“My phone vibrates in the middle of my text. It’s an unsaved number. I just stared at my phone. ALL I could think about was the tall handsome dude at the store, whom I didn’t even catch the name of.”
‘It’s definitely too soon,’ I thought. ‘No one would approve.’ I met K at the wrong time. At 26 years old, I had already been married 6 years, parented 7 children and miscarried 2 babies.’
‘Is she your real daughter? Who does she belong to?‘ At 4, I was adopted with my twin sister by a white Mennonite family in the heart of Amish country.’
“‘I bet you are so glad someone actually wanted you,’ a stranger told me. I am running through the grass, almost to the woods to find my biological mother. ‘My real mother!,’ I shout. ‘Hold still,’ my mom shouts, before I trip. She chased me, and scoops me up.”
‘We sound like the beginning of a bad joke. A Black, Transracial, Mennonite Adoptee and a White Mennonite Midwesterner walk into a bar…’
“Eight years ago, I got in a car at midnight to eat bad cheese fries at a sketchy truck stop. I took a chance to be vulnerable with someone I didn’t know. And, it changed my life.”
‘That’s my family,’ he said, pointing to us. The man looked back in shock and refused to let my husband through. Our daughter Ava began shouting his name.’
“I remember overhearing Justin telling the kids they were not allowed to scream in grocery stores. That someone might think daddy isn’t their ‘real daddy.’ That he’s trying to take them. It all made sense to me when we went to the airport as a family, and Justin was stopped.”
‘I’m Lebanese. He’s African American. No one approved of us. The longer we dated, the more friends began to slip away.’ Woman claims ‘intolerance’ only made her interracial relationship ‘grow stronger’
“We quickly found ourselves without friends, but we persisted. I remember hearing family make racist jokes and remarks like, ‘They don’t belong here.’ We were warned not to show affection for one another. But we leaned on each other when we had no one else to lean on. I never ONCE cared about the color of his skin.”
