If you read my blogpost last Friday, it ended on kind of a down note as I contemplated the fact that I sometimes feel a lack of belonging as I move through my professional and personal life. I’ve been thinking about this a lot since it was brought up in a discussion at school about what keeps us from feeling like we belong in our school community.
After I posted the blogpost, Diana texted me, “you belong with us.”
She’s right. The one place I truly do feel like I belong is with my family, even though no one in my immediate family shares my racial identity. It doesn’t feel like I’m out of place because there’s my identity as a member of the family overshadows any lack of horizontal identities I don’t have with Diana, my sons or with Buffy.
I hope that family is a central, and stabilizing part of my children’s lives like it is for me. We live in a society full of racists, and many who actively work, and even more who passively allow white supremacy to continue to rule over almost every part of our American culture. In this context, race is an issue. Even if don’t deal with it at home, it must be dealt with outside of the house whether you like it or not.
I am an optimist and I know that things will be better when my children get older but they will still have to deal with the micro-aggressions, the apologist, the lies, and the oppression of their friends and their family. It’s going to take more than a generation to undo thousands of years of sexism, and the racism embedded in every stage of Western human civilization.
There are times that I worry that the nature of our family will cause my children to feel like they belong. They are mixed-race most of the people in our lives are not. Ollie at age five already doesn’t share traditional masculine interests that his classmates do, and they have parents who work in education, not exactly the most prestigious career in America.
There are things about our family that will make our children more aware, more empathetic, and will help them connect with others. Their family include a dog that is well loved, three different racial identities (even more if you look at our extended family), a gender dynamic in which chores are shared and the women has as much control over the television as the man, a child with a disability, and family history that is rich, international, and full of stories.
I know there will moments when my children will be lonely, when they will be in a room full of people and they feel like they don’t belong. That is part of my life and it will be part of theirs. It’s the identity that they were born with and the society they were born into. I’m beginning to truly accept this, not as a point of giving up, but as a way to understand and move forward.
Someday I’ll teach them that lesson, but for now. Honest conversations, hugs, and whisper of “I love you,” late into the night into the ears of my sleeping children will hopefully be enough.
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