What brown did for me

I have brown eyes, brown hair, brown skin. When I was a child I wanted blue eyes, blond hair and white skin. My skin was the color of poop (as one kid told me) and dirt; blue was the color of the ocean and the sky.

I think this mental self-deprecation started when my mother moved my sister and I from all of our family in San Diego to a tiny Oregon town not too far south of Portland where we joined a cultishly conservative, mostly white church. It was where I have my earliest memory of knowing that I was black (at least that's how I was always identified at school, only to ask more questions later and realize that I am multi-racial, including Irish!)

My mom is Hispanic but passes easily for Caucasian, but my father is black (and not involved) so my sister and I usually caused a head turn when we were with our mom. More than once people asked if we were adopted. To this day I've never spoken to my mother about these issues of feeling ugly and not like I belonged to her. She married and cranked out four kids that look nothing like me . But I'm digressing into familial issues that we all have on some level.

My mom would bring home those bulky, old film projectors from the school she assisted at (I knew how to wind and load an actual movie film strip!) We watched The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and it spurred me to read more about black history (didn't know it was a book, at the time and like many others I thought it was a true story). I was already a nerdy reader so it was no big deal to pick up a children's biography of Martin Luther King Jr. I still have it. Inside the cover my full name is written in the best cursive my learners hand could muster.

I cried when I read MLK's story. My eight year old brain felt for little Martin when he reached a certain age and his friend's mother told him they couldn't play together anymore. His mom explained it was because he was black and his friend was white.

I may have better appreciated my roots from the exposure to black history, but I would still wish away my curly hair to be straight like my friends'. I wanted to get feathered bangs and run my fingers through my hair. Instead I usually had a halo of frizzy, wisps of curls, which my husband now calls angel hairs. ( I know, I know sappy sharing here). I wanted my eyes to sparkle but they looked like black holes to me. And I had a skinny body that elicited cruel comparisons to the children who suffered in the 1980's Ethiopian famine. (Seriously)

I think if child/teen body hatred had been christened Body Dysmorphic Disorder as it is today I would have been diagnosed and put on some medication. LOL. I say that not to show how bad my self loathing was, but to point out how ridiculous it is that we label everything a "disease," because I grew out of it just fine.

High school and beyond dramatically changed the way I view myself though. I embrace both of my primary backgrounds. I may not look like one or the other, or speak like one or the other, but I'm a well put together combination if I do say so myself.

It's ironic that women paid hundreds of dollars for bad perms in the 80s and I hated my curls, which I now see as having the best of both worlds. I can straighten it easily with an expensive flat iron or wear it curly depending on what In Style declares is "in" LOL. I don't have to tan or worry as much about skin cancer. My husband and Gabe have identical shades of brown eyes, and Asher and I share a tone as well so how can you look in those and think anything but beautiful thoughts, huh? And being skinny, well, let's just say it gave me an edge when I had my kids. The average woman keeps five pounds of the weight she gains from each child. I am no different only I started at just about 100 lbs so I probably could have used the ten extra I now have. (Ladies, please don't hate me.)

I started thinking about all this when I heard that MLK's wife Coretta Scott King had passed away. With her and Rosa Parks now gone, I feel like it's the end of an era. They and MLK gave me any kind of pride I had in being identified as black. I cried when I heard of each of these women's passing. They had a strength and determination that I think many people with social grievances today have replaced with self-entitlement.

My MLK biography sits on Gabe's bookshelf now. I'll catch a glimpse of it's torn binding now and then when we're picking out a book. I look at my family and I'm amazed at how times have changed from two little boys who couldn't play together because of their skin to a family like ours; two little boys who could very well be that one white boy and one black boy that MLK and his friend represented, but in our family, they are brothers.

I accept that I'm neither one or all of another. I don't fully experience the depth of either race, either. But that's my experience and that of many who are multiracial. We are a new group that can't be put into a box on paper or in someone's mind, and that's what people like the Kings and Rosa Parks fought for, for everyone.

Read about a side of Coretta Scott King that you don't often hear.