I think Ian forgets sometimes that we grew up in completely different worlds. In his world your parents were married to each other and your siblings were a matched set, but in mine, your parents might have not even known each other’s names, and you might have three brothers and sisters with different fathers. He grew up in suburbia and I, quite frankly, did not.

Intellectually he knows that Nika and I have different mothers, but that tends to slip his mind. My mother was white, hers was not. My mother left when I was a toddler, hers stayed until drug addiction won out. We both have that ugly scar of having mothers that left, but we had different experiences growing up, even in the same neighborhood. I was uncomfortable enough that I left the first chance I had, and I think she took that as a betrayal. She fit in where I did not and it was hard for her to understand that everyone we knew looked at me and saw my mother. Someone who thought she was too good to live in the neighborhood (my father thinks it wasn’t that, really, but people will decide what they decide, and the people around us decided she thought she was too good for us.) It never helped that I look more Hispanic than biracial, and in that particular neighborhood, that was borderline dangerous.

All of Nika’s anger aimed at anyone white was a product of environment, not of how we were raised. My father was stuck where he was at, but to him people were always just people, and when he I told him I was marrying Ian his only reaction was “that boy better treat you right.” I never heard anything remotely close to disappointment that I wasn’t just marrying a white boy, but one that was so white he damn near glowed in the dark.

Nika was only 16 and already angry and confused as it was. I’d left her behind when she was barely eleven years old, and somehow in her head I left because I was going to be with white people. I left for the money white people had, I left because I wanted to be with people like my mother, I left because I wanted to be white, and marrying Ian sealed the idea in her head. My friends were white (in her head), my husband was white, my life was white, and obviously I didn’t think “my people” were good enough. When my dad decided to move here, she took that as another betrayal. I don’t blame her for it because I can understand how it felt to her. She was headed for college (which was amazing to say the least) and he was supposed to stay home, and keep it as home.

He didn’t have any reason to stay. She left for school, as temporary as that turned out, and the rest of the family he was staying there for either moved on or wound up in jail. But as she saw it, he was being sucked into her big sister’s world of white. Her world had been in a gang controlled neighborhood, and where she heard her big sister called “whitey” every day, and to her that became something to fear, and something to hate. I understood why she was upset when I married Ian, even if he didn’t.

His mental blocks sometimes amuse me. His specialty in psychology is cultural ideologies and differences, but when he’s a part of it, he doesn’t always see it. Nika never hated him, but she hated what he represented to her. When she started wandering the country it didn’t have anything to do with thinking he was The Man, it had more to do with figuring out her place in the world. After all, when your mother abandons you because the drugs are easier and more appealing, what does that say about you? How little are you worth to lose out to a crack pipe?

The last time we saw her she had already started to soften towards him, probably because of her nephews and niece, but she still hadn’t found who she was outside of the neighborhood. She didn’t want to go back there for obvious reasons, and because she believed our dad when he told her she was better than anything she would ever amount to living there, but she just didn’t know who she was. Our dad could have held her in place and made her stay with him here, but he was smart enough to let her go. I know it hurt him, especially when so many years went by not knowing where she was.

Six months after the last time we saw her she got involved with a missionary church. She says she’d been afraid it was a cult, but they were going to Peru, so she didn’t care because she was going to get to see the real world, not something “artificial” created by a bunch of rich white men. The missionary work turned out to be real, and it was hard, and as she moved from Peru to Brazil, then to Haiti, and then to Africa, she realized the “real” world was not a pretty place.

Now she’s back and plans on staying put while she goes back to school, and she brought Peter with her. He almost glows in the dark. ;) He was born in Johannesburg, but has lived in the US off and on most of his life and was naturalized in his twenties. This tickles my dad, because Peter is now the whitest African American he’s ever met (don’t ever call my dad an African American, he’ll get very annoyed and point out that he’s never even been to Africa.) Peter is friendly and funny, but most important, he wasn’t afraid of my dad at first sight, which tends to happen a lot.

I missed Nika while she was gone, and I was angry about it when I stopped to think about how long it had been since we’d heard from her, but it’s hard to stay mad after seeing how much she’s grown and how wonderful a person she is. I want to feel selfish and just be happy that I have my sister back, but I think what might be more important is that my dad has his baby back, and I don’t think he thought he would ever see her again. I can’t imagine being that distant from my kids, I know it was killing him.

If any of my kids ever take off like that, I think I’ll let Ian hunt them down. Sometimes I wish I had let him look for Nika, but seeing her now I think it would have been a mistake. I'm just happy she's here.