Katharina Buczek
Then, she applied for various scholarships and was ultimately able to land a full ride to a state school that was a couple of hours away.
She opted to wait to tell her parents that she was going and only broke the news one week before she was supposed to leave for college. It was then that utter chaos ensued.
“My family begged me to stay and even had me meet the top church leader. I humored them but told them I would still leave,” she recalled.
“When I met with him, I was extremely scared, but I knew what I wanted. When he realized I was not budging, he had me sign an NDA that I wouldn’t speak about the church to anyone outside of the area.”
Afterward, she finally got out of the community and went to college. It was also there that she wound up meeting her husband, Antonio, who is multiracial.
She met Antonio while she was a junior, and he was a graduate student. They quickly hit it off, fell in love, and even adopted a poodle mix named Sunshine together.
She also learned that his mother had passed away when he was just a young boy, and his father moved back to the Philippines one year before they met.
Anyway, after they began dating, she did not introduce Antonio to her family because she knew they would not accept him on the basis that Antonio was not from their community.
However, she did not consider how her family would react to the fact that Antonio was multiracial.
“I know it was very ignorant of me not to consider how they’d react to his race. I had a lot of educating during college, and I know it’s my responsibility to continue learning, and it’s not my husband’s job,” she noted.
Still, once Antonio proposed to her, she did introduce him to her family. And in the beginning, they were quite cold to him.
