Reorienting After a Relationship's End SOME years ago, when I was living in Britain, I received an e-mail from a college friend who had recently announced her first pregnancy. "We have become good friends with a black/white couple," she wrote. They have a precious baby boy - you and Dan are going to have the cutest kids! Yes, Daniel was black and I was white - a British Jamaican and an American half-Jew, respectively - and yes, I suspected that we would have cute kids. But her well-intentioned e-mail made me roll my eyes. It was hard to imagine commenting to a white couple that their future children would be attractive simply because you'd seen some other white parents with a good-looking child. Now that Daniel and I have broken up, no one tells me how cute my kids are going to be anymore. To be fair, that's probably because I'm 30 and single again and my friends are trying to be sensitive by not talking about my future children at all. But to me, this is all part of a strange new landscape I am navigating, as I renegotiate both my singleness and my whiteness. O.K., let's not mince words. Whiteness is indelible. With and without Daniel, my skin color has allowed me countless minuscule and immense privileges, most of which I don't even notice unless I choose to. But when I fell in love with Daniel, my whiteness no longer told the whole story. With Daniel, I was white as ever, but I was also part of a unit that was half white and half black. Coming out of that, I've learned, is complicated. Daniel and I were one of those couples that made a good story. We met in New York. I was living there when he came for a week to see a mutual friend. There was a dinner party; we locked eyes and ignored everyone else in the room for the rest of the evening. A few days after Daniel returned to Britain, I stood in front of the mirror in my apartment in Queens and said out loud to my reflection, by way of trying to convince myself not to e-mail him - "What are you going to do, move to England?" I e-mailed him. Seventeen months later, I moved to England. And then, three years after that, I came home to Boston for what I expected would be a monthlong visit, and he called me on Skype and told me it was over. There had been no warning, no gradual deterioration. Not two months earlier, we had spent more than $1,000 on my new spousal visa. We had been through trying times - the trans-Atlantic distance, a long stretch of unemployment and, most devastatingly, the sudden death of his mother - and through it all, we'd been solid. But now he wanted out. He shipped my things. I got a job, an apartment and carried on with my life - broken in strange places, but functional. At the end of a serious relationship, you are left feeling somewhat flummoxed by who you are on your own. I missed small and large things: long drives through the English countryside, damp summer afternoons at the pub. I missed cooking Jamaican rice and peas with Daniel every Sunday, the smell of scallions and red chile peppers and crushed garlic sizzling in ground nut oil. I missed my best friend. I'd lost my other half, my daily source of raucous laughter. I was without the man I'd moved across an ocean to wake up next to, the man I believed would be the father of my children. And for us, race was part and parcel of all of those things. Daniel and I talked about race a lot. Some of our friends, other mixed-race couples, never really acknowledged their differences: they chose the path of "colorblindness," whatever that means. This approach wasn't for us. Daniel often joked that if our children came out of the womb without Afros, he was putting them back. His blackness mattered to him and was a source of pride and power; it was a cornerstone of his identity. If I failed to see that, I failed to see him. Kate McGovern is a writer in Cambridge, Mass.