Differences

Between the Roots has me thinking a lot about differences. For the longest time, I barely knew my daughter. Whenever we talked, I was more like a friend than her father. Her mother would not let my daughters talk to me, so I missed years of the everyday things a father is supposed to know. I heard about her friends and little pieces of her life, but there was always so much I did not know. Over the years I had asked if she had a boyfriend, and every time she changed the subject. Eventually I stopped knowing what to think. Maybe she liked boys. Maybe she liked girls. Maybe she just did not want to tell me. Then one day she sent me a picture of herself standing beside a man. I asked who he was. “My boyfriend.” The first thing I noticed was that he was not white. I would like to say that meant nothing to me. I would like to say that I saw a person and nothing else. But that would not be completely true. I have never thought of myself as racist. I do not hate people because of where they come from or the colour of their skin. But underneath that, I had to admit there were things I had heard about people from his culture. Things I had been taught. Stories and warnings repeated often enough that somewhere along the way they became little reservations sitting quietly in the back of my mind. And now one of those people was dating my daughter. My mind went straight to the things I had heard. Is he like that? I told a friend about him and showed him the picture. He leaned back and immediately brought up one of the same stereotypes I had heard before, that men from that culture abused their women. There it was again. Now it was not just something buried in my own head. Someone else said it out loud. And I was a father. Of course my mind went to my daughter's safety. But there was something else in that photograph. It was actually the second thing I noticed. She was smiling. That may not sound important, but with my daughter it was. She rarely smiled in pictures. She never smiled when we talked on FaceTime. My family had commented for years that she just did not seem to smile much. But in that picture she was smiling. A real smile. Not long after that I managed to get enough money together to fly out and see her. I had seen her the year before, but before that it had been almost twelve years. This trip was another chance to reconnect with my daughter, but now there was something else waiting for me too. I was going to meet the boyfriend. And her roommates. Three more men from the same culture. If I am being truthful, that added another layer to the worry already sitting in my head. My young daughter was living in a house with four men, and every old warning I had heard wanted to introduce itself before I had even met them. They picked me up at the airport. The boyfriend was small, quiet, and visibly terrified. Not terrifying. Terrified. He was a young man meeting his girlfriend's father for the first time, trying to survive the awkward questions fathers ask while probably wondering whether I liked him. The image I had carried onto that plane started falling apart almost immediately. Then I met the others. I watched them together. I saw the laughter. I saw how they talked. I saw how comfortable my daughter was around them. I saw the openness it took to welcome a stranger into their home because that stranger happened to be their friend's father trying to rebuild a relationship with his daughter. The culture I had been looking at started disappearing. The people became visible. And I kept seeing that smile. A couple of months later my daughter texted me to say she was heading to Banff. She lived in Winnipeg, and by the time she told me they had already passed Regina. There was no chance I was going to make it there to see them. But Banff in the middle of summer is ridiculously expensive, so I gave her my dad's phone number. He lived only about an hour and a half farther away, and I figured maybe they could stay there and save themselves the cost of accommodation. A couple days later my dad called me. “You're not going to believe who showed up at my house.” I laughed and told him I knew she was going to Banff and that I had given her his number. Then he told me about meeting them. His reaction sounded painfully familiar. At first he had been concerned that his granddaughter was travelling with four men. Then he saw all four of them pile out of the car and became even more concerned. I knew exactly where his mind had gone because mine had gone there too. But then they sat down. They talked. They spent the night in a tent and were gone before he got up the next morning. And when my dad talked about them afterward, the concern was gone. He told me her boyfriend was a really great guy. Then he corrected himself. They all were. But that was not the part of the phone call that stayed with me. He told me that when my daughter saw him, she walked straight up to him with a huge smile and hugged him. It almost brought him to tears. In twenty-two years, she had never hugged him first. And there was that smile again. At first I thought the difference in that photograph was the colour of someone's skin. Then I thought the difference was culture. Then I worried about the differences between how I had been raised and how these men had been raised. But by the end, the biggest difference I could see was my daughter. She was smiling. She was laughing. She was opening herself back up to family. I had spent so much time worrying about whether these men were dangerous because of things I had heard about people like them that I almost missed what was sitting right in front of me. They were not a culture. They were people. And the man I had worried about before I ever met him had become someone who helped bring out a side of my daughter that I had rarely seen. That does not mean culture does not matter. It does not mean every concern is foolish or that bad people do not exist in every part of the world. It means a person should have the chance to be a person before I decide who they are. Sometimes the beliefs we carry are not loud enough for us to recognize them as prejudice. They hide inside things we were taught, things we heard, jokes people made, warnings passed down, and stories repeated so often that we stop asking whether they belong to the person standing in front of us. I did not think I was judging him. But I had already asked whether he was “like that” before I even knew his name. Meeting him changed that. Meeting all of them changed that. But maybe the first crack in everything I thought I knew had already happened before I ever stepped onto the plane. It was sitting right there in the photograph. A smile. Between the Roots, I am learning that sometimes the first difference I notice is not the difference that matters.