December Series Part 1. Biracial Marriage: Balancing Act
I’m still so new to blogging and the blogs that I’ve read have all been about recipes. So if your looking for a quick scroll to a recipe at the bottom then your in the wrong place. However, if your looking to read something different, interestingly honest, and maybe even somewhat relatable, grab a drink, some snacks, and read on!
Oh my husband, we are so different yet have so much in common. We have similar backgrounds . We were both raised in lower income households. We grew in environments with levels of unpredictability and we both learned how to “adapt”. Growing up the way that we did has really helped shape our marriage. That being said, our personalities are that of “the youngest” members of our nuclear family. I feel like this area is the reason that we sometimes clash. Our racial backgrounds, albeit are two completely different ones, somehow mirror each other. This gives us common ground.
I met my husband when I was eighteen and he was nineteen. For the first time in my teenage years I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend. I was finally comfortable being alone, in a good way. On Friday nights, I like to eat SpaghettiOs in my room with the door shut and movie on. I would go for walks with my earbuds in and iPod on shuffle. After years of dealing with abandonment issues and a constant case of FOMO, I became confident in my independence. I feel like I got the time to heal from living in hostile environment. He had gone through some adversities as well prior to meeting me and I believe we got to mend before we found each other.
I met him, he shook my hand which I wasn’t used to. I didn’t know that was a thing outside of greeting elders and job interviews. Now here we are, married, a home, three kids, and two dogs. We’ve had our ups and our downs. We’ve seen each other at our worst and at our best. The thing is, we’ve left the worst of us behind and we are constantly striving to be better. We do our best and when one of us falls short, the other one picks up the slack. We are both hardworking. We both like to be productive and have high standards. Sometimes that adds stress so we not only have to balance our marriage, we have to balance our personal needs first.
This might sound like stating the obvious but we were individuals before we were a couple. He’s a hunter and hunts coyotes to keep the population down. I was raised to respect coyotes because animals have been apart of the earth before humans were. Coyote is a messenger and guide in my culture. Doug grew up in a culture where they are a pest and deplete the elk and deer population. He grew up on one side of the conservation conversation and I grew up on the other. This is just one of the many differences that we face.
It’s difficult for me to understand certain things about him. His political views don’t always align with mine. I’m a woman and a minority and he is neither of those things. He is “named” which means that he is considered “Nakoda” but we live in a world where he is seen as white first by both Natives and non-Natives. He been targeted by Indigenous men and I’ve been viewed as the “token Indian” wife. I guess the level ground is that, neither of us knows what it’s like to walk in the others ones shoes. We’ve both had to remind each to be patient. We both need to give each other credit for our resilience. We both need to be honest with ourselves first.
I think that with any relationship, marriage, friendships, companionships, interracial, non-interracial, whatever it is, that we be honest with ourselves first. The rest will fall into place.