Suggested, oddly enough, by the current thread aboutJurassic Park and the discussion therein about Ian Malcolm’s child. Feel free to contribute whether you or your child is is biracial or not. (It’s not like the word race means anything real anyway.)
I’m black, and my son’s mother is white. My son was blond and fair-skinned; moost people who saw him had no clue that he was biracial. Nonetheless, when his mother brought him and his sister to visit me at work one day when he was about two, one of my coworkers (who’d never met any of them) immediately pegged him as mine; she pegged it by his ears and nose. My coworker realized just as quickly that his sister wasn’t related to me.
I don’t look much like my father at all; few people guess that we’re related. By contrast, my baby sister looks very much like our other did at the same age.
What about the rest of you?
Oh, and don’t wait for the poll. I don’t feel like putting one up.
My daughter looks eerily like me. Which is odd, because she is a beautiful 21 year old woman and I’m a creepy looking old dude. She has had strangers approach her on the street with, “Oh, you must be kayaker’s daughter!” Freaky.
My first daughter looks a lot like me and acts exactly the way I acted at her age. Actually, she looks just like my younger sister did at that age, who was sort of the female version of me. My 2nd daughter doesn’t look anything like me or my wife, or her sister. For a long time I joked with my wife that the hospital pulled a switcheroo on us, but only half-jokingly.
No kids. Of the siblings I share with both my mother and father (dad partied a lot after his first divorce), my sister strongly resembles our mother’s mother, my late brother looked like a combo of our mother’s parents, and I am almost a double of my mother’s brother (who did not look like his parents).
FWIW, my husband says my niece (daughter of my late brother) moves and talks like my full-sister. I don’t see it, by my husband insists. My niece and I have the exact same hair, including the weird little curls on our temples that occur in high humidity.
I don’t look like either of my parents, though the older I get, the more I sound like my mom. I’ve been mistaken for my mom on the phone by family members and her coworkers.
Just about the time I was really starting to wonder, I found a pic of my maternal grandmother (or possibly g’grandmother, depending on what eldest “aunt” was up to), for whom I am a dead ringer. Except for being five inches taller. I’ve apparently inherited a lot of her personality as well.
My two brothers and half brother all bear a marked resemblance to our father. You don’t really see it individually, but we have a pic of all four of them lined up, and from just above the tip of the nose up to the forehead, they’re all copies of Dad.
When I was younger I was more clearly my father’s daughter because of the red hair and ruddy coloring, but the older I get, the more like my mother I look. Well, for one thing my red hair is now gray…
Mind you both my mother and father had similar build, coloring and overall similar general features. So each of us kids looked a little like both of our parents.
My brother looks EXACTLY like my dad except for the shape of his skull, and his teeth, both of which he got from mom. School pics of my dad compared to pictures of my brother are sort of freaky, and the older my brother gets the more he looks like Dad. They also have the same name, which is annoying.
I’m a mixture of features from both parents. People are constantly telling me I “look just like” whichever of them I’m with. Dad’s forehead and nose, mom’s cheekbones and eyes, etc.
I’m not a breeder, so no kids will ever look like me - though I’ve got friends who’ve adopted children who have people say the kid “looks just like them,” so someone will probably say it to me, anyway.
I am obviously from my mother’s family. Look at any picture of me standing next to my maternal uncle and male cousin and it jumps right out at you. Same build, coloring, everything.
Oh - I don’t have children. But a weird thing…my niece - my sister’s daughter - shares a birthday with our father, who died before she was born. Comparing photos of my niece and myself at that age - we could be the same child, I swear.
So, I’m adopted - by my aunt. Meaning I look fairly like her, but I don’t look like my dad at all (who I am only related to by the fact that he married my aunt).
I, of course, never knew this for the first half of my life. Yet, I often wondered. I look enough like my adoptive mom, but not that much. I am much lighter than all of them. No one in my family had curly hair but my grandfather and one uncle. I have large, dark eyes - my “mother” doesn’t, and neither does my father. And I really didn’t look like any of them, not even my real mother, not as a teen.
Eventually it came out that I was adopted. Ok, whatever. Fast forward fifteen or so years and I saw a picture of myself sitting on the couch - and I looked exactly like my real mother. I mean, same fucking expression and same shape of the face; everything. Same large, dark eyes. What the hell? How could genetics work like that? I mean, I was almost a carbon copy! I look different when I smile, but that could be because I never saw her smile very often, not a real toothy smile like I give all the time, only small smiles. But my sardonic face is exactly her face.
I have no idea what my real dad looks like. I presume he had the curly hair, and from him I probably also got a few other things, like my love of fantasy (everyone in MY family has their feet firmly grounded in reality and don’t dream at all).
My baby sister also declines to reproduce (which is a shame), but she and our eldest niece are the spitting image of one another. It’s particularly apparent now, because they’re only twelve years apart in age and my sister looks a decade younger than she is.
I look a lot like both of my parents. The older I get the more I look like my mother and the more I act like my father. No one but Dad can tell Mom and I apart on the phone.
Taste in literature comes from one’s English teachers, Mika, particularly those from 2nd to 5th grades. Sorry about the confusion; there’s supposed to be a memo.
And I am exceptionally fond of almost all of my English teachers…so you may be onto something. I just wish there were more worthy careers you could do with a love of English, linguistics, and literature. Le sigh.
Technical writing. The love of literature doesn’t directly help, but it does make it more likely that you’ll be good with the written word. And linguistics helps a lot with understanding just how to phrase things unambiguously.
That’ll be a dollar, of course. And as always I’ve sent someone to get it out of your purse.
Everyone declares that we both look like our mom because we have the same coloring as she does - blue eyes (Dad has them too), red hair, very fair skin - but beyond being colored with the genetic crayon neither little bro or I look that much like her. We have Dad’s oval faces instead of her round one. Occasionally people have picked up on the fact that we’re part Scottish and she isn’t, for example.
