Looking Like/Unlike

Between doses of cold medicine, soup, and chocolate, I managed to put this down today... Maybe it makes some sense.

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Liana at Welcome to the Dollhouse has an interesting post earlier this month musing over how people tended to say her adoptive daughter looked so much like her. She is black, her husband is white, and her daughter is considered mixed, and also happens to be adopted. So there are all kinds of reaction that could be going on there.

Commenting on a child's likeness to family members... is it veiled prejudice or awkward small talk or what? There doesn't seem to be an easy take on that.

Sometimes we do get vibes from other people that they are uncomfortable or downright hostile to our combination of family/racial mix or whatever. Those questioners feel very uncomfortable and on some level want to make us uncomfortable about our choices or about who we are. In that case, I don't have any qualms about issuing a smack down or freezing them out as needed.

True, one sometimes runs into the clueless, as did one poster on RQ recently who was chased through an airport by a teen and her mother crowing how cuuuuuute her daughter was to the point of being uncomfortably objectifying. What was her remark, again? "My daughter is not a puppy!" heh Too right.

Objectifying anybody for any reason is objectionable. As if any one characteristic could represent the whole person. Even a beautiful woman may not appreciate having her obvious beauty drowning out her other talents. People are more than their faces, physical characteristics, or racial backgrounds, one way or another.

I didn't ask to be made this way, even if it looks sometimes looks attractive, so for me, it's part of my persona in the world, but mostly incidental to who I am as a person.



Anyway... What really came up for me while reading her post was the way people used to remark on my family when I was growing up.

As I've said before, I have striking coloring. I had any number of friends and strangers remarking on it. The attention was mostly favorable, but it was a little odd. I didn't look obviously like my parents since the coloring feature drowned out other similarities. I got so many people asking me (in cutesy or admiring tones) "where did you get your lovely___??" that my mother taught me to say, "I got it from my dad's ___." I think she heard a bit of a jab in some of those remarks, so my response would gently point out that I was actually related to them. And in my extended family, it's true this coloring is not at all unusual; it just wasn't present in my immediate family that most people saw.

Now I wonder if my Mom was uncomfortable with friends and strangers implying that I was not my father's child, and was trying to head that off. Of course, in the process, she also squelched any hint that I might consider myself attractive, but that's another story. Maybe she thought she was trying to protect us from judging ourselves on looks alone.

When I got older, the more common remark has become "you look JUST like" so-n-so. "Let me guess," I say, they have "____" coloring feature. I try not to be too sarcastic, but the odds are great that its the ONLY feature I have in common with this so-n-so. I've even had people mistake me for some other person who looks NOTHING like me except for that x feature. It's a permanently annoying aspect of my existence.

Occasionally, there will be a deeper similarity. My old college roommate and I looked similar enough that college friends called us "twins." But it wasn't facial features or anything. It was a hint of coloring, plus body type, plus a goofy sense of personality and humor. Once she got a perm that made her hair poof out, and I thought it hysterically amusing how she looked *that much more* like me. :D

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But anyway, the strange thing in our family is that myself and my sisters look so different from each other and our parents. Through some wild and crazy genetic mix, we each have different coloring, hair texture and facial shape. We used to sometimes get people who would accuse us of lying that we were sisters! You can imagine how annoying this can be-- people who knew nothing about our family trying to rearrange the truth to suit their limited sense of the world!

For those people who insist that families should "match," I say, "meh!" They don't know the complexity of human genes and human connections.

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If you know where to look, you know that my middle sister and I look more like two different grandmothers on opposite sides of the gene stream. She's also very striking, my sister, but she has a whole different look.

We do have emotional similarities. We are locked tight together like pieces of a puzzle, despite sometimes locking uncomfortably closely, or with little knobs that catch or grind on our connection. We used to write letters to each other when we were away at school. Long, rambling letters that touched on our frustrations, our passions, the curiosity, the need to know, to organize, to connect... We are keyed into a similar sensibility. We are literary, questioning, creative, wounded, strong, appreciative, expressive.... We functioned as undeclared best friends back then, intuitively understanding each other from our shared background. We are still alike in so many ways, but not in our looks.


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I think we are keyed from an evolutionary standpoint, to search for similarities and likenesses. You know how the human brain can discern patterns lightening fast. So if people are related (and even if they are not), we look for similarities.

I used to search photographs of myself and relatives looking for similarities. The source of my hands and frame is dead easy, but what about my eyes? My nose? From where did I acquire that funky little cleft? The occasional dimple? My tendency towards IF? My artistic tendencies? Yes, where DID I get my unusual eyes? Or for that matter, where did my sister get *her* amazing eyes, those brilliant deep blues that capture us all? It's a mystery; there's no direct lineage marker; knowing my genetic ancestors does not help clarify the answers.

Once I saw a graduation picture of myself, and I suddenly saw my long-dead grandmother in me... the one that I don't resemble was suddenly rising to the surface. I was both startled and thrilled. I AM my mother's mother's child.

My husband, now, I can see the aspects of his mother, his dad. I love seeing how my nieces and nephews have a combination of this person's eyes and that person's smile.

My BIL's brother adopted a little girl from China. I've never met her or him, but when I saw her pictures, I was struck by the similarity of expression. There were those family eyebrows, placed high as if in perpetual question or surprise--it was there in her face, I tell you! I didn't say anything because they would think it was silly.... a relative stranger pointing out an "impossible" resemblance. I just keep it to myself, a small delight that the matchers picked up on something that went together...


So what if we search for similarities? It's like working a puzzle, looking for evidence of our connections. And isn't family all about connections? What makes family, family, and not just good friends or bad acquaintances? (Oh, but that's another post!)

It seems to be that similarities are part of the glue that binds us together, whether those similarities are visible or not... and part of our inheritance, too, whether genetic, emotional or from the box labeled "other."

It seems like a grand mystery to me. Cue the sweep of violins!

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