had, a good amount of these people were truckers and southerners amazed at the idea of a biracial couple surviving the daily criticism and social taboo of race mixing. Here in the northeast, now in 2012, it is fairly commonplace. We don't think about it, we don't dwell on it, it is what it is. We tend to take for granted the idea that people of a different color can and do flock together, make lives, car payments, cake, babies, love, together. By choice, by ignorance, by accident, we forget that the urge to share and partner and copulate with someone other than ourselves is as natural as our skin or the sex parts we happen to be born with. We go about our daily lives thinking our struggle is so much harder than those that came before us. We live blind to the experiences that put the person next to us wherever we may be. We don't ask eachother to share our life stories by a fireside and we don't really want to know. Unless you're like me and you do, sometimes, and so you ask. Four in five times that will get a long drawn out story about some shit you didn't expect nor did you really want to know. One in five times you get suprised with awesomeness and that is worth the risk. Mostly. My family is larger than my bloodline might have you think and my past is littered with judgements from inside and outside of that family, but I am ever impressed by my parents ability to give their children the best tools to survive the choppy waters and hard questions and looks from those without the sense to see past their skin and our burnt sienna crayons.
About a year maybe two, before she died, my Grandmother and I were discussing a news story about a lesbian couple in wich the Butch or more masculine of the couple was carrying their child because hir partner could not. To me this was the ultimate act of love and a beautiful selfless thing. To my Grandmother this was, at best, an abomination. In a heated arguement with a dying woman I quickly realized how hard my parents must have had it and how fortunate my sibling and I had been to even be alive. She said with the disapproving tone and I quote, " The poor children".Her stance (summerized) was that the parents would be different and so the children would be different and their lives would all be hell. She felt this was fine for the parents but they should not bring children into a world they could not assimilate to.  At wich point I lost it. Yes, with an elderly dying woman, I lost my shit and soon uncovered a truth I spent my life choosing to bury in the arsenal of dirt I knew about my Grandmother. "Grandmother, I am the children of differentMy life is not hell, hard at times but that has made me stronger. There is nothing wrong with different, my life is not hell, hard at times but that has made me stronger. There is nothing wrong with different, I am different, I am proud of that and what you're saying is that my parents should not have had us..." 

How much deeper and farther that conversation cut is between me and a dead women but the point is my parents love eachother just as that couple loved eachother. As one of three products of that love I will always be thankful that my parents dared to be different, before it was commonplace, before it didn't matter so much. Love is not an easy thing under the best of circumstances, it doesn't bend to appease the masses or adjust for optimal comfort, but it does give us the chance to grow and learn and become better with the help of a good partner.

I am black and I am white, I was not stolen or adopted, I am weird, I am different and my mommy and daddy love the hell out of me and I them. Happy 32nd Anniversary to the white lady and black guy also known as Mothadear and Papabear that made me. Thanks for turning out ok.