About This Blog

My name is Rosie Reid Funk. This is the blog my father, singer/songwriter Bob Reid, started for me to chronicle the story of how we first met in 2008. He chose the name “Creolebelle”, which I am keeping because I cherish my father’s adoration of me, not because I’m vain. (Well, ok, but not that vain.)

For those who are not part of the large French-speaking community in Southern California -call me, you two!- belle means “beautiful.” My discovery of my Creole heritage is part of the story.

It has been over a year since I found Bob, but I am still dealing with the issues it continues to raise: identity, racism, family disfunction, and marital strife. Blogging has helped. There has been nothing more healing than going public with this secret I kept for many years.

To date, this blog has gotten over 11,000 hits. Some of those reading it have been inspired to find a long-lost relative. I do not discourage anyone from doing so, but I hope that reading this blog will help others to realize that this is not a decision to be made rashly. Even the best-case scenarios will have far-reaching effects on your life and your family, even on your health. Words commonly used by people who have succeeded in their search are “whirlwind” and “rollercoaster”. If you are thinking about searching, brace yourself! I hope this blog will give you some insight on what you might encounter.

If you decide to proceed with your search, here’s what you will probably need:

• a good therapist
• tranquilizers (in moderation!)
• antidepressants
• a shoulder to cry on
• a spiritual advisor
• couples therapy
• courage

Don’t get me wrong. For me the pain has been totally worth it. I found the answers I was looking for. No one can take that away from me. An adoptee once said that not knowing where you came from is “as disconcerting as not being able to remember what you did while drunk”. I found peace by finding a huge part of myself.

My conclusion? Finding a lost-lost parent: costly. The satisfaction of knowing who you are: priceless.

If you haven’t read the first page yet, start with “The First Day of the Rest of My Life” .

Moving to a New Site

For my latest posts, please go to www.rosiereidfunk.com

Too Skinny for My Own Good

You know all that stuff about sugar making you fat? It’s all lies, I tell you. I eat tons of the stuff, and I still buy belts in the children’s department. Unfortunately, they have Hannah Montana and Hello Kitty on them.

Lest you cry, “Unfair!” let me assure you that I have had my share of weight issues. Growing up scrawny was no bowl of cherries, my friend. I was teased mercilessly: Skinny Bone Jones, Twiggy, Beanpole. Other children made taunting me a regular part of their playtime routine. They may have been thin, but rarely freakishly so like myself. I retaliated by singing about their derrieres, It’s Bubblebutt, a new kind of animal here at the San Diego Zoo! but when we hit puberty and the boys began drooling over their sumptuous curves, guess who got the last laugh.

In my early twenties I was desperate to put on weight. I was married, but I didn’t feel like a woman. I still hadn’t grown out of clothes I bought in junior high. So I started a weight-gain program, gym membership, protein powders and all. You thought it was malnourished old people that launched Ensure into geriatric superstardom? I drank enough cans of that stuff to float a ship.

Still, the pounds didn’t come, and  the childhood teasing was replaced with rude comments. ”Are you anorexic?” total strangers would say to me, or “Eat a sandwich!” or “Oh, honey, you should never wear black,” One lady asked me in all seriousness, “What’s your drug? Cocaine?” I started coming up with equally obnoxious answers. I delighted in their uncomfortable reactions to ”Yes, I am anorexic,” or  my personal favorite, “I have a tapeworm.”

Others kindly assured me, “Just wait til you hit your twenties, then you’ll put on weight.” In my twenties it changed to, “Just wait til you hit your thirties.” I’m still waiting. It should be any day now. Let me guess, wait til my forties, right? Don’t bet on it. My grandma is 88 and her top weight is 126 pounds. Oh, sure, you say,  just wait til she hits her nineties!

One day my doctor freaked out about my weight and sent me to a nutritionist. This woman had clearly never encountered this problem before. She got out a list of foods that she gives to fat people and circled all the things she tells them to avoid: butter, sugar, and basically anything with the word ‘cream’ in it, ice cream, sour cream, banana cream. “Eat as much of these as possible,” she told me. Obediently I ate an ice cream sundae every night for weeks.

But I knew that nutritionally this diet went against all common sense. I mean, sugar may not make me fat, but death is a bad look. What I didn’t know was that I was perfectly healthy and that my dad and his mom’s family were naturally thin like me. It would have been helpful to know that this phenomenon is genetic before I clogged my arteries. Now I am now fighting high cholesterol one bowl of Cheerios at a time. Ok, sometimes two. Fortunately, when it comes to longevity, genetics are also on my side. So that Ding Dong and the pound of bacon lodged in my aorta will probably work their way out.

But by now you may have figured out that at some point I began to appreciate that eating as much as I want and not having to exercise is totally awesome, like when Cameron says to me, “I guess I’ll go to the gym while you eat your pie.” My ‘fat clothes’ are size two.

Just to make things fair, I promise to donate my body to science so they can figure out what keeps me skinny, then they can bottle it and sell it on late-night infomercials. Someday for just $19.95 you can be a Skinny Bone Jones too.

Now, where’s the Haagen Dazs?

A Person Who Sings

One of Grandma Betty’s favorite quotes is, “I am not a singer. I am a person who sings.” The difference, of course, is that it is presumed that a singer sings well and does it professionally, in which case Grandma was definitely a singer. I just sing.

My new friend Deric told me my opening line should be, “Hi, I’m Rosie Funk, and I have a song on iTunes.” Sounds like my opening line at a meeting of Lousy Singers Anonymous. My current iTunes earnings scream a deafening, Don’t quit your day job! which is sad considering that by day I’m an unpaid volunteer.

My dad, like any good dad, thinks everything I do is great. “It can’t all be great,” I insist. “I would tell you if it wasn’t,” he assures me. He is not talking about my singing. He is talking about my music, because, while I am not a singer, I am a songwriter, as opposed to a person who writes songs. I finally laid claim to that when other songwriters started approaching me to critique their stuff, and when I was stumped one day by the question, “How many songs have you written?”, a question no real songwriter could ever answer. It is not the sort of thing one counts.

But I can’t take the credit for any ability I may have. It is not a result of hard work and perspiration. “You’re a machine,” a fellow songwriter once told me, commenting on how quickly I can crank out a tune. Thanks to my father and grandmother and some unknown ancestor who passed this on to all three of us, it is something my brain just does. I am not always aware of doing it until someone asks me, “What are you humming?” or my husband gives me an irritated nudge in the middle of the night when I am asleep. “Stop singing!” he barks. I even write music in my dreams. Sometimes I wake up and think, “That’s good. I should record that,” but by morning I have forgotten what it was.

Oliver Sacks describes that kind of phenomenon in his book Musicophilia, a sort of medical journal outlining various mental disorders related to music. Don’t read it if you are the kind of person who gets every disease you read about. You do not want to end up like the woman who passed out every time she heard Italian folk songs, or Schumann, whose brain spontaneously generated complete pieces of music but at the end of his life played nothing but a single incessant A. Sacks also describes “brainworms”, those catchy hooks that play over and over in your head until you go mad. Sometimes I avoid writing because once I start I can’t stop the music in my head. It’s both a blessing and a curse.

Lalaalaaah…nananah, shooby doo…was I saying something? Oh yeah. So, to sum this up, it is not low self esteem that makes me say I am not a real singer. It is important to be aware of one’s shortcomings, but also to revel in one’s strengths. So don’t be sad that your lyrics stink, Mariah Carey. No one is good at everything.

Wrong Again, Dummy!

You won’t believe this. Just when you think the road is ending it takes another turn. My dad just sent me an email apologizing and explaining why he has kept his distance. I can’t argue with any of his reasons: he wanted to get out of Cameron’s way,  I am pushy, he needed time with Margaret, and I’m a lot of drama. That was the gist of it.

He can tell me about myself all he wants, I am just happy to have him back so I can stop crying every time I hear “I Will Always Love You” in the supermarket. The produce guy gets so uncomfortable.

My shrink told me I am too hasty to draw conclusions. She’s right, I hastily concluded. I had decided I was never going to hear from my dad. He proved me wrong again. The only thing I’m positively sure of now is that I have no idea what happens next.

My “Peops”

My cousin Janelle invited me to a family get-together at her house in LA yesterday. We were the first to arrive.

“I should have known,” she joked. “You’re the only ones who wouldn’t be on Colored People’s Time.”

Thanks to CPT I had the added advantage of seeing each relative walk in the door. As they filled the house, my mental picture of who my family is became more clear. They are a mixture like me, some darker, some lighter, with green eyes, brown eyes, curly hair or straight. A pattern of features emerged, and I had the pleasant sense of blending in. And not the way I had pretended to in high school, hanging out with my Mexican friends and talking chola Spanglish. These really were my peops.

I have in the past been flattered by comparisons with Lisa Bonet, Salma Hayek, and Lena Horne. My husband once called me “the female Johnny Depp”. To my amazement I have discovered that all those people, including Depp, are Creole. And when I wear my hair up I get a lot of Audrey Hepburn comments. Lena Horne has been called both “the Creole Goddess” and “the black Audrey Hepburn.” It’s all making sense. I suddenly have a sense of race I never had before.

Lisa Bonet

Johnny Depp

Lena Horne

Famous Creoles

Yeah, yeah, I know I said I declare myself independent. But the Creole’s really kind of have a stake in everything. I mean, some of our ancestors were slaves, and some of them were slave owners. It would be stupid to brag about that, and even stupider to be a racist. My aunt Lottie, who is arguably whiter than me with her green eyes and straight hair, got kicked out of school for dancing with a white boy; her daughter Janelle got in trouble at school for dating a black boy. Creoles are simultaneously too light and too dark. I like that. It makes me feel special.

At the get-together I met for the first time my cousin Brandon, who looks so much like my dad that it was unsettling. Why ‘unsettling’, you ask? Because my dad was not there. He did not return Janelle’s calls about the party, which she was pretty steamed about. He probably thought she was calling to “tell’em bout hissef”, because she is the type who will helpfully let you know when you are being “a idiot”. What he didn’t know is that she didn’t know when she called that he and I are on the outs.

The truth is my dad and I have not spoken since April. Shocking, I know, but there it is. And it’s not even interesting enough to blog about. Painful? Sure. Humiliating? You bet. But an entertaining read? Not so much. It’s just another reunion story that ends the way they all do: …but I don’t really hear from him anymore.

Imagine, though, the questions I had to answer at the party. I repeated the How-I-Found-My-Father story at least three times, but each time I managed to steer the conversation away from How are things now? It did not, however, keep me from answering that question inside my head.

Anyway, it’s probably a good thing he didn’t come. I had imagined a jaw-clenching ‘Hello, Newman’ when he walked in the door. A get-together is not the right venue for us to reconcile, though we surely will, I am convinced wait no I’m not. I don’t know if he is waiting for me to budge first or if he lost interest or if he is getting up the nerve to whack the ball back into my court or what. It’s been a long, scary time since I last heard from him. I do intend to keep the promise I made to him that I will always come back to him, it’s just that I’m doing it on Colored People’s Time.

In the meantime, thank you, Janelle and Reggie for the party, Aunt Lottie for the laughs, and all my new family who made me and Cameron and my sister’s kids feel so welcome.  I am kicking myself I didn’t take a single picture. I owe an apology to those there with whom I would have liked to have spent more time, especially the ones who are reading this. I am looking forward to being family with you. Let’s not let too much time go by.

My Favorite Pic

This is my  favorite picture of myself.

Go ahead, swipe it, print it,

photoshop it onto Beyonce’s body.

I’m not getting any cuter.

Why Genes Matter

It has come to my attention that some people who have read my blog think that I am “really screwed up”. To that I respond HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAH,HAHAHAHAH, HAHAHA, HA, sigh and wipe a tear of laughter from my eye.

I am baffled that anyone would think otherwise.  Of COURSE I’m screwed up! THAT’S WHY I WRITE THE BLOG, DUMMY!

I don’t appreciate this George Lopez, slap-upside-the-head, “Why you crine?” attitude I get from people who want me to be OK so they can believe someone is. Sorry to disappoint you, dear readers, but you don’t have the monopoly on crazy.

Others have discounted my pain in a lame attempt to comfort me. I had been looking for my father for five years and getting nowhere. When I cried in frustration to a family friend his response was, “It just doesn’t matter.” Correction, I thought. It doesn’t matter to YOU.

For someone who has never had the feeling of having been lopped off the family tree, it is easy to say genes don’t matter. And convenient. If we didn’t believe that propaganda, we would have to admit that most of us are way more irreversibly screwed up than we are comfortable with admitting.

If our ancestry is unimportant, why are so many people obsessed with mapping their family trees?  Why is my Grandma Betty’s house filled with African art, when she herself is American? Why do adoptees go looking for their birth parents, knowing that there is more likely to be a rusty scrap heap at the other end than a pot of gold?

Trust me, no one wanted to believe the genes-don’t-matter line more than me, especially when my search reached a dead end. Up until I was twenty-one I did believe it. But my frontal lobe, the last part of the brain to mature, suddenly gave me the capacity to judge the information it had absorbed throughout my childhood. And it decided that, despite what I had been told, genes do matter. They matter a lot.

Our personalities are mostly genetic. That means someone somewhere has or had your same traits, a person with the capacity to understand you in ways no one else could. That is true of me and my dad, but the first time I spoke with him on the phone, he also observed, “You remind me of my mom.” The time she and I have spent together confirm that connection. The two of them help me to understand myself.

I am not saying that everyone who shares genes feels some magical connection. When my Grandma’s distant cousin Paul arrived from Louisiana to meet the “brown” side of the family, they immediately bonded. They are both from Louisiana. Their parents spoke French. They share the name Charbonnet, a name I cannot pronounce without an obnoxiously snooty accent because I have no relationship with that family name except that it’s fun to say. I didn’t feel the magic.

It’s just not possible to feel related to every relation, especially distant ones. Think about it. You have sixteen great-great grandparents. That’s 736 chromosomes. I know this because my husband can do math. You only have 46 chromosomes. Those extra 690 either got discarded along the way or passed on to some relative who is nothing like you. On the other hand, you only have two parents. Your chances of being like them are pretty good; therefore so are your chances of being understood by them, and if not by them, by at least one of their parents. That is one reason why breaking the genetic connection slows down the process of self-understanding and identity.

The Search for Identity

Like most people, during my teenage and early adult years I tried on a lot of hats, which explains that bad hair-do during my senior year, my hippie biker-chick phase, my obsession with the Doors and my brief flirtation with Victorian decor (yuck!). But it was when I hit twenty-one that my true self began to emerge. That’s when the writer and the composer in me fought their way out.

The writer wasn’t unfamiliar. I started writing short stories when I was eight. Most of the time, though, I only wrote because my teachers made me do it. They said I was good at it, but until my adulthood, I never did it for fun. The music, on the other hand, was a complete stranger to me. It was bewildering. I didn’t know anyone else who composed music. All I knew was that my brain started writing music as if it were possessed, and it was. It was being driven by my father’s genes.

That’s when my obsession with finding Bob Reid began. Finding him meant finding myself. I had to complete my identity. For the first time since that day my mom first told me when I was ten, I spoke with her openly about him. And then she said something that shook me: he might not have been black.

The Role of Race and Culture

For years I had told my friends I was part black. I had not realized how integral that had been to my identity until it was suddenly taken away. You’re black, wait, no you’re not. You can’t mess with a person’s identity like that.

So I told people I was Asian Indian and tried hard to see myself as one. I bought some bindis to wear on my forehead, but I felt like a poser. The culture was completely foreign to me. I did not know a single person from India. I did not know what it meant to be Indian.

But, as it turns out, I am not Asian Indian. I am Creole by race. Between my mother and my father I come from at least four native tribes: Choctaw, Mahican, Shoshone, and Seminole. Add to that a cup  of white, two cups of black, and teaspoon of Latina, mix it up in a love fest and voila! You have an olive-skinned, brown-eyed child with high cheek bones and uncooperative hair.

But I am not Creole by culture. In fact, I am a seventh generation Californian. Having lived here all my life, I know what that means. Meeting my father’s friends on the Granola Coast brought back memories of my childhood, visiting with my parent’s friends, the Santa Monica hippie-turned-yuppie crowd. Hippie culture is California culture. The Reid mostly-black family reunion was a flashback to the congregations I attended during my school years in San Bernardino. Black culture is California culture. The fact that no one cared that I am a mixed-race, illegitimate child. Liberalism is California culture. It’s all familiar to me. California is the righteous blend of taco-loving nutjobs that I call home. Both my parents come from here, which solidifies my cultural identity.

So why am I “crine”? I’m not. The tears have just about all dried up. This last year provided me with the information I need to complete this process that was retarded by the break in my genetic connection. Now, if everyone will just please stop telling me how much that supposedly didn’t matter, I might be just fine.

Almost Normal

Of all the posts I’ve written, I think the cheesiest was “Family-Rich”. Complete garbage. I didn’t even succeed in convincing myself that having a lot of family makes me rich. It was a lame attempt to hide my struggle with the feeling of not belonging.

That became a conscious thought last weekend when Grandma Betty invited me up for an impromptu Charbonnet family reunion. Some newly discovered cousins had flown up from Louisiana and wanted to meet the California side of the family. When Grandma introduced me as her granddaughter I felt compelled to explain, “But I just met her last year.” I felt it would be misleading to let them think I was a normal grandchild. The day before I had written a text to my cousin Kokee , “Are you going to Grandma’s tomorrow?” but then I erased the word “Grandma’s” and replaced it with “the Charbonnet thing”. I did not want to insinuate that I have Equal Grandchild Status.

Every time my Dad introduces me to his friends and then adds, “We just met,” I flinch, like somehow those words cancel out the relationship.  I want us to be real father and daughter. I don’t want to tell that story anymore. But I have to. If he didn’t tell it, I would. Otherwise I feel I am deceiving people.

It is a familiar feeling. Until I met my real dad, I had just three full relatives: my mom and her biological parents, one of whom disowned me last year (why, yes, that is a long story!) So I attending a lot of family reunions but could never shake the feeling that the family was always someone else’s.

Let me make it perfectly clear that no family member ever made me feel unwanted, inferior or unaccepted in any way. I loved my dad Neil who raised me as his own, love his parents and all his relatives. The same goes for my mom’s kin. They were all genuine family to me, even those with the foggy distinctions of  ’Granny’s ex-husband’s wife’ and ‘adoptive step-great grandmother’.   I have lovely memories of all of them. So this feeling of not belonging comes purely from inside and not from the way anyone treated me.

It’s a sad testament to the fact that we humans have made a complete mess of the family. While I agree with the statement “Love makes a family”, all families are not created equal. Even crocodiles follow a family structure. Although we don’t like to admit it, there is a formula for the human family that when followed it creates a nurturing environment for children to grow up healthy and when broken or ignored has a crippling effect. It can be summed up this way:

Children have a basic need to love and be loved by the two people who brought them into the world and for those two people to love eachother.

That one fact is the single biggest reason we are all various degrees of cuckoo.  You can argue with me all you want, or just ask your therapist. If it weren’t true, he’d be out of a job. So would Prozac, Dr. Phil, and my comfort food of choice, Haagen Dazs ice cream.

While we can’t fix this mess we created, the least we can do is teach others to live right, stop repeating our mistakes and set the right example from now on. My mother did that for me. I, in turn, am trying to do that for others.

But in the meantime I am suffering from my own personal brand of cuckoo, which includes having trouble adjusting to this new status of having numerous relatives whose connection to me is not  half, step, ex, in-law or adopted. Imagine how it felt for me to hear Grandma Betty say to me, “You are my real granddaughter, and I am your real grandmother. That will always be true.” I was pawing through a container of mixed nuts. “You pick out all the cashews,” she observed. “Just like me.”

You are my real granddaughter. I play those words over and over in my mind.  Still I am incredulous. But I’m working on it.

After telling people about finding my father, I am frequently asked, “So, what kind of relationship do you two have now?”

“Oh, we love eachother, and we fight all the time,” I answer.

“Just like a normal father and daughter,” they say.

“Yeah,” I say, smiling. “Just like that.”

It’s a start.

On Second Thought…

I reserve the right to change my mind and frequently do, which, I remind my dear husband, is what makes me so fascinating. Almost yearly I walk into my local Guitar Center ready to embark in a completely new musical direction. One year my passion was drums, next it was bass guitar, then bongos, keyboards, etc. The year I set my sights on the $6,000 digital baby grand piano, well, at that point Cameron was wishing I weren’t quite so fascinating. But ever the bargain-hunter, he found me a used one on Craig’s list.

Despite my many ambitions, I am in no way an accomplished musician. I have only played any one instrument long enough to discover that the numbness in my left hand caused by a dramatic self-mutilation episode when I was 21 makes the effort to play anything an exercise in frustration. It takes twice as long  to learn to play with a handicap. When I played drums I constantly dropped the stick, so I played with it strapped to my hand with a rubber band. Still my rhythm was uneven. Because I am unable to feel pressure in my left hand, I cannot gauge how hard or soft I am striking or holding anything. And that ability is a crucial part of expression in music.

It took me a while after the accident (if you can call it that) to relearn how to use my left hand. Once at a restaurant I picked up a styrofoam cup full of lemonade and crushed it, drawing puzzled looks from my fellow customers. How could I explain? “I’m the Hulk”? Another time I was shopping and picked out a necklace, walked around the store holding it in my left hand and, not finding anything else I wanted, went to the register to pay. To my embarrassment I discovered I wasn’t holding anything.

But I don’t feel sorry for myself. Where there is a will there is a way. I could learn to play with two fingers, if I really put my mind to it. My dad taught a girl to play guitar who is severely handicapped and has little control over her hands at all. I could do it if I really tried. Chalk it up to laziness, lack of discipline, or fear of failure-I simply don’t want it badly enough.

The one instrument that is completely unaffected by my hand is my voice, and that is just as underdeveloped as any of my other skills. I am not a born singer. Some people are born with a voice like a Strativarius. Not me; I got the blue light special. Still, with training and practice I could improve, but frankly, at the moment I’m just not that interested. But that is subject to change.

What remains constant is that my instrument of choice is words. Like music, language has limitless possibilities for creation. How I love to string all these beautiful, colorful, multifaceted words together to accessorize my thoughts and feelings!

For that reason I am grateful to have English as my mother tongue. The English vocabulary is twice as large as that of any other language. It contains endless depths, shades, and nuances with which to express oneself. And when I learned to combine that with music I found an entirely new dimension to explore.

True, the ideal language for singing is Italian, in which almost every word ends in a vowel and thus notes that are sung can easily be held. English is not so convenient in that way. Try holding a word that ends in ‘t’. Rogers and Hammerstein once blamed the failure of one of their musicals on the fact that the final word of the closing song ended with a consonant. Disastrous! But I revel in the challenge of finding a word with just the right rhyme, mood, pentameter, number of syllables and singability. It’s like a crossword puzzle for the ears.

In the interim since my last blog post I’ve been writing Angry and Depressing songs. (Take a lesson: be nice to songwriters; they will write about you!) They are junk, mostly, but oh-so-satisfying, like filling up on bread. They only served to soothe my pain, and I have no need to go back to where I was when I wrote them. I’m done. Now I can go back to serious writing.

So that’s what I’m doing. I’m back to blogging, for now anyway. Because tomorrow I might change my mind.