I'm Not The Babysitter - Really

my blog is actually iamnotthebabysitter.com

I am half Armenian, half Swedish and look about 16. I have a biological son and an adopted son from Ethiopia. I am SHOCKED when people don't think I'm the babyistter....it happens that infrequently.

I don't really mind, but sometimes it would be nice for people to see me for who I really am.

anyway, I feel your pain!

I had pink hair and my daughter was a cherubic blonde. Everyone thought I was the Nanny. I made my hair look like hers for awhile until I didn't and then I could just say something. It isn't the same I know, but I'm a tattoed freak and she's a blonde angel baby which causes a thing.

I am sorry because this seems a bit sensitive for you but it made me laugh because times have not changed at all....My mother is Jamaican and my father was German and I was born 1970, born and raised NYC...The way my mother tells the story...lol...the three of us were in the train station and my father ran ahead to hold the door of the train while my mother ran behind with wee-bitty me in tow...and as she was attempting to catch this train a black woman stopped her and asked if she knew anyone else that needed a nanny. My mother has never told this story with anything but laughter in her voice over the situation and like your son, there is NO DOUBT that I am my mother's child...in fact we have always joked that we are literally carbon copies...although now I am a bit taller: )

When my oldest child was very young I was asked if I was the babysitter quite often. Like every other babysitter/mother out there, the complete stranger would say "well then she must look just like her father."

The problem for people to wrap their minds around was that my children are blond and blue eyed while I am not. Clearly we're not a different race but different species. They share my features, they're whining at me in the mommy tone and sometimes they even call me by my name; Mommy.

It has never stopped anyone who decides to judge our family by asking if the kids are really mine (you'd think it would have stopped after the first one, but no).

I truly believe that the fundamentals of genetics are foreign to everyone who married someone who looks just like them and whose kids look like clones.

www.SaraInAkko.blogspot.com ( http://www.SaraInAkko.blogspot.com )

Life in the Middle East, with craft and spice

I live in NYC on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and this is definitely the land of mixed marriages of all types and multi-racial kids abound. Many, maybe even the majority of my kids' friends are.

I have two friends and they each have daughters my sons' age (9) who are also friends. One friend is a blond, blue-eyed Minnesota Norwegian married to a dark skinned African-American man. Her beautiful daughter is a lovely mix of the two: a light skinned black girl. My other friend? Black/white bi-racial herself, her husband was white, and her daughter? Blond and blue eyed. The spitting image of my friend body and face shape and feature-wise, but of a completely different coloration.

You see where I'm going with this story right? When the girls are playing together at a playground, and then come up to their mothers? You can see the jaws drop.

They even once had a stranger INSIST that they were playing a joke and pretending to switch mothers. Which we were all laughing about, but still you would think in this day and age people would have a better clue.

Because while mom A is the same exact color as girl B (and vice versa), if you look at the faces, at their features? The daughters clearly match up with their own mothers.

You just have to look beyond color. And its sad how many people still don't.

Anyway, thanks for sharing your story and I am glad that you know to trust that your kids will never question who you are to them. You're the Mom.

Varda is the Squashed Mom from The Squashed Bologna: a slice of life in the sandwich generation. ( http://www.squashedmom.com/ )

It's human nature to want to categorize things...My husband and I are both white, but people still feel compelled to openly discuss which one of us my kids resemble, and they're 12 and 15! You can only hope that in a couple of generations there will be so many mixed-race kids nobody will pay attention anymore. But then they'll find something else to yap about.

It never fails to amaze me the things people say! My husband is white and has a son from a previous relationship who is mixed. We had a woman over to our house last month who asked 3 times,right in front of my stepson, if he was really ours!!!

I have a friend whose son has her white-blonde hair, but her husband's rich color and beautiful curls. When he was first born, he was significantly lighter, and someone remarked, "I didn't know all babies were born white!" Oh, you should have seen my jaw drop!

But my "favorite" story of origin comes from an ex-boyfriend's grandmother who had Asian ancestry, but completely denied it. She was openly racist, only accepting people of European heritage. It was embarrassing, but particularly because her appearance was 100% Asian.

-Kari

www.kariannaspectrum.com ( http://www.kariannaspectrum.com )

I know how hard it is too be mixed and have kids. My husband is Black and I am hispanic and we have three boy two that have green eyes and blonde hair and one that looks like me Black curly hair and brown-skinned and people question if they all share the same parnet YES THEY DO! and then what hurts me when we go out people think i am baysitting my other two because they look so differnt. When will people look past color.

I've had a few 'is he adopted?' questions to which I answer that I pushed him through my own loins. I also get asked a lot 'where is he from?' which I particularly dislike. I answer, from Adelaide (where I live in Australia) and that shuts them up. I feel a bit mean because I know they're not really asking where he's from but maybe it will make them think next time.

Jen at Semantically driven ( http://www.semanticallydriven.com/ ).

I may not be of mixed background (though there is a rumor of asian or african blood deep in my hubby's family tree...still digging up the dirt), I still find these comments uncivilized and rude to an extent.

My one-year-old daughter looks almost identical to me. But just to prove to people that she has inherited something of daddy's, I always tell them that she behaves like daddy. Daddy is a photography and loves music and to cook. She loves looking at pictures, loves music, and eating. They even have very similar reactions to some foods (dairy makes them gassy, they don't like peaches, they love pears and bananas). The funniest one was noticed in the ultrasound before she was born...the classic putting hands over the head when tired. So funny to watch!

Anyways, you would think we would all be past these superficial comments on whom the baby looks like, color, etc. Maybe in a couple hundred years, eh?

One of my friends is half-Mexican but you wouldn't guess it based on her pale skin. I can't tell you how often I have cringed and then schooled someone because they were talking in sweeping generalizations.

I guess the lesson is: you can't judge a book by the cover, so you should speak as if everyone is everything. After all, go back far enough and we're all related.

Kids don't see color. Or age. People were always mistaking my dad for my grandfather. I don't know if it bothered him, I know I thought it was funny.

a/b from The Burrow at http://ashleighburroughs.blogspot.com

Well said! :)

Kelly, @LifeOptimist, blogs about family life at http://onequartermama.blogspot.com

Some people talk way too much and spend a huge amount of time worrying about other people's lives.

___________________________________
http://mustbeliberating.blogspot.com/

Great attitude!

Also, I don't mind if people ask me questions about my colour or my child's colour. I just like it when people *assume*. So you don't always have to keep your mouth shut! You can be politely curious and that's ok :)

Kelly, @LifeOptimist, blogs about family life at http://onequartermama.blogspot.com

I try to just keep my mouth shut whenever I see a family that doesn't "match." I'll admit, I do notice when it seems like family members are different colors. But then I remembered that there are SO MANY ways to make a family (adoption, blended families, sperm/egg donors, etc in addition to mixed race relationships) that things aren't black & white anymore (literally, LOL). I was raised by my step-dad, so I should know better than anyone that families come in all different forms. I think all that matters is that you can see love in family...screw the rest of the details :)

The 1st time someone said something to my husband he handled it so very well.

A little boy approached my husband at Barnes & Noble and asked if he was that boy's daddy, pointing to our son. The kids were playing at the train table in the Children's section. Hubby had just told Charlie to share the trains.

Hubby said yes. The boy stated that "he doesn't look like you". Hubby responded, "No he does not. Not all little boys and girls look like their daddies. Sometimes they look like their mommies. Or sometimes they look like other family members. Do you look like your daddy or your mommy?" The boy sorta tilted his head, thought for a minute and said he looks like his grandpa. Hubby said "well, there ya go." the boy went back to playing.

The boy's dad later approached Hubby and apologized for his son's question. Hubby told him not to worry about, kids are curious.

Elizabeth

@texasebeth ( http://twitter.com/texasebeth )  and My Life, such as it is.... ( http://texasebeth.blogspot.com )

It was very difficult for me to accept when my daughter was younger when I was mistaken for her babysitter. Or if someone implied I had adopted her. But now I use it as a teaching tool of sorts. I often share with others traditions our interracial family have or something along those lines. I hate to say it, but it will only be the first of many times you'll be mistaken for the sitter...

www.Mom2Amara.com ( http://www.Mom2Amara.com )

People are obsessed with homogeneity! No matter where I go in the world, I am constantly being asked, 'Is that your daughter???', and then, 'where did she get her hair? And who's eyes are those?' I have dark hair and brown eyes, my daughter has blonde hair and blue eyes. My son has brown hair and brown eyes. DH has dirty blonde hair and blue eyes. We're not of mixed race, but we do come from opposite sides of the world. People want kids to be little clones of their parents.

Quote: "I would not have believed he was mine if I didn't see him delivered lol!"

Sometimes I feel that way. When my son was born, he had thick dark brown hair, just like mine, but then it all fell out and in grew strawberry blond!

I'd love to see a picture. I think mixed people are the best looking (but I'm biased :)

What I find most awkward is when people make comments about other races, not knowing you have relatives from that race. People need to think more before speaking!

I can so relate this! I have 4 children that are bi-racial and they all are very light and look more Hispanic than anything, except for my oldest boy! My 14 year old looks Caucasian, dirty blond hair, super light. I swear he could be an Abercrombie & Fitch model! Anywho! When he was born he was white and when I say white I mean it looked like he belonged to totally Caucasian parents! I would not have believed he was mine if I didn't see him delivered lol! He had jet black straight silky hair and blue eyes when he was born. I also had my son at 16 so I really got the "Are you the babysitter?" a lot! I guess I can understand though, because he really did not look like he would belong to me at all! I wish I could post a pic!

http://www.cutclipsave.com

Thanks for your comment. I love reading about all these different kinds of mixed families.

I think the shocker for me is Montreal is a very diverse place, multi-culturally speaking, and it's just not what I expected from my city. But you never know....

That's too funny! It's good to have some funny retorts to these sorts of questions. If anyone ever asks where my child came from, I'll tell them, "from my uterus!"

It's true - for some reason people think it's ok to make random observations about a child's appearance or behavior when they would never dream of doing such a thing to an adult.
Most people don't walk up to adults and say, "hey, you're super short for your age!" or "hey, you look kind of fat!"

A lot of people speak without thinking.

As my half Korean daughters develop their summer tans, I get the "are they adopted" question more and more. Almost every stranger has to throw out the assumption that my younger daughter looks just like her dad, whom they've never met. She actually does. There's nothing about her that looks like me, but sometimes I wish they'd just say what they are really thinking: She looks SO Asian. But that, too, would be stepping over the line. Why do we need to talk about that at all?

Creative Kids Play (The Darndest Things) ( http://creativekidsplay.com )

Our son is full Hispanic and we are not. Hubby is 1st generation Irish and I'm your basic Anglo mix.

If I'm by myself I usually don't get many comments because people assume I married a Hispanic. We live in south Texas.

Thankfully our neighborhood is very mixed middle class area. You never know who will pick up which child. I love that nobody even gives us a second thought.

Elizabeth

@texasebeth ( http://twitter.com/texasebeth )  and My Life, such as it is.... ( http://texasebeth.blogspot.com )

My niece is half-Asian. She looks nothing like my brother; she has very Chinese features. Anyway, people always used to think that she was adopted from China. I remember once I was grocery shopping with my brother and the baby. Someone asked "Did you just adopt her" and my brother answered - loudly and with kid-like pride - "Nope! I made her myself!" Still cracks me up to remember the look on that lady's face. I don't have any kids yet, but when I do, they'll be mixed race as well.

Stephanie blogs about health, balance, living lightly and learning to love life more deeply at Love Life Project ( http://www.love-life-project.com ).

My adopted sister is korean and my brother half black. So so many of my friends have mixed marriages, but it can still be tough, even in a cosmopolitan environment.

Lady Jennie also writes at  A Lady in France ( http://aladyinfrance.com ).