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The funny thing about being biracial is that you never really quite fit in anywhere. It took me a long time to come to terms with that - I didn't really start thinking about that seriously until I was 20 or 21 - and it still throws me for a loop. It’s not something you ever really get used to. It’s always just there.

My parents divorced when I was three and I spent the eleven subsequent years going back and forth between them every other week. They lived within fifteen minutes of each other in a white middle class suburb outside of Boston. My dad was one of the few blacks who actually lived in that town. I remember when I was little and I’d notice that my dad would often say hello or nod to other black people we'd pass by on our way to the post office or heading home from school. It occurred to me that maybe he didn't know the people he was acknowledging so I asked him about it one day when one of those moments occurred. "Daddy, who was that?" he laughed and said, "I don't know." "Why did you say 'hi' to him then?" I asked. My dad smiled, "well, there aren't that many of us around." I started making sure I said hi to black people I saw in the neighborhood and anywhere, really. I was a friendly little kid.

As I got older, little by little, I experienced more than just the divide between blacks and whites in my neighborhood (I have my sixth grade friend's stodgy father to thank for my first experience with racism - he never wanted me to come over to hang out with his daughter or give me a ride home when I did, god forbid I dirtied the inside of his BMW). All of my closest friends were white, and I always felt as though I wasn't "black enough" to be any closer to the few black friends I had. With the exception of the boy I went to see "Ghostbusters" with in fifth grade, the two and half year relationship I began with an older musician when I was sixteen, and a three-night stand three or four years ago, I’ve dated, or just fornicated with, mostly white men. Some people are attracted to what's unfamiliar. I guess I’m the opposite. Still, I’ve been with everyone from an ultra wasp (we're talking: sounds like James Spader, went to boarding school in England, and sails the family boat off of the north shore of Massachusetts), to a boy from a traditional Hungarian family, to a Japanese/Italian Johnny Depp look-alike.

I have to hand it to my parents, they took huge risks. They met in the mid-sixties, both teachers at the time. My dad was one of five brothers and sisters who'd grown up in a two-bedroom house in Croton-on-the-Hudson, New York and my mom was the eldest of two raised in an apartment on the upper west side of Manhattan. Her mother was a Jewish immigrant. Though my mother's parents were considered liberal and sent my mom to the famous school for ethical culture in New York, issues really surfaced when my mother got involved with a black man. It’s easier to accept people who are different as long as they don't cross family boundaries. To make matters worse in the eyes of both sets of my grandparents, my mother and father never married. They lived together for several years and had me in 1972. All sorts of lying and covering-up about the relationship, and about me, ensued by pretty much all members of the extended family. It was nothing short of a scandal that centered on interracial relations.

There was such a thing called anti-miscegenation laws which made it illegal for interracial couples to marry, or even coexist. The first anti-miscegenation law was passed in the late 1600's in Maryland. It was, in part, the backlash of so much inter-mixing between slaves and slave owners, and the rape of women slaves by white men, and an ever-increasing fear of black men getting too close to white women, perhaps the greatest taboo. In 1896, the Plessy vs. Ferguson act established the "one drop rule" which meant that if you had any color in your family history, you were legally black and therefore subject to such legal prejudices as the anti-miscegenation, and later jim crow laws that, along with the little rock nine helped spawn the civil rights movement. As late as 1967, anti-miscegenation laws were ruled unconstitutional by the u.s. supreme court. But in the 1970s, several states, mostly in the south, still had those laws in place. Though unenforceable as a law, even Alabama didn't overturn it until 1999.

This is all of particular importance to me, of course, as a child of a mixed marriage and in light of the strange fact that technically every relationship I’m in is an interracial one. It also affects same sex relationships, one of the reasons why Alabama and other states were hard pressed to let go of those laws. Though I would never want to be anything else, coming to terms with being neither one, nor the other is a lifelong process. In my writing class last year, there was a woman with a similar background as mine but she was even lighter skinned than me. When she told me she was biracial, I was shocked. Sometimes I think I’m supposed to have a special kind of radar, but the lines have been much too blurred for that.

I, myself, can actually "pass" as white if I so choose and no one is the wiser - especially me. In fact, passing is seldom my choice. When I was little people knew there was something different about me, because there seemingly weren't many me's around. Now, I never know how people perceive me. They often think I’m white or Italian or Puerto Rican. The other day, I was picking up a pizza at the place around the corner from my apartment and the guy behind the counter insisted I was from Morocco, his homeland.

I love my neighborhood because there are so many interracial couples around. A lot of them walk with strollers and beautiful multiracial babies in them. Kind of like my dad, I always want to acknowledge them and be acknowledged by them. At the risk of looking like a stalker, I always want to make eye contact with those couples, to have them see me smiling knowingly at them and their child, to have them make that connection, and hope that they don't take me for white. It’s like a club that I have the need to assert my membership in.