My multicultural baby

First of all, mestizo, as Filipinos have coined the term, typically means someone who is European-Filipino.
However, it's traditional Spanish meaning is used to define European-Native American people. Anyway, that's not the case for Filipinos so lets leave it at that and carry on.

My son has known for a very long time that he is Filipino. It's the only cultural/ethnic background he truly identifies with. He understands more of the Filipino dialects used at home by my parents than I do and he's growing up with the same cultural upbringing that I did.

He knows he's "half white" because ever since he was two years old, he was able to distinguish the difference in skin tone between him and me. In fact, if you look at all of our pictures together, it's clear to see that he's a good ten shades lighter than me which he used to ask about when he was younger. Now that he knows why he's white and I'm brown, it doesn't phase him so much to ask or even notice. However, he still gets so intrigued with cultures and different languages that it's frequently brought up in discussion.

When people ask him what his background is, he will tell you he's Filipinos though sometimes he will say he's Irish.
However, his dad is a mangia at something like seven generations of Canadian that define his ancestry, so despite the fact that his grandparents are Irish and he has flurries of Scottish, and randomly enough, Swedish spackled throughout his blood line - none of these cultures have ever had a distinguishing effect on who his dad is or where his ancestors came from.

Anyway, because my son is a little learner, he frequently asks questions about places he hears about in the news or in today's pop culture. China, Spain, Japan, Italy and France have been brought up by him within the last month or so just because he's heard of them somewhere and it piqued his curiosity to ask about them. It's hard to tell Matheson about things that I'm not personally familiar with, but thanks to our library at home, I have tons of books and magazines that have informational passages and articles on different traditions and practices of cultures around the world.

Lately, I've been familiarizing myself with different findings in countries all over the world and reading about traditions practiced by different cultures. I haven't relayed much to my son as of yet, but now when he asks, I have something to say. The best part about it is that he loves the conversation and he loves learning new things. When we learn about different cultural practices together, he's been asking all the right questions to understand the concepts better.

It might sound weird, but I'm raising my son to be my best friend. I love having someone to talk to about those things, and comparatively, I've found that I enjoy his intellectual level not because of how well he understands any of , but how willing he is to even understand it at all.

Anyway back to the mestizo thing. My son is trying to understand what Irish is. Its hard for me to explain to him because there isn't much I know about the Irish culture either. I mean other than the standard stereotypes like - all-day breakfast, Irish castles and green plains and hills, plus the fact that gaelic is cool, and a lot of people get celtic knots tattooed to their bodies without understanding why, I literally know nothing about Irish culture.

I want him to know a bit of his lineage and where he's from but only because he's expressed his own want to. His dad is not a part of his life, but even if he was, he wouldn't have much to contribute to the realm of cultural diversity in Matheson's upbringing. So I'm taking it upon myself to figure this out and maybe come up with some good findings about where Matheson's bloodline comes from.
The fact of the matter is, when I get older and have more children under the family structure that I still faithfully want to have for my home, I want all my children to identify with all the cultures that both their parents identify with. With varying cultural differences, its clear that definite culture may not define them, but whoever they are and wherever they are from, I want all my kids to be aware of what is inherently a part of them and of their family.

In Matheson's case, his dad didn't know anything about where he was from and had no cultural upbringing in that sense. He was very much Canadian as Canadian gets. But lately Matheson has clearly expressed the unfairness in being the only one in our family who is not full Filipino. He just didn't fully understand what the other half was and now he wants to know more. Although I have to start from the beginning with Irish culture and history, it made me a little bit glad to know that my son wanted to know. Being five years old, most kids don't really understand culture. I guess giving my son a globe as part of his Christmas gifts two years ago helped him define cultures based on the locations of certain countries and regions. However, my little learner has a taken a new step in his curiosity to figure out who he is and where he's from.

Anyway, I invite anyone with LEGITIMATE and VALID information about the Irish culture to talk to me/teach me about it because when I say I know nothing, I literally know nothing about Irish culture. At the end of the day, I just really don't want my son to see his mixed background as something that disables him from associating with different cultural groups - as we know through high school experiences - cliques are typically ethnic based.
I want his knowledge of his backgrounds and other people's backgrounds to enable him. I want him to understand that just because his bloodline is composed of two radically different ethnic groups that are defined through different practicing cultures, it is not something that should ever separate who he is into two different parts. Race and ethnicity are always difficult to teach a child. Culture has a huge role in defining who you are as a person, but it should never deter anyone's ability to respect someone else.

I want my son to embrace who he is for everything that makes him him. But I also want him to respect everyone for who they are and if they choose to identify themselves by their ethnic brackgrounds then I want him to want to know more about them. I want him to learn and assess before passing judgement. I don't want him to be afraid of what's different, I want him to understand why it's different and learn about it until what was once different becomes familiar. But most importantly, I want him to appreciate the fact that no matter how many questions he asks, how much information he comes by, and how much he learns, people, things, places, will always be different, and though no one is expecting him to change for them or to be different with them, he needs to respect them despite what he doesn't understand of them.