And this is why you're awesome!

You have saved me.  The gates are open and the writing will commence!  I just needed a push and you, my dear and lovely readers are so freakin awesome for giving me just what I need to get over this writing block hump!  I told myself it would be a success if I could get ten questions and I'm almost there and even if I don't reach that, my writing wheels are turning!  Thank you so much!


For the original questions, go to the comments here because I'm going to paraphrase.


Being in an interracial relationship, what issues/cultural differences have you encountered in dating/marriage?


Love that question and it's definitely not one I've talked about!  So we all start in the same place, these are my parents.

My little mommy is Mexican, my dad is Black, ex-military and from the South.  I grew up in Kansas - Kansas City to be exact.  I'm a city girl through and through, although a friend of my mom's had a dairy farm and I remember going out there to shuck corn and watch the cows get milked so I have been on a farm.  However, I would never call myself outdoorsy.  Going camping is just pretending like you're homeless and I don't see the point.  I'm all for nature hikes and getting one with Mother Earth but when we're done, I want to sleep on a bed off the ground with indoor plumbing and four walls surrounding me.


My dad's family lived in Georgia and we saw them on sporadic summer vacations.  My dad's sister has three kids around mine and my brother's age, but sadly I'm not close to them at all.  He has another sister that he's not super close with and two other brothers and they all have kids, but I don't know them very well.  A few Labor Days ago we visited my uncle Virgil in Atlanta, but family or not, getting to know a perfect stranger is really hard over four short days. 

Labor Day 2007 at the MLK memorial

My dad wearing my uncle Virgil's letter jacket

Virgil's three daughters, their spouses and kids and our family.

My brother took the picture.

It's crazy how much he and my dad favor each other!

Plus, I kinda don't recognize myself with straight hair!

 My mom's family all lives in Kansas with the exception of her oldest brother who actually lives in Galveston, I think.  She has another older brother, my late Uncle Pete and her younger sister, my Aunt Mary.  Of my cousins, I'm closest with my aunt Mary's kids.  She has twin boys six months younger than my brother and a daughter that's ten years younger than I am.  However, she's more grown up than I am because she has two kids and is super mature.  I speak to her at least every other day and I miss her kids all the time.  Actually, she's the reason I got sucked back into Facebook.  She posts new pictures of the girls almost daily and I loooove seeing their little faces!  I seriously contemplated making her my only friend just so I could see pictures of the girls, but I thought that would be rude.  So I just deleted everyone that I wouldn't send an email to, but I'm still not on there like I used to be.


Wasn't this supposed to be about culture and interracial relationships?  Gah!  When the floodgates open, I guess!

My cousin Lorena (on the left), who looks exactly like my Aunt Mary (her mom.)

My cousin Jayna, my uncle Pete's daughter.

My cousin Lana, who looks exactly like my mom.

She's Jayna's older sister and a year older than me.

My cousin Tommy, Lana and Jayna's brother who looks exactly like his dad 

with his wife Jessi.

They live outside of San Antonio with their two boys.

One of my aunt Mary's twins

The other one with one of his daughters

Culturally speaking, my mom married a Black man, my uncle Pete married a White woman, my aunt Mary's first husband (the boy's dad) was Persian and Lorena's dad was Mexican.  We all joke that she's the only cien por ciento (100%) in the family!  My uncle Joe always lived in Texas and he was from my grandmother's first husband and much older.  His son is like 60 or something and I've seen him less than five times in my life.

So my brother and I grew up with my aunt Mary's kids and we spent a lot of our free time at my grandmother's house.  There was an empty lot next to my grandma's house and I remember playing house and making mud tortillas for my babies (my brother and the boys.)  I was ten when Lorena was born so she was my real-life baby.  Of course, I'm pretty sure I'll suck as a mother because when she was about three, I was playing with her one summer and misting her face with a bottle of water because it was so freakin hot outside.  A few days later, she got into some Tilex (!!!!!), and sprayed herself in the face with it!  I still feel bad about that.  And then, three summers ago, Drew and I went home to Kansas and stayed at her house and we were babysitting her year old daughter.  I'd ironed my skirt on the bedspread earlier that day and her iron didn't have an automatic shut-off switch like ours does.  I didn't even think to check and the baby knocked over the iron and burned her foot.  There were four adults in the house to watch one little kid.  I probably shouldn't have kids.

Growing up around that diversity, I didn't really know I was different until I was in about sixth grade in my mostly White Catholic school.  I was raised by my Mexican mom around my Mexican cousins, was brought up in the Church, got all the sacraments (PS - even though I haven't been to mass in years, you can't be ex-Catholic; that's like trying to be ex-Asian), learned a smattering of Spanish (I didn't become fluent until high school), and danced in the fiestas every summer with my cousins.

Now, when I say I was raised by my mom, that's not to say my dad wasn't there.  He was so incredibly involved and I'm forever grateful for that.  As long as I can remember he worked from home, so he packed our lunches every morning and he was always there when we came home from school and he would always drop whatever he was doing to pull me onto his lap in his office to hear all about my day.

But when I think culture, I think food, music, customs, traditions and language, all which came from my mother, my aunt and my grandmother - all old-country Mexican.  I sang the rancheras (old school Mexican songs) before I even knew the words or what they meant, tortillas con mantequilla (tortillas with butter) were my afternoon snack, and chorizo con huevo (Mexican sausage with eggs) is my most favorite comfort food in the world.  Any time we were in the car with my Aunt Mary she gave us all the bendicion (blessing) before backing out of the driveway and you never wanted to pooch your stomach out and make it big and round because that's bad for your tripas (insides.)

Dating wasn't allowed.  Our house was three levels - the bottom level was the family room and my parent's bedroom, middle was the kitchen and living room and the top level were the bedrooms - the guest, my brother's and mine.  Boys entered the house through the bottom level and if they went to the second level, it was only to the kitchen.  I didn't have a boy in the living room until I was 16 years old.  The only boy to ever go to third level of the house was my husband.  And I didn't question it - that's how it was, end of story.


My parents taught me that I could go and do and be whatever I chose, but at the end of the day I was a lady and I was to conduct myself accordingly.  God, just typing that makes me feel guilty for the rowdy stuff I've done in my youth!

I was 22 before I had my first serious boyfriend - he was White.  The one after that was Black - and frat.  That was a culture shock!  I was comfortable around White people and they were familiar - I went to a Catholic school in Kansas, but a Black dude?  That was in a fraternity?  That went to an HBCU (Historically Black College or University)?  He might as well have been from another country.  That was the most fun relationship ever and I learned so many things from him!  My dad loves his soul food, but my mom never cooked it so consequently, I never ate it.  I was 26 before I ever had collard greens or homemade macaroni and cheese.  I remember when I was 7 or 8, we went to my dad's sister's house in Georgia for Christmas but I was too scared to eat the food because I didn't know what any of it was.  I remember asking my mom if they had tortillas and I seriously think I only ate some corn because that was the only thing that looked familiar.  I knew some Motown-type, soul-type songs but I didn't know all the words.  I never knew what Homecoming was really all about!  I still have a soft spot in my heart for that boyfriend - I hope he's found a girl that makes him wildly happy.

But if you were cute, I was equal opportunity!  I've dated Italians, Colombians, Puerto Ricans and farm boys from Iowa!  But Drew was my forever so I married him.  I didn't seek out a White guy, it just kind of happened, and boy are we different!  He grew up around his extended family as well, but he's not nearly as close to them as I am to mine, but maybe that's less a culture thing than it is a gender thing.  I doubt he pretended his younger cousins were his babies!


Drew's actually done quite well with my family.  I was nervous as I was the first brown girl he's ever dated and I wasn't sure of his motives.  He likes to say he dated a Cuban girl in college, but they only went out for a couple months and frankly, I wouldn't call any of his college relationships serious!  


I know he thinks it's odd when I want to give him the bendicion before he gets on a plane, but he goes along with it.  He doesn't speak Spanish or know the songs I grew up with, but neither did my dad.  I'm sure he shakes his head that six of us will pile in the car to go to the drugstore for toothpaste, but I say can we fit one more?  I can't cook, so he doesn't get any of my family recipes that I grew up with - I want to move back to Kansas for that reason alone.  My Aunt Mary's cooking is legendary!  Even though my cousin commented that he was 'a little bright', they still took him in, inviting him to take pulls straight from the tequila bottle at the impromptu barbeque they had for us.  And with that, he was officially one of the family.  


But we are different - Drew's parents were waaaaay less strict than mine, again maybe a gender thing.  Additionally, he thinks that men and women can and should be 50-50 equal partners in everything, which goes against everything I was ever taught, and I've had to do some re-learning in our relationship.  There were men things and women things in our house and it was a non-issue.  My mother has never in her life shoveled snow out of the driveway and my father has never expected her to do it.  I've never seen my dad do laundry and that's just the way it is - but I suspect that's more because he does it the guy way of stuffing in as much as will fit and dumping in detergent after.  My mom makes more money than my dad but she was always the woman of the house and he was the man, no questions asked.  I was taught that boys should hold open your door, always pay for dates and that you should offer to split things but if he was a true gentleman, he would always decline.  I grew up seeing my dad do things for my mom that I'm pretty sure she could have done for herself, yet he did them and she let him.  My dad taught me to drive and my mom kissed my knee when I fell - she was the softie, he was the teacher.  Yeah, he was a Southern ex-military hard-ass and he was the one who gave us spankings, but he's still my daddy, always always always.


One of the things that Drew and I disagree the most about is the notion that women/men can do anything the other can do.  I vehemently disagree.  We are not made equal and we're not supposed to be.  We're different to complement each other.  I don't think that women are supposed to be bench-pressing 200 pounds (no offense to those women that can) or that men should be sitting on the sofa with a hanky, weeping over a soap opera.  Men can build and provide a home, but it's just four walls without a woman's touch.  


Again, I'm just talking about mine and Drew's relationship and how I grew up.  Family is not just a married man and woman and I'm not discussing various family dynamics like gay parents, single moms by choice, single dads, foster families, blended families, blah blah blah et cetera et cetera - I'm just talking about me and how my upbringing has shaped my thoughts about marriage for me.  Like it or not, your upbringing shapes you - you either seek to duplicate it or you seek to do everything the exact opposite but it is an influence any way you slice it.  I don't know many details about Drew's family dynamic because he's a guy and guys rarely talk about that stuff, but I get the impression that he kept his nose clean, got good grades and his parents pretty much let him figure stuff out for himself.  I don't really know much about his extended family and I don't pry - much.  I know there are cousins and I do wonder why he's not closer to them.  I do wonder how in the world he could go for years without going home for Christmas.  But I'm also pretty sure that he's the only one in his family with an advanced degree in  biomedical engineering and that might have something to do with it.  I'm sure there's the whole 'you think you're too good to work in the factory like the rest of us' thing going on there.  


You know, I left home when I was 19, something my mother never would have done.  She moved from her parent's house to her husband's house and had I chosen to do the same, no one would have raised an eyebrow.  But I left, seeing the world, meeting all kinds of people, doing all kinds of things, but when I finally settled down, I found that all I really want is for my husband to shovel the snow while I stay inside and attempt to cook and sing to the baby.


Funny how that happens.