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3 days of 3 racist events, one by one, marching in like little ants.

Today is my divisional holiday party, and Josh’s class was having one too at the same time, so we traded the baby – meeting halfway at the train station. As Josh brought the baby to the train station, a woman approached him and asked, “Aw, what a cute baby. Is it a boy or a girl?”

“Thank you. He’s a boy.”

The woman continues. “Wow, they don’t let a lot of boys out – mostly girls, but not many boys!”

It took me a second to realize when Josh called me, with the Rage, that this woman thought Josh adopted Matthew. That it is impossible for a white man to be the father of an Asian baby.

Even if we adopted Matthew, in what fucking world is it remotely appropriate to say this? As if an adoptive father isn’t a father at all? And since we did not adopt Matthew, does this bitch even realize how much that one phrase hurt? No. I only wish it would make me remotely feel better if she went up to white babies and their parents and said the same sort of shit, but it wouldn’t.

I don’t exist. I am silenced. I am insignificant. I am minor. I don’t count. My experiences don’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.

If you would like to see an article that talks about how Americans view racism and how that very article indicates a racist institution, this is the article for you.

On its surface, it talks about a poll conducted for CNN about how serious a problem racial bias is in the United States. And then the article only discusses racial relations between whites and blacks. There are no mention of Asians. There are no mention of Hispanics except in relation to whites, i.e., “non-hispanic whites”. A highlight of this article says:

Only a few of either race say they are racially biased themselves.

Yes, because there are only two races. There are only two major ethic groups affected by racism in the United States, and the one other that is mentioned is in relation to the first! What about biracial people? What about everyone else in this fucking country, because all of us, not just the whites and the blacks, are affected when racism permeates things like the media?

The irony of this article would make me laugh if it didn’t really make me want to cry.

Everyone knows what happened five years ago today.

This is what you might not know what happened and why, despite the horror of today, I’ll always hold the memories of today in a special corner of my heart. I wrote about it a little bit last year, about how I drove down to New Haven to pick up a battered Josh, dusty from the remains of the World Trade Center, who had fled New York City after being awakened by a plane crashing into the building where he’d recently bought books for class. I remember him telling me that he thought it was a thunderstorm, so he’d jumped out of bed and unplugged everything, before he realized it was clear out. He lived three blocks away from the towers.

I, on the other hand, was safe in my suburb in Connecticut, worried like hell about Josh, who’d just the weekend before spent the weekend with me.

Today, the world stops momentarily to remember the deceased on September 11th. On the internet are stories upon stories of people who died, people who lived, people who have disappeared since that fateful day in 2001. How dare we only stop on September 11th, I want to shout out. Every time I look at Josh and see Matthew, who wasn’t even a glimmer in our eyes back in 2001, I think of how fucking close I was to not having the life I have before me right now. My life would be so different right now, if Josh hadn’t fled New York, and fled into my life for good.

He once asked me when I knew I loved him. It was on the evening of September 11th, as we lay in bed really late that night, after having eaten a crappy Domino’s pizza – the only delivery place in my suburb delivering that evening. The lights were out and we lay there, he in my arms. I don’t remember exactly what he said to me, but his voice was quiet and he told me about his day. I knew right then that I loved him, and that I’d always love him.

So today, I haven’t turned the television on (which, frankly, is less grand sounding than it ought to – we usually only watch the television in order to watch DVDs). I clicked on cnn.com but left. I haven’t focused on the losses on September 11th, because I am one of the lucky ones. I gained a family that day.

I’ll never, ever forget everything else that’s happened on that date, because I have a son, a son who wasn’t alive but needs to know what happened. One day when he’s older, he’ll learn in school about the events of September 11th and he’ll come home and sit on his father’s lap and ask him, “Where were you on September 11th, 2001?” and he’ll need to be ready to hear that story. And then I’ll take him onto my lap and tell him mine.