“He doesn’t look like your other kids,” said the dimwitted waitress who was looking at my four-year-old son as she put the glasses of iced tea on the table.
I’ll take care of this.
“That’s because he probably isn’t my husband's. Too much tequila and too much reggae music on a boring and lonely night. Husband out of town. Kids at their grandparents. A cute neighbor with a sexy Australian accent. What can I say? We haven’t had a DNA test, and we aren’t planning on it. Now please bring us two straws and an extra plate for the baby,” I say in a matter of fact tone and with tinge of annoyance all inside my head.
Too harsh. Instead I consider: “He doesn’t look my husband because he is my dead sister’s son. We are raising him as our own. He resembles me and his cousins.” Don’t say that either.
Adoption, kidnapping, artificial insemination, a child from a previous marriage or relationship, my love child, my husband’s love child, so many possible explanations for why our third child doesn’t look like us. In this situation, we don’t explain. We almost never do. Curiosity is good for the mind.
Instead my husband and I laughed. He says, “We get told that a lot” while he continues to cut spaghetti and hand out dinner rolls to the kids.This kind of uncomfortable moment happens quite frequently and takes different forms. Sometimes we are told he doesn’t look like his siblings. A nurse once told me that my son looks nothing like me and must bear a strong resemblance to his father. No, he looks nothing like his father. And, it is not just strangers who make this observation.
“Your son looks nothing like my son,” says my mother-in-law, laughing to foreshadow the upcoming punchline: “And, we know why that is?”
“Why is that? Are you calling me a slut?”, I think, but decide to smile instead. I am not sure if it's more insulting when she implies I'm a cheater or calls me a Yankee; they are probably synonyms in her mind.
Anyway, here’s the truth. There is a chance that he is not my husband's child. But then, he's not mine either. I am pretty sure that our third child is the baby who was beside our biological offspring in the hospital nursery—the baby boy with a hyphenated name who was born about seven minutes before my son. The hyphen in the baby’s name wasn’t the uptown, yuppie kind that says “I am an independent career woman with success equal to my husband's, so he will carry both of our surnames.” Instead, the appellation connecting punctuation conveys “I live in the inner city, on the dole, and am not married to the baby’s daddy."
Yes, we got the gorgeous welfare baby with dark curly hair, olive skin, sparkling white teeth, long black eyelashes and a single dimple on his right cheek. He always looks like he is ready for a Baby Gap photo shoot. Sometimes we just stare at him in amazement.
While we fawn over our child, somewhere out there, a confused single mom in the Dallas area tries to love a chubby preschooler with big ears, a speech impediment and curled toes. She hugs who she believes is her biological offspring every morning while thinking “damn, he is ugly and dumb.” At least when she is told that her child doesn’t look anything like her boyfriend who is helping to raise him, she can say with conviction: “I don’t know who his father is.”
