Sunday, January 17, 2010

Huh?

Recently we took a weekend trip. Saturday morning we headed to eat the hotel breakfast. (For the record, I bring my own oatmeal and homemade muffins for the baby). I finished quickly so I would have time to squeeze in a morning workout before we headed out for the day. My husband and daughter stayed behind to finish eating.

About fifteen minutes later, they stroll into the workout room to say hi to me. My husband shares that while he was cleaning E up, the breakfast attendant came up to her and was talking to her. Next, she asked Steve if he was the dad. Steve said yes. Then the next words out of the attendant's mouth were: "She looks like you."

HUH?

Besides sharing brown eyes, none of us look anything alike, starting with the quite apparent skin tone difference.

I have shared that sometimes people just don't know what to say. Some go on and on and on about how cute our daughter is....to the point that it gets weird. Some ask too many inappropriate, nosy, personal questions. And some, like the breakfast attendant, just blurt out something.

We have encountered a lot in our short journey as a multi-racial family, but the comment E looks like one of us is a first.

3 comments:

  1. Knowing the three of you....that really cracks me up!

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  2. Oh, people. :)

    We get the "she looks just like you" comment on a semi-weekly basis. I just got it for the trillionth time yesterday. And, ok, same hair color, same eye color, same skin tone... got it. But it's hard for me to see *myself* in my daughter (whether or not we look related), when I so clearly see A.

    I think some people (certain ones more than others) just have a "need" to justify it in their mind... like they need to find similarities to make it make sense or be acceptable to them. Sometimes I think they want to "reassure" us poor a-parents who couldn't have their "own" kids that we're just as good of a family as the one down the street.

    My response has become to bypass a real response and just say "We'd love her if she was purple-polka-dotted!"

    (Wrigley's Mommy)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Oh, and sometimes I just laugh and say "Poor kid!" You've got to have a sense of humor in the adoption world, I guess. :)

    ReplyDelete

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