“Too ______.” “Not _______ enough.”

My professor was late to my first class of History of Cuba today. I sat watching the sky outside slowly turning gray and internally high fived myself for bringing an umbrella. It was cold in the classroom. I sat on one foot. The classroom slowly filled up, everyone spreading around so as to not sit next to someone else. Some random girl in jeans sat next to me.

“I like your glasses,” she said. “They’re very different.”

“Thank you.” I smiled politely as this tended to happen on the first day of the semester a lot. She spoke after a minute.

“So are you a history major?” she asked.

“No, this class just fits nicely into my schedule and goes towards my second major,” I replied. “Plus, I’m Cuban so it’d be interesting to know more about my heritage.”

“No way, you’re Cuban?” She looked shocked.

“Uh, yeah, definitely am.”

“You just don’t seem that Cuban. I mean, you seem too white to be Cuban.”

“Well, I am.”

Too white. I’ve heard it before as people question the fair skin and generally on the European side features I inherited from European grandparents and great-grandparents. In my private high school, it was said with pleasure and respect by a lot of my white classmates: “You don’t seem that Hispanic at all!”. By other Hispanic people, I’m often seen as betraying my ethnicity by not neatly fitting into a stereotypical role as Latina. I grew up in a fairly affluent, mostly white suburb. You may be surprised to learn that I speak and write fluent Spanish, know much about my cultural background, and make one of the meanest plates of ropa vieja around. I do not really listen to Latin music or wear big hoop earrings or do any of the things that many people see as markers for “Hispanic” but I am Hispanic.

To you, girl who sat next to me in class as well as you the reader, I say this: as long as you continue to classify and judge people based on your knowledge of stereotypes instead of actually getting to know a fully formed, unique individual who is made up of any number of backgrounds, you will be ignorant and you will miss out on understanding just how complex and beautiful people are. To assume that there is one common Hispanic or Black or Asian or Christian or Muslim or LGBTQ or female or even, yes, White experience or identity, is to put people in a box before you even know them. There is no right or wrong when it comes to identity, you cannot be “too black” or “not Asian enough” or “too boyish”, you are what you are, that’s it. I’m sick of hearing that I’m too white, that Obama isn’t black enough, that lesbians would be more accepted if they all fit into some feminine stereotype, that all Muslims are terrorists. That’s fucking enough. Everyone’s life experience and identity are valid and while communities share aspects, every single person has their own story, their own face that the world sees; you can’t just lump everyone together and expect to understand who a person really is.

I am a part Jewish Catholic Cuban Spanish (along with other things!) cisgendered woman who grew up in the suburbs. Pa que sepa.

Morning Sickness Becomes Electra

I was an accident.

I don’t mean that in a really dramatic, “I wasn’t wanted!” Lifetime movie way but in all seriousness, I was an accident. My mom confirmed this after my parents got divorced when I asked her once while she was drunk.

“So you just told me you had wanted to divorce Daddy since early in your marriage. Why did you have me then?” I said to her as her glazed-over eyes swirled.

“Well, you weren’t planned. I wanted you, I wanted a baby but I was all set to leave,” she slurred. “It just never worked with your father, we weren’t a good match.”

She then tried to tell me about her apparently nonexistent sex life with my father but I stopped her before my therapy bill became astronomically high.

What happened was that my parents were married for about four years during which things just weren’t really working out. As they were about to hit their fourth wedding anniversary in early 1986, they decided to go on a final trip to see if they could work out their problems. They went to North Carolina and stayed in a bed and breakfast in the Blue Ridge Mountains; unlike me and my dad, my mother is not one to rough it. After a long weekend which apparently involved some kind of sex or at the very least, some sperm got inside my mom somehow, they left for Florida, having come to the resolution that they weren’t meant for each other and that they were going to get a divorce.

My mom started packing up some things and she told my grandparents about the end of her marriage which pissed them off to no end. They were traditional and at that time, much less open minded than they have since become. Regardless of their reaction, she continued going about her business of getting divorced. After a few weeks, she went to go see the lawyer she had hired to handle her side of the divorce. While going over paperwork relating to assets, my mom gets the urge to vomit and ducks into a nearby wastebasket. The lawyer looked at her curiously.

“I bet you’re pregnant.” The lawyer smirked while looking nauseated at the vomit in her formerly paper-only trashcan.

“That’s ridiculous, you have to have sex to get pregnant,” my mom replied, quoting what sounds like every romantic comedy about a pregnant woman ever.

“I’m just saying, make sure.”

“It’s probably something I ate.”

Leaving calmly, she freaked out as soon as she got home and made a doctor’s appointment for the next day. She was indeed pregnant. She told my grandmother and said that she wanted to continue with the divorce, that she wanted to raise me alone. My grandmother did not react well to this bit of information and threatened to not be involved in her life if she didn’t give this mystery baby a proper home. Head hanging, my mom went home to tell my dad, who had been sleeping in his den, that she was pregnant.

My dad who was older at this time, almost forty, was over the moon that he was going to be a father. They decided that the universe had taken the decision of ending their marriage out of their hands and so it was. My mom had an uneventful pregnancy with me where she drank a whole gallon of milk per day and got really, really fat and a few months later, I arrived late and healthy with a tiny baby fauxhawk.

My parents remained married for 15 years after I was born. 15 years. They really made a go of it and even though I knew since I was little that they didn’t love each other how my grandparents did or how people did in movies, they cared for each other greatly. They never fought or had disagreements in front of me and until my mom told me one day after school during my freshman year of high school that they were getting divorced, I would have thought that they would just stay content to be sort of in like with each other for the rest of their lives.

It’s weird how things work out. I was my mom’s first and only successful pregnancy. She miscarried something like, five times after I was born, and some late in the pregnancy. I remember her being pregnant when I was little and then nothing. Every Christmas, I would ask for a little brother or sister (to rule over, naturally) and I would always begin to think I was getting my wish sometime in August but then nothing; I just thought I was being punished by Santa for never picking up my toys or something. All the pregnancies that they tried for were literally fruitless and yet, this one random instance of fornication in the mountains produced me, springing from the womb fully formed, personality intact. It’s strange.

I’m glad they stayed married. I used to feel guilty that they stayed together for me, unfulfilled in many ways, but now I can see that we had some good times together. Despite their issues as a couple, we were, we are a family. My dad’s remarried now to an awesome lady and my parents are friends; we all hang out together and it’s the most natural thing in the world. I don’t know if this is common, my experience is perhaps unique. I just had a good time growing up as their tiny sidekick.

I don’t know if I believe that everything happens for a reason but I do to some extent. Things seem to click in place like puzzle pieces at times. I came to be as a bunch of cells in the place where I feel most at peace and I was christened with a name that has seemed to guide my fate in life in certain directions. I grew under the tutelage of two very different but cohesive people who have helped shape my views and opinions and tastes but have left me room to seek knowledge and experiences on my own. It doesn’t really matter how you came to be though, planned with the help of doctors or entirely accidental in a serendipitous way. You will be the product of many things and how you came to exist at this exact moment matters little in the long run. If you weren’t wanted, not even by your parents, someone will want you and at the very least, the universe wanted you and here you are.

I am my mother’s stubborn and passionate dark eyed fire and my father’s wry, wandering dreamer’s heart, filled with the haze and poetry of the mountains. I exist.