Faithfully Frazzled

To be honest, I was going to start this post with a disclaimer about this not being a political post but I’ve decided against it – not because I don’t care what people think, but because this is a highly personal exercise in introspection and, in the end, it’s about my life’s journey. It’s really not open for judgement.

The impetus for this post is sadly grounded in a recent event that is politically charged. It happened when former President Trump visited a gathering of the National Association of Black Journalists, which was a bold move. He has been thoroughly at odds with the Black community as a whole since taking out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the death penalty for the so-called Central Park Five. During this meeting he expressed surprise that Kamala Harris was calling herself black because up until a few years ago he had only heard of her saying she was Indian. Even typing these words right now creates a visceral reaction in my belly when I think of all of the ways President Trump displays his insensitivity and contempt for anyone he considers beneath him. As a person of mixed race I find myself feeling the need to explain why our multi-ethnic identities are not open for discussion. We are who we say we are.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c06k07dn1zjo

To break some of this down for those of my readers who may not know me personally, my history and childhood must be addressed. I’m not quite 50 but I’ve had quite a journey in these 49 years that have taken me all over the country. Even before I was born the die was being cast on who I would become. A young, South Carolina woman from a musical and very spiritual family began a pen-pal relationship with a young, Canadian man who, for these purposes we’ll call Brian Anderson. The two of them hit it off and the decision was made that he would come down to South Carolina on a student visa. One caveat; even though his name was Brian Anderson he was a very dark-skinned southern Indian man who emigrated to Canada with his family from Pakistan. Plot twist! My birth mother had envisioned, in her words “a tall, Swedish man”, and that is the exact opposite of reality. It turns out they were still wildly attracted to each other and after he came down to South Carolina, one thing led to another and, boom, she was pregnant with me. The two young lovers decided they would get married as soon as possible but this was not to be. For reasons which will probably always be unclear to me, they were denied a marriage license in both the US and in Canada.

Fast forward to my birth in 1974, I was adopted in South Carolina by another young couple who had already had a biological son and adopted a daughter from South Korea. They were both from mostly German families and to really put a Deutsch cherry on top my father was and still is a Lutheran theologian and pastor. My poor mother endured a lot of dirty looks and comments during their time in South Carolina and to some extent in the next couple years in New Orleans, Louisiana. When I was not quite four we moved to the East Bay near Oakland, California. My father took a professorship at a Lutheran seminary and another school called the Graduate Theological Union.

To say that my life was shaped by my childhood in the Bay Area would be an understatement. As I only recently learned, Kamala Harris’s life was intertwined with the East Bay as well. We lived in Berkeley for the first year in the mansion built by William Randolph Hearst at the top of Marin Avenue, one of the steepest streets in California. My mother worked at the Wells Fargo on Bancroft next to UC Berkeley and I attended The Bancroft School for preschool. Kamala Harris lived on Bancroft Way. Berkeley gets a bad rap for being a place with, as my dad affectionately says, “all the kooks, nuts, and weirdos”, but it’s also where I first truly encountered Jesus Christ. My mom and I made lots of friends down by the campus and there was even a homeless man who regularly professed his love for the two of us and was convinced we would be a family someday. My dad taught me that everyone we meet could be Jesus regardless of what they looked like and that lesson never left me.

Eventually, we moved to a town called San Pablo but we were never far from Berkeley. My church was in El Cerrito, just down the hill from the seminary. My ballet school, Ann Davlin’s Dance Studio, was off of Telegraph Avenue. Our family’s favorite restaurant Tsing Tao was on Solano Avenue, near where Kamala was bused, yes bused!, to grade school.

One major change that came with living in the Bay Area was that even though there were not many families that looked like mine, there were so many different ethnicities that nobody really took that much notice of what a calico family we made, especially after two South African brothers spent four years with us. I knew that we were different but it ultimately didn’t seem to matter all that much. People caught on pretty quickly that we were just a multi-ethnic family and that was that. Until it wasn’t.

As a young girl I always wanted to be blonde haired, blue, eyed like my best friend Debbie. Everyone always thought she was the cutest, and she was! I was always embarrassed that I had inherited, what I didn’t know at the time was, my Southern Indian father’s deep, dark brown skin, eyes, and hair. Boooring, I thought to myself. Why couldn’t I look more like my Germanic parents? Uuuugh. I also inherited the hooked nose that got me teased by the cute boys because it wasn’t a perfect button. It bothered me so much but I also just accepted that’s how it was and nothing would change that fact.

The older I got the more I became confused about where I fit in. Not until my early forties when I took a test through 23andMe did I learn the truth about my ethnicities. Throughout adolescence and adulthood I struggled to feel comfortable in my skin. I was raised one way – in a loving, Christian, but let’s be real, WASPy home. I knew little to nothing about my ethnicities which all throughout my childhood I was told were Portuguese and Pakistani. That seemed as likely as anything so I just went with it. I romanticized Portugal because it was familiar and European while I was less comfortable with embracing anything Indian. My father had gone there on one of his many travels and came back with stories about the incredible people, the beautiful country, and the soul-crushing poverty. There was no talk of Bollywood, only time-worn Mother Teresa with the poor and destitute in Calcutta. That is all I knew and it made me sad as a child. He did regale me with the story of Ramayana and Sita and used to call me his maharani when I gathered my hair in a towel after my baths. Other than that the lack of a real identity began to eat away at me.

Last night before Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech I began looking more into her childhood and was taken aback by how many similarities there were with mine. My parents were very concerned with social justice and civil rights. My dad even started the prison ministry program at the seminary he attended as a student. I have vivid memories of watching the evening news every night before dinner with Dan Rather. We would often spend our weekends doing things like the C.R.O.P. Walk to end hunger and helping the local food kitchen. Public service was a part of my childhood and I’m very grateful for those experiences.

I was always very interested in current events and when in my freshman year in high school my Economics teacher said I could get extra credit for working on a political campaign I jumped at the chance. I had no idea what I was getting myself into but I marched right into the headquarters for the Dukakis campaign and said, I’m here to help! Ah, youth! They made me a precinct leader which means exactly nothing but it sounds really cool when you’re 14. I also campaigned for Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein. They got so much free labor out of me, I can’t tell you. When I get into something, I GET INTO IT. Go ADHD superpowers!

I did it again in 1992 in the year I spent in junior college. I studied political science that year and signed up to be a precinct leader again for the Clinton/Gore campaign. I was again very gung-ho but was just that much removed from my childhood naïveté that I began to realize just how flawed our country’s politics were. After the election, we rode the feel good wave of triumph until, of course, the Monica Lewinsky scandal. As with every presidency before, save perhaps that of the saintly if ill-equipped President Carter, there are always scandals but this was the first time I had skin in the game. I helped get this person elected. How dare he let me down?! Thus began my slow descent into disillusionment with our nation’s political system. To this day I have no political affiliation and as I continue on my spiritual path I feel less and less inclined to care. Unlike Kamala, my political aspirations shriveled up and died long ago!

Around 1993 I left California and settled in Princeton, New Jersey attending Westminster Choir College. I was studying sacred music and voice and immersing myself in all things choral. As a “good Lutheran” this was instilled in me from practically birth. I’ve since learned that my maternal birth family was also Lutheran for a time and many of my relatives were church musicians. I haven’t yet touched on the nature versus nurture debate but there is much to be gleaned from my own life. My mother had been the choir director at our Christ Lutheran Church for about as long as I could remember and I was always involved in every service in one way or another. I played the flute, participated in the bell choir, and was the trusty acolyte for years until I left for college. I was a weird kid because I actually really enjoyed these things. I even helped on what’s called a “call committee” to bring in new pastors as a teenager. In essence, my identity was being defined by my life in the church and that was just fine. Again, until it wasn’t.

During my first year at Westminster our choir did a tour down to North Carolina and it was the first time I had set foot in that state since being born in Charlotte and then transported across state lines to South Carolina. My roommate at the time, Cathy, still recalls how this hit me like a ton of bricks and literally threw me into a panic attack. The realization that this mythical place of my birth really existed and my story was real. I CAME FROM SOMEWHERE!! All at once, I felt lost, untethered to reality. I started to feel like I was two different people. Anyone remember that movie, Sliding Doors? In a nutshell, the main character lives out two different scenarios of how her life could’ve turned out. I began to think of myself in that way and yearned to know more. A few times I tried to search adoption records when the internet was still brand new but to no avail. My records were sealed I was not meant to know anything. I would have to settle for just accepting myself as is. Brown on the outside. White on the inside. I would never know who was Portuguese, who was Pakistani and HOW IN THE HECK did they make a baby in the South in 1974???

While still in college, through studying church music, I discovered Eastern Orthodoxy which was just as foreign to me and my own ethnicities. I was drawn to the history, the ancient-ness of its worship, the connection with my first Christian brethren. It felt as much like an identity as anything I’ve ever felt and I knew I needed to remain in this faith forever. I’m now married to a priest of the church and am referred to as “Matushka” which is sort of like calling me “mama”. To be fair, I find I most comfortably identify as a mother over anything else, even being a singer which qualifies as a distant second.

I’ve since discovered the truth of my adoption and ethnicities. Some days I feel very brown, especially when being followed in stores, or being the target of racially charged comments. This started happening much more post 9/11, however. Most people that have made comments or said hateful things assume that I am affiliated with one race or another. I grew up with very dark skin but now am much lighter. Probably why I’m Vitamin D deficient. {smirk} To the average eye, I probably appear Middle Eastern or Indian, which I technically am, but only kind of. An unkind woman in my local grocery store said, “Your people think you own the store!” My cousin Tom who is as Germanic as they come was shopping with me and said, ” you mean her German people?” I guffawed but it stung. I don’t even know who my people are, lady! If you can tell me that would be great! To tie things up in a messy little bow, for anyone to question what Kamala identifies as is, frankly, none of their business. Think of it like the old Facebook status; it’s complicated. ~