The Soothing Waters of Lake Minnetonka

or the warming waters of the Double Tree Guest Suites indoor heated pool and jacuzzi, whichever is closer and within your budget.

Last weekend I celebrated my nieces birthday. She just turned 13 which is huge to me. I'm a young aunt (24), so I remember when this little girl was born and I feel so old, but she really looks up to me.

Anyhow, I work at a hotel, and she wanted to have a pool party so I hooked them up with a couple of rooms at one of our affiliate branches. As we were going over the plans, I asked her who she invited. She named a girl I knew, another girl from school, and another friend.

"She's black." She said nonchalantly, and then continued with activities she wanted to do that night.

That might not seem like much, but let me give you some background on her side of the family. My brother is black and my SIL is white, and they began dating for various reasons, but one, I believe, was because my SIL knew it would upset her parents that she were dating a black man. They started in the 70's where it was free and easy like Sunday morning, and soon fell in love.

Now, my SIL knew that my brother's race would be an issue. In fact they had been living together for several months before telling anyone in her family. The problem with this is that when it did get revealed, my siblings had to act like it wasn't a big deal, and her family had to act like they accepted it. Over the years they've all grown to love each other. He treated her unbelievably well, and when he died in 2002 (cancer sucks), it literally tore my SIL and her family to shreds.

I have three of the most beautiful nieces and nephews in the world. They are little bad butts, and are way too grown, but I love them to bits and pieces. I would literally kill/die for them with little to no hesitation. My SIL, however, believes that she is the only one who can love like that, and rightly so, but also rightly wrong.

You see, when you're in love their is no one in the world that exists except you and that other person, but when you're in a commitment, you have to think of everyone else. When SIL had kids, she thought she would raise them her way, by her rules, involve only her family, etc. What she didn't have in mind was a defiant little sister (moi) who loved her big brother to death, and would fall head over heals for anything that he produced.

So the arguments began. I was never allowed to babysit, when she came to Lincoln (they live in Omaha, approx 1hr away) she would see her sister and not bring the kids over, she would never let us hold her, when the baby cried she had to be the one to attend to it, she would never discipline. It drove me utterly insane.

To be perfectly fair, part of the reasoning for my lack of involvement was my age. I am my father's youngest child, but I am my mother's only child. There is at least 20 years between me, and my youngest, older brother. They had always seen me as a baby, and even just now are seeing me as an adult. There is also an age gap of four years between my niece and my two nephews (who are a year apart).

Raising kids is hard, raising black kids is harder, and raising black kids that you refuse to see as black is probably hardest. Everything I did to instill some color into my niece was argued about. For her 3rd birthday I bought her a black girl doll with tight ringlets and my niece loved it, but my sister said she "lost" it (and yet none of the other dolls). When I bought books, I bought the ones with black girls on the cover. When I played music, I played black music, just anything I could to make sure she would grow up knowing who she was. It may seem a little extreme, but I figured with me on one side, and her mom on the other, it would be fine.

When my SIL just couldn't manage my nieces hair, but refused to get any help, and started straightening it, I got my niece black hair care magazines and did her hair whenever I was there. My SIL bought her Britney Spears (prewhore) albums so I bought her Destiny's Child (prewhores) albums. It was always this unspoken tug of war, and it got to the point where I just kind of gave up.

Then one day I was up for a family gathering. My niece was probably 8 or 9, and we were sitting outside in the grass on an unseasonably warm Feb day. She asked me what I would be doing the next day and I told her I was going to sing in a musical for Black History Month. She smiled and said, "Black History, that's me!"

You could not get the grin off of my face, even to this day.

What I realized is that as long as I'm there, as an influence, she will have access to any answers about the black side of her. She's so smart and so inquisitive. I thought that since she didn't outwardly express a lot of the personality quirks attributed to black people that maybe she wasn't open to experiencing that part of her culture. I was wrong. She was just trying to see where she fit in, which parts of her fit inside of different bubbles of her makeup, could she have some parts that overlapped?

The thing I love about it is that she knows that I care, without my saying anything about it. And I also love that she cares enough to tell me about her "progress" without analyzing it.

Her mom is getting better too. She's starting to trust me more with all of the kids. She's starting to realize that though one day the world might see these kids as biracial, they will never be seen as white, and that's okay. She's starting to ask me questions that really should have been asked 10 years ago, but better late than never I always say.

So that's why I was happy my niece informed me her black friend was coming. And I was happy when I started singing a different version of Happy Bithday she made it known that it was the black version. I was happy when her friends asked about different black artists, black writers, black dances, etc.

I'm mostly happy because for the most part black people are thought to be substandard. They are at the low end of the totem pole in even being acknowledged as a culture, and everything within said culture is said to be bad or negative. There are so many unfair stereotypes associated with being black in America so when anyone shows any type of appreciation for us, it warms my heart.