Undivided

I am white and my husband is black. He is really tall and I’m not. Although we are the same age he has two grey hairs in his beard and I’m a total silver fox . Our physical difference are the least problematic of our differences, at least for us.

The things that send us to our marriage therapist are that he is borderline OCD and I’m borderline ADHD. He is concentrating on the little details and I’m constantly distracted on my way to the big picture. The state of the house is a big issue. The kitchen needs a clean and I’m too busy writing this. I understand the concept of clean as you go but have no real idea how to implement it.

How we were raised is very different. Our dating history is different. He has had lots of girlfriends and casuals and I’m divorced after being with one guy 19 years. Our food choices are whack; he eats meat and I’ve been a vegetarian for 35 years. I’m an optimist and he is a what he calls a realist which looks a lot like a pessimist to me.

Even our movie choices are totally different. He like horror and I like drama. He thinks ‘life is hard enough already so why watch things that will make you cry?’ I can’t watch horror because why does anyone want to scare themselves like that? Isn’t there enough that’s scary about real life?

Then there is our love. The full on best thing in the world for thousands of different reasons and for no reason at all. It just is. The list of things we love about each other is equally long and even more diverse but in those moments of breakdown you wonder wether love is enough.

As we watch the worlds divides grow and erupt into our screens on the daily it’s hard to see what can bring us together. We divide along lines of race, gender, sexuality, religion, politics, climate and honesty just about anything.

We are told that love conquers all and we want to believe it but how come nothing really changes?

Aren’t things worse?

How is love enough?

What Toks and I discovered about love is that whilst it’s extremely powerful it’s nothing without acceptance. Well not nothing but here’s the things. We couldn’t change our relationship just by loving more. We really tried but the thing is it’s the little things could still build up into resentments that would blow up in our faces when we least expected it.

Change happens and stress triggers our individual pain points and make us feel alone even when we are together. We are complex. Humanity is complex and we often need a complex response beyond the tools we actually have.

The first thing Toks and I had to learn was to allow the other person to feel what they feel without judging or adding our own issues to it. Yep it sounds simple but have you ever tried just listening to someone else and supporting their feelings without adding your own? Just being with what is for that other person? Having something to add or disagree with and just zipping it and bringing empathy for their feelings in that moment instead is worth practising for us all.

For us to do it effectively we had to learnt to love and accept ourselves. We had to embrace our complete selves, our upbringings and our beliefs. Accepting ourselves as we actually are, not as how we would like to be. We had to love and accept our reality as opposed to our embellished or diminished view of ourselves. The whole of you including the way your inner critical, voice talks to you in those moments of stress and pressure and well pretty much all the time it can get a word in. The way you talk to your partner inside the home that you would never say when you are out. You know the mean stuff that gets written on the web from annonomous trolls and keyboard warriors when no one one really knows who you are or you think they don’t. The worse bits of ourselves.

I’ve always been curious about how easy it it is to create hate. You just name a difference throw in some fear and bam you have hate. Let’s take race for example. Slaves and indentured servants had way more in common as people but that would also mean that the white slave owners would be outnumbered so they created division and shame around skin colour and lessened another’s humanity in such a simple yet powerful way that literally tears people apart to this day. Lighter skin slaves worked in the house and dark skin slaves on the fields one better than the other. It’s created hatred for black and white and colourism within cultures and family. The idea that someone is better than someone else is a fundamental for hatred.

It’s easy to make hate but have you ever shown up on the diversity and inclusion team and wondered how to change the world without saying the wrong thing to someone else that’s suppose to believe in the same stuff as you? To include is much tricker than to exclude. The answer is not in the getting everything right it’s in the acceptance of the fact that you won’t but still keep trying.

My husband just told me that one of the things he loves about me is how hopeful I am. I forgot to tell you about why.

We have a daughter. The most treasure and loved person in our world.

She is the reason we care so much out growing and evolving as people and as parents and partners. We want change for her both in our home and in the world.

We started our company Undivided to accept and celebrate difference. We want to create a community that can take supportive action together not by ignoring our differences but by accepting them and celebrating them. We will never stop believing in the power of love. But just as salt makes an avocado, adding acceptance makes change possible.

Accepting ourselves and each other is essentially accepting our differences. This is our life’s work, not the bits that make us the same but our differences subtle or otherwise that have have historically divided us.

It’s by accepting differences we can begin to see our truly shared humanity. Acceptance + difference = Undivided.