Not Good at Minority-hood

Feelings of discomfort come in several different shapes and sizes. Discomfort, of course, can be self-inflicted. You know, the kind where you're loofah-ing in the shower and you loofah a little too vigorously? There are other feelings of discomfort brought upon by others, sometimes purposefully and sometimes completely inadvertently. Sometimes these feelings of discomfort help us to get over ourselves, and sometimes they can remind us not to wear a certain pair of pants with a certain lacey thong.

Lately, I have beem floundering in a morass of discomfort. It is one that is difficult to admit. I imagine it's up there with the discomfort that Ditka and Dole may have felt before going public about impotence. But my discomfort derives from something that I can probably, actually, intelligently overcome.

I'm just really uncomfortable lately as a minority. I'm not good at it. Yes, I am a white woman, living in urban America. My first language is English and I have a college degree. I am an unlikely minority. But I am often in the minority. And I am very bad at being a minority, truth be told.

Since I married outside of my race and religion, I really have no right to be shocked by my circumstance. But I am consistently surprised that being a minority is so terribly difficult.

My husband, who is Korean-Canadian (and my favorite CanAsian, at that) has dealt with minority status throughout his entire life. As a minority, he knows how to work a room. He is a master of the superficial conversation. Growing up, he expected his instructors to scroll down the attendance sheet, and look up for the Asian kid when their pencils reached "John Lee." He expects that he may be the only person of color when we attend large events like weddings with 200 or more guests. He has never - in the seven years that I have known him - been inclined to congregate only with other Asians. It is perhaps for this reason that I always found him so accessible, and yes, I did just say that I found my pre-husband an accessible person of color, which is my point exactly.

I am having trouble accessing the person that I need to be when I am in the minority, because I have never had to cultivate that person. I grew up in the lily-white suburbs of northern Ohio. I attended private schools nearly all of my life. I spent my summers at a public pool with other white kids, and I competed with other Irish Catholics in basketball and in Irish step-dance competitions. I heard more than my share of racist jokes growing up, and it was not so long ago that I learned the critical error in calling Asian people "Oriental."

"Oriental" now gives me an acidic feeling in my stomach.

For the past several years, I've been attending a Korean church. Most of our Saturdays are spent with these churchies, many of whom are Korean, none of whom are white or raised Catholic, or from Ohio. Frequently, by these churchies, I am told that I look tired ("I'm white. I have lines under my eyes.") that my nose is so small and pointy ("Yup, I'm white.") and that I am sarcastic ("I'm Irish."). I'm also asked when I am having a baby, that people are expecting me to have a baby, and oh, I know I just asked you this last week, but when are you going to have a baby? ("I'm 26. I'm American. That's not how I roll.") Yesterday, one of the churchies told me, "See, we're Korean. We don't speak up." This was not intended to zing me in the least and was probably conveyed with a tone of admiration for my being a pushy broad. But it reminded me, once again, that I am in the minority.

Of course, one day out of the seven should not burden me so greatly that I simply cannot bear being without white female ally! I just wish I had more training in cultural exchanges. I wish I could let the abject contrasts and the social faux pas roll right off of my lily-white skin. Thankfully, my husband - who has a master's degree in empathy - is a wonderful personal trainer in surviving minority-hood. Hopefully, once I learn everything there is to learn about toughing it as a minority, I will begin my life's coursework in Raising a Biracial Child 101. Of course, life is not so neat and tidy. The moments of life's tidiness are really in the minority.

Raised by a Matriarch

I just got off the phone with one of my old beloved babysitting charges. I was so pleased to connect with Kevin since I like to think that so many of the answers on his homework papers from 1st-5th grade came from me, and so much of my understanding of Nintendo and sportspeak and how to eat Tortilla chips properly comes from him. Kevin and his sister Maura were my kids, and I like to believe that they gave me a second childhood rife with bike-riding and band-aiding up bloody knees. It is hard to think about how much they taught me about myself and shaped the person that I was as a teenager. In their house, they saw me as a teenage in loco parentis, but I always saw them as my kids.

Kevin and Maura and I had a lot of fun and a lot of squabbles in the course of our summer days together or after-school afternoons together. But when their mother came home, our slate was always wiped clean. We had all been angels, we had all done our homework together. We had all eaten no more than our standard allotment of Oreos. With milk. Their mother was and is and exceptional woman, primarily raising her kids on her own, largely like my own mother had. And I believe it was for this reason that Kevin and Maura and I always got along so well. We had all been raised by matriarchs who became matriarchs in the absence of their husbands who still had some things to figure out about their lives.

My phone conversation with Kevin today covered the obvious bases - where do you live, how do you like it, and how many times a week do you think cherry Pop Tarts sound like a solid meal? The conversation shifted when Kev asked me for some counsel about his prospective career change. We talked about the importance of making leaps of faith, but also about the importance of savings accounts, the importance of friends and the importance of knowing, really ascertaining your passion. Then I asked him what his mother thought about his change, and that was, perhaps, the most important question I could have asked.

When you're raised by a matriarch who is a matriarch by default, aka a single mother, I think you live your life a little more gingerly. You've seen your mother struggle to make big cases for the small things in life. You've seen the look in her eyes when you gave her a hard time about the dinner she came home from work to cook for you, The Look that said, "Keep it up, kid, and you can eat a cherry Pop Tart for dinner, and don't think it will be a brand-name Pop Tart, either." You know what it means to your mother that you succeed because of the sacrifices she made for you, and maybe that sounds cliched, but maybe the experience of having a single mother is cliched, because it's all too common and still all too cumbersome.

Kevin said his mother had been pleased about his thoughts on a career change, since for him it would mean more time for family, for friends. I told him to keep me posted on his potential move and to know that he'd always have a couch to surf on in Boston. Finally, I told him to please tell his mother hey for me. I hope his mother knew what a great surrogate she'd been to me in the stead of my great mother, and by entrusting me with her children, she'd helped me to think about what I would be like as a mother, and no matter how hard I try to resolve otherwise, I'm sure that I will operate much like my own when that day comes.

Go ahead and say you don't have any regrets, but I know you have at least one.

If you haven't considered a litany of things already to regret about your past, I suggest you head over to dooce.com and read her entry about her "sixth birthday" as a blogstress. Dooce confesses her own Capital Regret and opens her comments section for your own contribution.

You can tell me you ain't got no regrets. You can tell me that you pull life by the hoodie strings every single day. You can tell me that you never let the bastards get you down. But I don't believe you.

We all have at least one small little weed of regret, planted deep in our hearts once upon a time. We try to stomp out the weed and keep it from sporing off into whole weedy patches. We try to fend off the weeds from entering our little gardens of helpful hindsights and proactive thoughts for the future. Sometimes our faith helps us to keep the weeds in quarantine, but until this faulty world crumbles, the weeds will always keep us looking back just a bit...

My Chief Regrets:

1.) I regret being such a snivelling, abusive wretch to my sister growing up. And for rigging the cards in Candy Land so she'd always get sent back to Plumpy in the homestretch.

2.) I regret not having more fun in high school, for not relaxing more, and not spending more time with dear friends and family. A 4.0 GPA and sundry awards and plaques have never comforted me when I have felt homesick or lost.

3.) I regret that I read so many asenine Sleepover Friends books when I was a pre-teen instead of more literary things without contrived plots. I regret that my vocabulary and spelling could be so much better because of this.

4.) I regret exacerbating the pain that likely targets in grade school experienced. I hope that they are very rich and that someone gives them a big bear hug every single day.

5.) I regret not keeping a journal during junior high. I bet it would be funny to read now.