Your mom just showed me a video of a black teenager beating up a white teenager while I was washing the parts of my pump. I said "that's terrible". She then said maybe she should move back to Taiwan and left the house to go to Walmart.
I received this text from my wife while at work. Wife is working from home. We are both healthcare workers and were fortunate enough to still have our jobs. Both of us were transitioned to telehealth for our work. I do telehealth at the office and my wife was allowed to do telehealth from home after her maternity leave ended. Our son is 5 months old in June. My mom had moved in with us last year after she retired, after learning that my wife was pregnant with our first child. She had been spoiling us with her homemade cooking and practically nursed my wife to 100% from the birth of our son.
Our son was born in January, 2020. What a year he was born in - the death of Kobe Bryant, Coronavirus pandemic, and now this - the largest Black Lives Matter movement the world has ever seen. We were saddened by Kobe's passing. We were worried, afraid, and angry during the pandemic. However we were getting through it together as a family - all of us: me, my wife, our son, and my mother. But now, the thing that is threatening to tear our family apart, is the violence that came with the protests.
The BLM movement is multifaceted. It is is both political and racial - the two things that my family is extremely new to in terms of integrating two extremes. My marriage to my wife is an integration of black and Chinese. My wife is black - she is half African American and half Nigerian American. I am Chinese - born in Taiwan. I was the first of my mother's children to marry outside of our race. My father in law had asked me repeated when I asked him about marrying his daughter "Are you sure? You have to be sure!" To which I had said calmly "I am sure!"
I grew up in a conservative family. My father is a clergyman - a Christian pastor by trade. My mother's father was a Christian pastor. My mother's third brother is a Christian pastor. I grew up in the church, and had considered myself a Republican even before obtaining Naturalized Citizenship in the United States. After going to college, my political affiliation changed. I did not vote for Obama when he ran for President since I was not registered to vote in time, since it was very shortly after I obtained my Citizenship. However, since I was against the war in Iraq, I sided with Obama instead of McCain.
You can see where this is going. My mother is a conservative Republican, deeply anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion. My wife is deeply Democrat, pro-LGBTQ due to her trade as a mental health professional. They had agreed to disagree for as long as we had been married. However, the protests had lit a fuse, and the two of the people I love the most are on the opposite sides of a historic movement.
For as long as I could remember, my mom had emphasized the importance of eating dinner together as a family. This is the first time she had refused to have dinner with us, even though she still cooks dinner for us. This breaks my heart, and with the little faith that I have, I had returned to prayers for God to reunite my family, and to protect my family from conflict and brokenness.
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