Saturday Spotlight on Multiracial Families: Balancing Jane

I can't express how much I am enjoying reading about each family that has volunteered to be in the Spotlight and how excited I am to introduce their stories. Folks, please meet Michelle of Balancing Jane and her beautiful family! When you are done reading today's Spotlight, check out Michelle's blog, where she writes intelligently on a wonderful mix of topics from parenting to Kanye and Jay-Z's latest video.


Jane, tell us a little bit about your family. What makes you a multiracial family? Where do you live?

My family consists of me, my husband, our 18-month-old daughter, two cats, and two dogs. I am a white, my husband is black, and our daughter is biracial. We live in a mid-sized urban area in the Midwest. 

What does your family enjoy doing for fun or to spend time together?

We’re talkers. My husband and I have always loved debating current events, fictional situations, and philosophical quandaries. Though our daughter only knows a handful of words, I can already tell that she’s ready to join in on our debates!  A lot of our family outings are pretty low-key. We live in an area with a lot of free parks and museums, so we enjoy walking around and experiencing the culture of our city. My husband and I both work, so our weekends are really cherished time. On a typical weekend, we’ll walk to our favorite local café for breakfast (and the best cupcakes I’ve ever eaten), go to the zoo or the park, or visit with friends and family. We’re also fans of live music, and our daughter loves to dance!

How did you and your husband meet?

We lived across the hall from each other in our freshman year honor dorms as undergraduates. On the weekends, most of our friends went back home and we spent a lot of time in a nearly-empty dorm. We spent a lot of those days talking and getting to know one another, and that led pretty quickly into a relationship that’s been going for about nine years now. 

How did your family and friends respond to your interracial relationship?

It was definitely an issue for parts of my family. My parents were divorced, and I was raised mostly by my mom. When I told her I was dating my husband, she was quiet and said that she trusted my judgment but that she worried about “what other people will say.” I learned the hard way that those “other people” she had in mind were primarily her own brothers. I have two uncles that still won’t talk to me because I’ve chosen to be with my husband. The very first time I brought my husband (then-boyfriend) home for Christmas, one of my uncles literally marched his entire family (wife, daughter, son, grandchildren) out of the building and refused to eat dinner with us in the room. I was eighteen and incredibly headstrong but also very, very hurt. I wrote him a letter that included a phrase like “history and humanity are on my side, and one day your grandchildren will be ashamed of you.” It may have been melodramatic, but I meant it. Mostly I was just shocked that the message of “everyone is equal” I’d heard my whole life was apparently lip service. 

As for my husband’s family, I never felt anything but welcomed. I think that he initially got teased for running off to college and coming home with a “white girl,” but they were always warm and loving to me. The very first time I met his family, it was his father’s birthday party, so his extended family had all gathered at a restaurant. I was the only white person in the room, and I could tell that some people were a little confused as to who I was and what I was doing there, but no one was unwelcoming. Then his grandmother, who was in her eighties, came up to me to give me a hug. After she hugged me, she stepped back with her hands on my shoulders, looking at me at arm’s length and smiled, shaking her head. “Well, honey, I sure am glad to see you, but you sure are a surprise,” she said. That was the reaction I got from an eighty-year-old black woman—someone born in the 1920’s, and yet my own uncles, who were born at the start of the Civil Rights Movement, couldn’t manage to stay in the room.

It’s fine, though. I mean, it’s not fine that there are still people who react with such strong racism, but it’s fine in my personal life because we don’t need people like that around us. I believe people can change, and I don’t hold hate in my heart, but I’m not going to intentionally put my family—especially my daughter—in spaces where people like that can judge her and harm her, so we stay close to the family who accept us, and we stay far from the ones who don’t.

What do you and your partner do to keep your relationship strong?

We talk. We laugh. We do crossword puzzles together and play Sporcle. We are bluntly honest with one another and aren’t afraid to disagree. We talk about the future, and we value the present. We’ve shared a lot of experiences in our time as a couple: his mom dying, my dad dying, buying a house, me going to grad school, him going to law school, us starting careers, having a child—and those are just the big things. We have grown in ways that wouldn’t have been possible without the love and support we share as a couple, and that growth gives us a lot of footholds for a strong relationship.

What do you and your partner disagree or argue about most?

Housecleaning. We’re both pretty terrible at it, and no matter how much we will it, it doesn’t seem to be willing to clean itself.

What is the most fabulous thing about your little girl?

I love everything about my kid, even the parts that drive me crazy. I love that she sings along to songs and dances to jazz. I love that she knows the word “velociraptor” to be a verb (it means to attack someone with little clawed hands, obviously). I love that she is fearless and climbs playground equipment as if she were years older than she is. I love that she has changed my perspective on the world around me because I get to see it anew through her eyes. I love watching her grow and become a complex person who I’m sure will continue to surprise and delight me.

What is your philosophy on "how to raise a multiracial child"?
I want to say that race doesn’t matter in my parenting, and in many ways, it doesn’t. But I am not “color blind.” I know very well that we live in a world filled with inequities, and my child will be double bound by some of these as a woman of color. In the most practical ways, this impacts my parenting by bringing those issues to the forefront (though I think that these are issues all parents should be discussing). I plan to talk candidly to my child about race and the way that it impacts the world, but I also plan to teach her that she has the right to frame her own identity. I think it is very important that she get the space to explore what her race means to her, and that is not entirely determined by the lessons her father and I teach her. I aim to make her a critical consumer of the messages she gets from the media and her peers so that she can make decisions about what to believe and how to use it.

Also, raising a child of color has factored into our decisions about education and where to live. It is important to me that she grows up around racial diversity. This is proving to be something of a challenge, as we live in an area that—while diverse on paper—has a lot of very segregated realities, especially when it comes to neighborhoods and schools.

What does your daughter do that makes you smile? 

Every single time we are in the car for longer than ten minutes, she takes off her shoes and socks, so when I come around the back door to get her out, she’s waving her bare feet around and grinning. It is adorable.

Have you had any difficult or negative experiences related to being a multiracial family? If you 

have, please tell about it.

When I am out with my daughter alone, I get comments about her racial background. These range from a woman in the grocery store who said, “What’s she mixed with?” to the doctor who asked me—in the middle of my daughter’s check-up where I just told him I was breastfeeding—“So,is she adopted, or what’s up with that?” I think people stare at us sometimes, especially when we’re in the suburbs. For the most part, though, there aren’t that many negative experiences. 

How have you changed or what have you learned as a result of being part of a multiracial family?

I grew up in a very small town with virtually no racial diversity, but I had always been told people were equal and I believed it. Still, I came face-to-face with my own privilege in college. I don’t necessarily credit being in an interracial relationship with that change; I think it mostly came from being in a more diverse environment and getting challenged through texts and classes, but my husband and I have been together since our freshman year, so he was always there to discuss these lessons as I learned them. I became much more aware of racial inequalities and much more motivated to try to make a difference. This informed the research that I do as a graduate student and the work that I do as a professional. Again, I can’t say that this is all because of being in an interracial relationship, but that relationship has been a big part of who I am and how I’ve grown into that person, so it’s not something I can separate from that growth. 

Stay tuned for our next Saturday Spotlight on Multiracial Families on July 14!

If your family is interested in participating in a future Spotlight, I'd love to hear from you! Please email me at musingmomma(at)gmail(dot)com. For more information about the Spotlight, click here. 

Spotlight photo by Fernando de Sousa via Creative Commons - some rights reserved.