Swirl babies are like a box of chocolates. When you mix melanin, you never really know what you’re going to get.

Take me. I joked with The Hubster that by marrying and procreating with me, he’d be seen with a bunch of babies folks thought he’d adopted. How wrong I was…

Kendra, married to a white guy and a proud new mom, posted this on our BB&W fan page last week:

“Welp….I am the mom of a 10 week old beautiful baby girl. I had prepared myself for the eventual moment when someone asked me if she was mine. But when it happened today, I was still caught off guard. Yes, she’s mine! Yes, she took color after her dad…but she does look like me!”

I can just imagine what that was like. First time that happened to me was when I was in the hospital after delivering The Boy. The nurse, a Russian woman, looked at my chart that showed my last name, KARAZIN, and since “Karazin” is of Russian/Polish origins, she was thinking she was about to meet one of her comrades, and peeked open the hospital door to find little old me, who was too dang-on dark to be Eastern European. Zachary was laying next to me in his little bassinet and so she triple checked our hospital bands. In her defense, The Boy was not just white, he was pasty white, and his hair was white-people straight. I gotta tell you, it was kind of shocking at first, seeing the contrast in skin color when I breastfed him. The Hubster and I joked that I looked like the wet nurse.

Often the first reaction to the “Is that your baby?” question is to be outraged and try (usually too long after the fact) to say some smart-arse snappy comeback. “I told [the woman] she was mine. As I pushed my shopping cart out of the store, I thought of more witty things I might have said. I am still a bit shocked although I’d been warned it might happen,” Kendra said.

But Chandra Crudup, MSW, says that black mothers should use these opportunities to educate people, and not to automatically assume the person asking  you the question is being malicious. Crudup, an instructor at Arizona State University and multi-cultural educator is a product of biracial union.

Chandra Crudup, MSW

“Most times people don’t realize they are being rude,” she says.

…But…

If you’re determined to have a snappy comeback, try these:

“Is that baby yours?”

“What baby?” Where?!”

“Is that your baby?”

“I’m not sure. The father insists that I am but I’m planning to go on Maury and get a DNA test, just to be sure.”

“Is that baby yours?”

“No. There was a horrible soap-opera like baby switch and my real, black baby was given to a white family, but we both got attached to each others’ babies we decided to keep the ones we ended up with.”

“Is that your baby?”

“Yes. I’m addicted to tanning. I’m going to start the baby on the tanning bed as soon as she’s potty trained.”