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Monday, March 28, 2005
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G's latest email has a picture of him and the wife and their little boy attached. Just in case you forgot what we looked like, he teases. He looks good, pretty much the same as when we met back in college, a few more laugh lines around the eyes maybe. But it's the kid I can't stop looking at: he looks just like G.
G's all blond hair and blue eyes and is white as white can be. His wife has kinky black hair and dark brown eyes and skin that's like rich caramel. Their son's cutey-pie curls and smidge of tan are both courtesy of Mom's gene pool, but the rest is pure Dad. Looking into his eyes, especially, feels like looking into G's.
That makes me smile, and then feel a little sad too.
The boy and I used to talk a lot about what our kids would look like. We'd imagine his big round eyes mixed with my nice full lips; we'd wish for my thick glossy hair and his long lush lashes. We'd laugh about my little eyes and flat moon face paired with his big nose and pointy cleft chin. That would be hideous! -- we'd shudder. But secretly we thought our kids would get the best of each of us. We imagined the perfect mix of me and him -- half Anglo-mutt, half Chinese -- and knew it would be beautiful.
It's a strange thing to think that my kids won't look like me. It was always a possibility anyway -- half Asian/half Caucasian children often don't seem to look obviously Asian at all -- but now that maybe's a definite. My hair, my eyes, my nose, these lips: all this ends with me. I'm a genetic dead end, and there's a certain amount of irony there, when you consider that the boy's a biologist whose main thing is evolutionary genetics.
Genes aren't everything, the boy tells me, when I mention DNA and dead ends. Trust me, he says, I'm a biologist -- we know that environment counts for so much. The things your parents gave you, the best things, they're not about your genes.
And so I try not to dwell too much upon what might have been, because deep down I know the boy's right. Eyes and hair and skin, that's just surface stuff. I'll have plenty of good things to pass along to our children -- even if those things won't be obvious just from looking at pictures.
# posted by y @ 7:02 AM
