Chelsea Kaplan’s Musings About Life... After Birth

My baby looks nothing like me, and I have a major complex about it.

As you can see from my photo, I’ve got your typical Nice Jewish Girl looks: dark (well, not totally, thanks to my highlights, but naturally dark), curly hair, darker skin, 5’2” on a good day height…you get the drift. My son, however, is my Aryan polar opposite: translucently pale skin, white-blonde hair, blue eyes and, according to his recent nine-month check-up, he ranks in the 90th percentile for height.

???????

Everyone seems to think he looks like my husband, who does have the fair skin and blue eyes, but like me, has dark hair and when it comes to height, let’s just say he isn’t exactly being actively recruited to play for the NBA. Regardless, when I carry this kid around, I don’t doubt that others probably mistake me for his nanny. This irks me for a few reasons: 1) Not only did I endure 9 extremely uncomfortable months of pregnancy, but also 7 months of needle-filled fertility treatments, eventually hitting the jackpot with our first round of IVF, to bring him into this world. Is a slight resemblance so much to ask for? 2) I look exactly like my mother. Like, people stop us on the streets and tell us we should enter a contest (seriously, do they have those? how weird….). Because of this, I always assumed my progeny would look like me, because that’s how things work in my family. 3) My genes are the dominant ones! Even biological science is dumbfounded by my kid’s looks.

For a while there, I was convinced that by some accident in the IVF lab, the Kaplan Petri dish was somehow switched with that of Sven and Inga, a nice Swedish couple. “Perhaps your son was a clerical error,” my dad would joke, except I actually believed it may be true. Insert Carrie Bradshaw voice here: Was it possible that somewhere, Sven and Inga were feeding Swedish meatballs to a small, dark, curly-headed hairy baby, wondering where the heck he came from?

I even went so far as to bring these fears up to my momtourage. My pal Becky, a forensic chemist who works for the FBI (dude, how CSI is that?), offered to DNA swab me and him, clearing up my doubt once and for all. I balked, wondering what I would do if my suspicions were verified.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a baby photo of my husband at six months. I had never seen one before, as my husband is the youngest of three, and his mother literally has no baby photos of him (don’t even get me started….). However, his brother, Michael, managed to dig one up and I gotta tell you: MIRROR IMAGE of my son. Freakishly exact. Just like me and my mom.

Perhaps Sven and Inga’s baby is blonde after all.