Mommas with biracial/interracial children - Page 2

[FroNuff]

Totally forgot to say...

Goepark, I'm in your neck of the woods! I live a little bit north of you, in Linden.

[RainCoastMama]

*

[Mommay]

Yeah, hey Tia. I saw you on the central nj tribe forum. It'd be great for some of us to meet. And now we have yet another thing in common. Fridays are great for me. So let me know.

I don't get that much comments about the eyes, but maybe because ds has red hair. That always draws comments. Other asians are usually very accepting of ds and frequently assume he's mine, which is not always the case.

[meco]

I am late, but I wanted to chime in

I am a classic American, caucasian mutt and my SO is 1/2 Cuban and 1/2 Chinese. Great mix too :LOL

So DS is 1/4 each and 1/2 me

I always have kids ask me where his mommy is or who I am. :LOL I never get the sitter question, but I guess that is assumed w/the others. He is dark hair and deep, dark eyes, darker skin, tans wonderfully. I have blonde hair and blue eyes (my entire family has blues eyes!), fair skin.

We do not look alike really, but so far we laugh it off. I did post a thread awhile back because people ALWAYS ask me "What is he?" or "Where is he from?" And I was starting to get annoyed, but I guess now I am used to it.

We speak Spanish, Chinese and English to our son so we have a multilingual household as well. We celebrate all the holidays (Chinese New Year is SO's favorite and even asked my sister not to have her 2005 wedding so that it would interfere with Chinese New Year in NYC--a real spectacle!).

[veganbaby]

I get the same comments about her eyes too.
I would like to speak Vietnamese to her, but unfortunately I lost the language. I can understand it, but not speak it. My parents were too busy working to talk to us when we were younger. It's hard when you immigrant to a country..you have to start from the bottom.

[Divina]

I'm half Filipina, half white, my older kids' dad is from Scotland but of English and Scandinavian origin ... my younger kids' dad is euro-white, but not sure of the mix because of a number of adoptions in his family ... I call my kids Hitler's Nightmare! My mom's family is mostly Asian, with a good bit of Spanish and some Polynesian thrown in ...

My daughter and my youngest son are both dark--tan skin and black or brown-black eyes. My teenage son and 3 yr old have very fair skin, hazel eyes (one of Rowan's eyes is half blue) and medium brown hair with some red in it. Genetics is just weird. My daughter, who has Asian coloring, but is taller and, um, more voluptuous than most Asian women, gets a lot of "what are you?" questions, as do I. My white boys just don't get questioned. It's interesting. Morwynne and I identify as "non-white" or "mixed". Jamie id's as white. Too soon to say for the younger boys. DP is a little tiny bit defensive about being a white boy ... I try not to tease him, and he dances much better than most!

[momof2tadpoles0104]

we belong here, my boys fathers(yes i said father's) are both from Africa so tru "black" people lol. My oldest is tan but gets way dark in the summer, my youngest is alot darker than me and moderelty darker than his brother. check out my sig and see for yourself lol.
The only time i really "think" about it is when i get stared at and cant figure out why and then it dawns on me that they are trying to figure out if they are mine or not :LOL like i said they are both alot darker than me!!
Having said that i love having biracial children i think biracial kids are 1000% cuter than others (but hey maybe im just biased :LOL )
ETA both my boys have diffrent hair types, my oldest has the more course curly dark hair native to black people, my youngest has more "white" hair thats fine but is REALLY curly after a bath lol. And yes i constatly get told that people wish they had "his" hair

[catherine_hogans]

I have the opposite issue...rather than the nanny thing, we have had comments like, "ds must be the mailman's baby!!" (ds is as white as me, while dh is black). Avery looks everything like me and as of late, his eye shape may look a little like papa's but they are still blue.
Anyhoo...the joke was...ds can't be the mailman's baby...our mailman is black too!!
I started a website for ds...check it out in my signature...baby peanut.

Many blessings to all the beautiful babes and their courageous and loving parents!!!

[FroNuff]

Originally Posted by catherine_hogans

I have the opposite issue...rather than the nanny thing, we have had comments like, "ds must be the mailman's baby!!" (ds is as white as me, while dh is black). Avery looks everything like me and as of late, his eye shape may look a little like papa's but they are still blue.

A friend of mine, who is white with a black husband, has a son who used to look pretty white when he was a little baby. One day when she was in church and her DH was not around, an older woman next to them asked her if she had been raped! Apparently, the woman thought her son looked too white and couldn't possibly have a black father. My friend took it really well and didn't say much back to the woman, but I was in shock when she told me this. People can be so rude.

[FroNuff]

Ok, I hesitate to post this, but it was on my mind a lot of the day yesterday. I don't mean to offend anyone by this, but I'm wondering if I am alone in my thinking (and therefore certifiably ).

It gets my goat when people tell me mixed babies are cuter, and I'm trying to figure out why. Don't get me wrong, I think my daughters are beautiful, but not because they have a varied ethnic background. When I was pregnant, I didn't automatically assume I'd have "beautiful mixed kids", but I did wonder what they would look like maybe a bit more than the average mama-of-a-single-race baby would wonder.

This is hard to explain, but I *know* that my girls will get a different type of attention - both good and bad - because of people's natural curiosity about race/ethnicity, and I just don't want them building themselves up about looks and appearances. I want my girls to beautify their personalities from the inside out, so that race makes less of a difference. It's early, so this probably isn't making much sense, but does anyone get what I'm saying?

Just want to share this story... DH and I were on a road trip through some Southern states and we had stopped for breakfast somewhere in Virginia, I believe. We were getting the usual amount of stares which I attributed to the area where we had stopped, but the hostess was staring with such...gosh, enthusiasm?...that it started to get annoying. When we went to pay our check, that same hostess rang us up and out of the blue says, "Have you guys ever thought of having children?" My guard went up because frankly I thought it was rude to ask such a question of strangers without any previous conversation. I mumbled something, to which she said, "You know, you should think about having kids because mixed kids are the best and the most beautiful. I should know I have one." And she whipped out a picture. Now, I guess she was trying to bond, and I must be a b*tch, because I was totally turned off and offended. Sure, we'll go home right now and have some kids just for beauty's sake.

[cocopuffmami]

There is definitely a major problem these days with biracial children being made out to be 'designer babies'. I do not know how many times I have had a teen come up to me and say something along the lines of them wanting a black and white baby, because they are the cutest. I guess I am suppose to take that as a compliment, but really it just scares me. I think of some children growing up confused, because they were born to a parent mentally unprepared for what having a child of another race requires. I think as a white mother of a minority child I am responsible to educate myself. After the ooohs and ahhs of my child's beauty wears off there is still a life there that I am responsible for.

www.thecolorofus.ipbhost.com

[cappuccinosmom]

I'm white American and dh is Ethiopian. He's from the south, so he's a little darker than the predominant cultural group, but a gorgeous, chocolate color. Yummm!

Our son is lovely. He definately got the best of both of us, and so looks better than both of us. He has his daddy's almond-shaped eyes (dark, dark brown), light brown skin, lovely dark brown hair that is somewhere in between my wavy hair and dh's tight curls. His face is shaped more like mine. I don't know. There is something about the combination that makes strangers stop to admire him. He could pass for a native Ethiopian from the northern parts, and I've noticed he looks quite a bit like children from Egyptian background. Figure that.
Haven't had any wierd or nasty comments yet (except my grandmother, who's a bit of a racist and doesn't like anything we do, including the names we pick for our kids : ). But lots and lots of very nice, complimentary comments. Our new church has a huge number of mixed families and it's great not to feel like an oddball so much.

[veganbaby]

I've heard that about inter-racial babies too. Of course I think Desmina is beautiful because I'm biased

[wendy1221]

Well, my older ds is 1/4 filipino. And he looks very white. He has dark brown hair (most people say black, but it's really dark brown. His dad had black Asian hair). His eyes are slightly almond shaped, but not all that noticably (although, we get comments EVERYWHERE about how beautiful he is, especially his eyes, which are big and blue with the thickest blackest lashes I've ever seen). His skin is much darker than mine, but still in the range considered "white" and he has my little freckles. I'm just really really white. His dad was very immature and things ended very badly when ds was just a few months old. He moved pretty far away. Ds has not seen his biological father since a few months after we broke up (I made the effort and took the 4 hour drive for ds to see his dad. He was not happy and made no effort to contact us since then.) Anyway, nobody seemed to notice ds was different in our family (I'm married now to dh, Marc) until ds#2 was born. Before ds#2 came along people would actually say how ds#1 looked so much like his dad (meaning dh). I thought it was funny, but didn't correct people. Dh is as pale white as me and also has blue eyes, but his hair is pretty dark. But now that ds#2 has come along, people comment all the time how little they look alike and then comment that he doesn't really look all that much like either of his parents. And then look at me as if expecting an explanation. OK, my 2 ds's don't look anything alike except their eyes are the exact same shade of blue (different shapes, though). Ds #2 is whiter than white and blond. BUT *I* think ds#1 looks exactly like me, only masculine and darker. To be more exact, he looks exactly like my dad, only darker and prettier. LOL!

For a while there, I was explaining to everyone who did this about how they had different dads and ds1's dad was 1/2 filipino. Then I got tired of it. Plus ds started saying he wanted to see his old dad and he missed him, etc (I've never tried to hide this from him. I've shown him pictures and explained things to him). And that hurt, and I don't know how to tell him that his "old" dad just isn't interested in seeing him. So I just started telling people he looks like his grandfather. Which is true. Anybody else gone through anything like this? Any advice.

Also, I'd like ds to know SOMETHING about his filipino heritage. But I have no idea how to go about it. His dad wouldn't even admit he was filipino (he liked to tell people he was Spanish, like from Spain. ???? He had issues), so I really don't know much about anything. And ds looks white. So I feel kinda funny about going up to Filipino people and saying, hey, my son is part filipino, can we hang out and learn all about your stuff? I'm just not sure how to do it.

[AugustLia23]

Well, I am 1/2 Jamaican Black and 1/2 white american mutt(irish, english, welsh, etc.) and DS is 1/4 black and 3/4 white, but he looks 100% white, his black doesn't show at all. He is super cute though

I love that as a biracial person I will be able to teach my kids how to just be happy with being bi/multi-racial, and not try to deny any parts of themselves.

I love seeing all the pics of the cute biracial babies!

[MotherEarthMom]

My husband is Puerto Rican and I'm Native american and white.We have a 5 yr old daughter Cheyenne.So guess I belong here too,we have been together for 7 yrs and hope to have one more child.I guess we also belong in a older woman younger man thread too,he's 27 and I'm 41.

[heldt123]

Hi guys! I would be interested in this topic. I am a "mut" white, and my husband is Navajo, Apache, Hispanic, and German. Our little guy looks a lot like Mommy and hasn't picked up any of the other ethnic characteristics. I would like to be proud of his different racial heritages, but not sure how to go about doing it. We live in a prodominantly white area and anyone who is "different" is noticed very easily. I am also concerned about how he will feel growing up looking "different" than Daddy.

[homemademomma]

"wendy1221 Well, my older ds is 1/4 filipino. And he looks very white. and made no effort to contact us since then.) Anyway, nobody seemed to notice ds was different in our family (I'm married now to dh, Marc) until ds#2 was born. Before ds#2 came along people would actually say how ds#1 looked so much like his dad (meaning dh). I thought it was funny, but didn't correct people. "



wow- i could have (almost) written your whole post. my son is 1/2 polynesian, but his biodad (sperm donor lol) was out of the picture a few weeks after i got pregnant. my son looks very "white"-12 but he has slightly dark skin, dark brown eyes, and brown hair. everyone always says he looks like dh i love it!

anyway, i too am stuck about what to tell ds about his biodad, whom he has never met.i have no idea where he is, and i like it that way, but i wonder what i should be telling ds?

[happyhippiemama]

My Lil Miss is French Irish Swedish German (all from me) and Black and Hispanic (from her SD). I'm stuck in Iowa and surrounded by white folks like my family and am concerned about introducing DD to the other parts of her heritage. *sigh* just one more thing to worry about as a single mom.

crystal

[freegirl23cat]

so interesting to skim this thread...i had just searched "bi-racial" children b/c i've been starting to think that i really need to connect with other parents...my dd is only 5 months and i've already been way SHOCKED at the amount of attention paid to her "racial" features...one thing i've noticed is that my family (white) and other caucasian people/strangers always comment about the color of her skin (oh it's like butterscotch, she's got such a pretty complexion, she looks like she has a tan) and my ex's family and other black folks usually comment about her hair (oh shel'll have good hair, you'll be able to do so much with her hair)...

i also feel like people touch my daughter more than they do other babies of friends of mine...

anyway, i'd love to keep reading about how others deal with the multiple issues surrounding raising multi-racial children