I think there are a lot of feelings/fears/insecurities in the egg donation community about whether kids will/do look like their parent. There are so many posts/stories from DEIVF parents of how much their kid looks like them, so I wanted to share what it’s like when your children don’t look like you.
In the early days of parenting, I often heard, “Don’t worry, my kid/s do(es)n’t look like me either.” Though well intentioned, this was never the comfort it was intended to be. When your genetic child doesn’t look like you, it’s “just one of those things.” But when your non-genetic child doesn’t look like you, it can be a reminder of your infertility journey. In my case, my eldest has my donor’s eyes both in terms of shape and colour—I can’t count the number of hours I spent gazing into them as she nursed. In that sense, my infertility was staring me in the face.
Not seeing my family of origin reflected in my kids’ faces was strange at first. In the space between the grief of my journey and the love for them, I acknowledged that none of whom would exist without my going through all the pain. And really, it’s not important to have a mini-me.
That said, there are lots of things that get passed along environmentally. For my family, sense of humour, interests, speech patterns, my British accent/words, mannerisms, facial expressions are what I see reflected in our kids.
Epigenetically, my children are tall (their dad and our donor are average height, but I’m a giant) and two have a crease in their nasal septum, like me. They might not look like me or my family of origin, but I definitely see my influence.
And just like how having ongoing conversations with them about how they came to be paves the way for other ongoing conversations (such as race, gender, equity, sex positivity), with them not resembling me comes the opportunity to see them for who they really are, not who I assume they are.
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