something I really liked about my daughter

As a teenager, she never told me the race or ethnicity of people in her life that I tended to not meet. Then something would happen, I would meet them and find out a gal pal of hers was Asian, a guy she was seeing was Middle Eastern. She didn't want me meeting anyone but it could not always be avoided.

One time when she did tell me a guy's race:  she was waiting for the walk light at a lighted interssection downtown. A much older African American male hit on her, asking her to go out with him. She was always an amazingly confident flirt. I have never flirted. I was in humble amazement at how effortlessly she did it, although I also saw how it could be risky. If the wrong guy thinks her casual, fun, flirting at age fourteen was a serious signal of interest, she could get in trouble. For the most part, she was just well-skilled at flirting, keeping a light tone that few men interpreted as serious flirting.

When this particular black guy hit her on the street, she said, she didn't speak initially. She just waved him off. The guy became a bit abusive, haranguing her for being racist, for not dating black men. She figured he was in his mid-to-late twenties. She was fourteen or fifteen, but, as a former acquaintance remarked when he saw a photo of her at fourteen, she had a 'nice bod'. She danced 30 hours a week and was voluptuous. Even skinny, she had full breasts, curvey hips. Voluptuous.  Hot.

When this man kept haranguing her and her, she thought, polite waving him off didn't get him to desist, she said "I'm fourteen." He moved on.

I think it was when she told me the story of the aforementioned black guy hitting on her on Hennepin Avenue outside her dance company, she told me that I should expect her to marry a black man. "They are more attractive than white men," she said.  I was proud that she said it and I kept my thoughts to myself, although neither of us were very successful at hiding are real thoughts from one another. We knew one another well enough to know what the other thought, whether they said it aloud or not. My real thought was that she might find black guys hotter but she cared too much about fitting in and her ideas of what constituted status to marry one. I think she knew it would not have upset me if she had chosen a nonwhite spouse or either gender, although she has made it clear she doesn't give one good goddamn what I think about her at all. Still, it looks like she is dating a wealthy white young man in construction engineer, a field related to her work in real estate development. She always has attracted wealthy lovers, even when she dabbled with chicks.  I wonder if she still sometimes has chick lovers. And I bet it would irritate her that I use the word chick as I am. This is how I talk and I get to be me. One thing about being free of any need to please my daughter, I am free to be me, free to slake off any whisper of opprobrium. She has made it clear:  she disapproves of me so much that she has concocted a fantasy that I am, as she put it last February, "severely mentally ill". Usually 'severely mentally ill' involves psychosis and I have not had a single moment of psychosis. Depression is my greatest flaw and that is not 'severely mentally ill'.

She had a dance girlfriend in those days who was half-Asian, half-white. I forget the girl's name.  I think this girl tried to hide her racial identify. She dyed her hair bleach blonde, plucked her eyebrows so they were almost nonexistent. I met her many times, had no idea she was not white. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just that I felt empathy for the young teen who seemed to deliberately hide she was Asian. I totally didn't get she was Asian until my daughter finally told me.

I don't know why my daughter did not mention her friends' races when she told me stories about them. Did she think I would care?

The only thing I cared about, in terms of who she hung out with, was I didn't like her hanging out with much older friends, which she did increasingly, but pretend to me they were her age. Race. Ethnicity. These did not matter. But when she proudly passed herself off as much older and would socialize in the city, pretending she was at dance practice but was actually out partying with men in their late twenties, her passing herself off as older, that I minded.