Assignment 22- Mary Huffman- My Pale Mask

It’s natural to struggle through self-discovery during adolescence. I’m certainly not unique in that experience. Where my individuality lies is in my years-long struggle to identify with a culture that I can proudly claim as my own. On the outside, I look like your average Caucasian teenage girl: I have the most commonly brown straight hair, rather pale complexion, freckles, and green eyes. My brother, on the other hand, has darker hair, deep brown eyes, and a year-round tan. And I feel like a fraud. My grandmother on my dad’s side, Granny, immigrated from Puerto Rico to New York when she was a child. Dad looks the part too, except he got my Granddad’s blue eyes. I never got to know Granddad; he died before I learned to talk, but I’m told we have similar personalities, that I’d be his favorite if he were still alive. 

I often get mistaken for my mom and I’ve learned to respond to her name as well as my own. I look at her and I know where my physical characteristics come from, but that’s as far as I can trace any resemblance. She was adopted as a baby into a Catholic Sicilian family that lived on the outskirts of New Orleans. I know a lot about her adoptive family of oyster fisherman who became lawyers after a few generations. It’s really fascinating, but sometimes my family’s history doesn’t feel like it’s mine. My biological great-grandparents, G.G. (for great-grandmother) Ivy and G.G (great-grandfather). Bob, met in England during World War II. G.G. Bob took his English bride to swampland, Louisiana with their young child, a woman I’ve only known as Carol. My biological grandmother gave birth when she was much too young to care for a child, let alone two- I’ve met my mom’s little brother once or twice- so both babies were given to Catholic Charities. My mom’s biological father won five Emmy's for a documentary he created, he won several other awards for his writing, he authored a handful of books, and he taught writing to students of all ages. I blame him for my interest in writing, for my verbose blog posts. But I only know him from his Wikipedia page. The one that describes his illustrious career. And his other family. And his death from a genetic heart condition.

Throughout my life, I’ve quietly identified as Puerto Rican, English, a little Creole, a little  Sicilian, Catholic. I’ve struggled behind a mask of whiteness to be anything but. I’m not oppressed, nor would I ever claim to be, but in a way, I am suppressed. I don’t express my full cultural identity. It might be partly because I don’t want to pledge loyalty to just one element of my DNA. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to make my mom uncomfortable. I think I’m much more interested in her personal history than she is. But through all this, I’ve learned you choose who is truly family to you and that the love of a family, whatever form it may take, is so vital that it must not be neglected. Physical resemblance and shared histories shouldn’t matter. I know I need to honor and embrace the cultures that I’m surrounded by, but I won’t become a white person who tries to be a person of color. I’m struggling to find myself, as are most of my peers, but I am not only my history- I’m my own present and future, too.