My story

My husband Ken and I met at work at an insurance agency in the late 1980s.We were in our early 30s. Initially we were just colleagues and friends, accustomed to just joking around. Every now and then he would ask me to go out and he kept asking for about a year. Each time I would say, "No." Mostly, I just didn’t want to date a colleague. That could get messy.

But he kept asking me out and finally it was New Years Eve and I agreed to go out with him. But then I thought about it and stood him up because I knew that on that night you’re sort of obligated to kiss. I didn’t want to kiss on our first date.

That year, New Years Eve was on a Sunday and we both worked that evening since we didn’t have dates. I went to work still wearing my church clothes. Ken thought I had stood him up for an early evening date with somebody else. So he had an attitude. We straightened things out, though. And he confessed that he had liked me from the first time he saw me. I wore braces back then and he said he liked me because of my braces.

My mom called me at work that night to make sure I arrived safely. Ken happened to answer my telephone. He asked my mother to encourage me to go out with him When I took the phone, my mother said, “Kathy, he sounds like a nice guy. Why don’t you give him a chance?” Did she know he was white? I think she knew. But she didn’t say anything first off. She later told me that when I was a little girl, I was watching her put on makeup and I said, “Mom, what if I marry a white man?” She thought the question was odd at the time. But she said, “That’s all right baby, as long as you love him and he loves you.”

A few weeks later I finally went out with him. It was on a night when there was a blizzard. My mom thought I should cancel. Back then when I went out on dates, I would ask men to pick me up at my mother’s house because I didn’t want anybody to know where I lived until I got to know him. I told my mom that I couldn’t cancel because I had already stood him up once before. So I drove in the blizzard to his house because his car wasn’t working. I was so scared. I turned onto a winding road and nearly drove off into a ditch. I told myself that I couldn’t wait to get to this man. I knew I really liked him. I said as soon as I got there I was going to give him a big hug, and I did.

That was our first of many dates. Soon we started going out consistently and my sister called me. She said, “I hear you’re dating.” I said, “Yes.” She said, “Why didn’t you tell me he was white?” I said, “I wouldn’t have told you if he was black.”

There were evenings when he would cook and then bring food to work for me. I didn’t have a washing machine and dryer where I stayed and he would take my clothes to his home to do my laundry.

Over the course of our relationship, maybe there were a couple of times during which somebody looked at us or said something racist. Something like, “Look at that white man with that black lady.” Ken heard it. I didn’t. My head was always somewhere else.

When he wanted me to meet his friends, I was game. I'd been around many different types of people. He told his friends that he was dating a black girl. Now, there are certain types of black girls. They said, “Is she a black girl who talks white, a poser, a whitey black girl.” He said, “No, she is who she is.” They wanted a heads-up in terms of what to expect. When they met me, they loved me.

Walshbridegroom When I met his family, well, that wasn’t as smooth. I met his parents at his brother’s house at a barbecue. Everybody was there. His mother was surprised. She tried to be cordial. We dated for three years before moving in together. By then his mother was fine with me. In 1989 we went out to visit his parents in Las Vegas. We stayed at their home. He told his father, “Daddy, this is who I’m with and I love her.” After they both realized that it wasn’t a fluke, things were fine.

Sometimes men don’t know when it’s time to get married and you have to tell them. So one day I said, “Ken, we’ve been living together, so what are we going to do next?” He said, “You want to get married?” I said, "Well, yeah." He said, “OK, we’re going to one store, just one, to find a ring.” We got married June 13, 1992. We had our son in December of 1992. Our daughter was born three years later.

When they were young, they would say: "My mom is brown. My dad is pink. And, we are beige." They saw skin color as purely literal. At school, the kids would ask them, “What are you? Are you Mexican?” My son would say, “I’m half African American, 25 percent Irish, 12.5 percent Italian, and 12.5 percent German. But the children would say, “What?” And he would say, “My mom is black and my dad is white.”

Walshfamily People ask if I was concerned about what being in an interracial relationship would mean for our children. I tell them that the only thing I worried about regarding children was not being able to sleep because I couldn’t figure out how to stop the baby from crying.

My husband always says being in an interracial marriage is like any other marriage. But we’ll never know. We have our disagreements, our ups and downs. I do know that as I look back over the 16 years, at the life we’ve carved out for our family, I’m really happy that I drove through the blizzard that night so many years ago.

credit by Kathy and Ken Walsh
http://www.experienceproject.com/stories/Believe-In-Interracial-Marriage/382875