A few months ago, I held a baby shower at my home for a friend who is fostering and planning to adopt a child from Milwaukee County’s foster care system. The little girl was already with her mom-to-be so she came to the shower and played with my two boys as well as two other children from two other families. The kids had a raucous time stealing cake off plates, trying to ride our very patient dog and chasing the balloons that refused to stay stuck to the walls no matter how much tape I put on them.
There were single people (both straight and gay), married people and divorced people at the party. There were grandparents, parents with children of all ages and people who can still finish a sentence because they don’t have children. The racial and ethnic heritage of the guests covered four continents. There were vegetarians and meat eaters, those who like Diet Coke and those who like regular Coke and people who like a little champagne and orange juice at 11 o’clock in the morning.
At some point, I noticed some of those things. I didn’t notice because I was keeping score but because I just noticed. It’s the sort of cataloging our brains do as we go about our day, whether we want to admit it or not. While I was acutely aware of whether there was enough food and how long the champagne would last, I somehow completely failed to notice that all five children at the party were biracial.
My own children are biracial so normally, I’m on alert for that sort of thing. We live in a mixed neighborhood in a diverse part of Milwaukee. We attend a church that is relatively integrated with a few other families that look like ours. We go to playtime at the COA in Riverwest where families of every persuasion happily sing songs about fish and suns and hot dogs together. We chose a school for next year that we know is racially mixed so my son will see other little faces that look familiar. We intentionally seek out circumstance that will make sure our children feel comfortable as multi-racial humans in a multi-racial world.
So how did it escape me that our party was so diverse? How did I not notice that we had so many different “types” of people in our home and that their children were a whole different type? In fact, I would never have figured it out but the mother-to-be said to me later that she thought it was great that all the children were biracial. She is white and adopting a multi-racial child so she too is learning how to care about her child’s surroundings in a different way than many single-race families ever consider.
I’m guessing that I missed the fact that the party was so diverse because it’s just how our life as a family is, the bulk of the time. Growing up mostly in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, I took it for granted that the world looked like me. Not only is that not true in general, but a smaller and smaller part of American’s population looks anything like me. I learned how different the world really is when I went to college and I’ve learned more and more each day I’m a member of an interracial family. I only hope that when my sons grow up, they never pause to think that it’s nice how diverse their parties are. I hope, one day, they only worry whether there’s enough champagne.
