You Can Miss Me With That One!

http://www.thegrio.com/opinion/do-black-men-feel-guilty-about-dating-white-women.php#comments

I gave birth to one child, a son, but I have thousands of daughters. You are Black and White, Jewish and Muslim, Asian, Spanish-speaking, Native American and Aleut. You are fat and thin and pretty and plain, gay and straight, educated and unlettered, and I am speaking to you all. Here is my offering to you…Maya Angelou (an excerpt from her book Letter To My Daughter).

If a person’s perspective IS reality, then here’s mine:
I couldn’t care less about what ANY woman (or man) thinks about my marriage, my family, my life. Whether it be a random woman off the street, in my church, or even at Walmart. Whether or not they approve of MY life concerns me NONE.
I AM a positive conversation, image, role model, and story about interracial relationships. I AM NOT vanilla arm candy or a porcelain-skinned goddess…just a woman who loves this man with all my heart, soul, and body. I am his wife and he is my husband and we have weathered this storm for eighteen years.
My husband IS an amazing partner, father, provider, and role model for the hundreds of boys he has coached over the years. He IS NOT a professional athlete, politician, etc, with a trophy on his arm…He drives a truck all day and works hard on the dock because he loves his family. He doesn’t hide from the eyes of black women in Walmart nor does he walk twenty strides ahead of me…I don’t follow him around, I walk with him – side by side, hand in hand.

I DO NOT accept the description of my marriage as a “social ill”…to be lumped into the same category as addiction and prison…PLEASE! You can miss me with that one. I didn’t take my husband from anyone, we simply met and fell in love. Besides, what would make any woman believe he “belonged” to her simply because his complexion is as hers?
We work hard, we love hard, we raise our children to be comfortable in their skin, they are aware of who they are. We pay a mortgage, a car note, and a ton of other bills. We go to our kids sporting events, and offer them incentives to bring home straight A’s. We all curl up on the couch for movie night in the family (yes, FAMILY) room, and pop popcorn for such an event. We rejoice when one of us succeeds and our hearts break when one of us are hurt…
I’m sorry, did I miss the description of this kind of interracial relationship while being SO enlightened by this author’s perception, uh, I mean reality?

I, we, owe no apologies to another human being for the choice we made to have a life together. There is no guilt from either of us…we didn’t abandon our own – we are our own.