Crowds of People Asking

Sometimes I think it is a curse to be aware. Consciousness can be a burden. If I were less aware then I think I might cringe less than I do. My life has been full of cringe lately. I know that being different from your average Joe is full of gopher holes and such, but I have a lifetime of experience of being different. In the past few days, it has just been a full on explosion of awkwardness. The other day after Lucas’s music lesson, I decided to stop at a local park and let the kidlet have some runaround time. There was an older woman there with a couple of kids and as soon as we alighted on the play structure she started haranguing me with questions. Most of them were of the generic variety (a/s/l?), so I answered her various queries with courtesy. She seemed a little over-anxious to partake in conversation which made the warning bells in my head go off. Whatever. (I am not overly friendly at parks because of my introverted tendencies + I try to avoid the pitfalls of child rearing conversations thus less speaking on my part.)

Lucas was all over the place, jumping, climbing, walking and I had my arms full of Quinn, so I was following Lucas around as he explored and played. We moved all over the play area and every now and again the woman would come over and start nattering away. She did this to almost every new person to come to the park and there were a few while we frittered away an hour or two. Off to the side of the play area there were some fallen trees and since I like for Lucas to play amongst “nature”, I cajoled him into climbing and playing by the trunks. The woman followed us over there with her grandsons and she started interrogating me. I was doing my best to send out “leave me alone” signals (single syllable answers, looking away, &c), but she was relentless. She started commenting on Quinn’s pale skin and reddish hair (here the warning bells were a claxon). Guess where this went? She said, “She’s so pale?…[Implying (and you're so dark)]…What’s your husband?”. At this I took total offense. My inclination was to revert to salty language, but I was so perturbed by her impudence, I gaped. She behaved as if she took my silence to mean that perhaps I wasn’t married. I told her irritatedly, “She has father. He’s like everyone else, a human being.” She continued in her ignorance, “I guess everyone’s a little bit of everything now a days, I mean there’s all races mixed-up, Scottish, Irish, German, Canadian…”. She went on in this vein, but I’ll spare you.

The next person who comments to me on my children’s skin color and my heritage is going to get an earful. For the record, I think it is totally rude to accost strangers and demand of them their provenance. I understand that people are curious, but I don’t see where their curiosity trumps my privacy. This is all about entitlement wherein the “white” individuals see themselves as the bearers of “regular” and everyone else has to justify themselves to them. I reserve the right to tell these people in whatever language I choose that they have crossed the line. In the past I might have felt just uncomfortable with these situations and left it at that, but the website “Anti-racist Parent” has given me the vocabulary to descibe my discomfort and the inherent problems with this level of human interaction.