Why people stare!

[moosh]

I can't figure this out, I have two boys ds1 4 yrs and ds2 8 months. We live in a mixed area, people of all races when I am walking down the road with ds1 no body seems to stare too much (unless he is doing some mad Spider man thing!). But when with ds2 people always stare at him and them me and back again. I want to shout from the roof tops "HE IS MINE!!!!" What I think it is is that ds1 is much darker than his baby bro so he obviously looks like mine, but ds2 I think had all his skin colour (hair included) stolen from ds1 he is very very pale and I think people think I am the child minder or something!
It doesn't wind me too much it gets to my mum more than me, she gets really offended and almost starts arguments which can be really embarassing!
Anyone else experienced this at all. There are no solutions but its nice to moan!

Uhu that's so awful the poor man.

I think you got it right Issymum, it's just that people instinctively want to "place" other people they see. My Irish-American SIL and her Swiss husband adopted two children from Korea, and people are always doing double takes, trying to figure out what the relationship is.

my mom tells everyone at her work that dd is half spanish the lieing cow shes half pakistani she ashamed the silly woman

omg nikcola

i no she didnt know that i knew thats why she never lets me go to her work when we go to visit she will only take dd

Oh in case you tell them

yeh i might send a eid card to her at work then thet will no lol shes such a snob

My cousin has two mixed race daughters and my aunty encountered a very racist couple whilst on holiday. She'd like them up until then and they got such a shock when she pulled out a pic of her stunning grandkids!

people allways ask me if dd is my sister im nearly 21 but look really young which hate xx

when people (mainly oap's) ask if she half cast i say no weve just got back from spain and she tans well !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

heheheeehe

i was completely unaware that this staring business went on until a few months ago when, as part of my job, I (white European) took out a little girl from Malawi. Not only did people stare but then turn back for a better look ... in case one of us had changed??

Issymum,

You weren't at Secrets garden centre near Godalming a couple of weeks ago on a Sunday were you? Could have sworn saw parents and children matching your descriptions taking a walk around the duck ponds??!!

My brother-in-law (white) was walking around with my nephew (who looked like a 100% Chinese baby), and someone came up to him and asked, "Is he yours?" When my b-in-law answered the affirmative, the person asked, "How did you get a BOY out of China?"

motherinferior, how very very very interesting!

Uhu, that story is a bit scary. Say he was alone and his dp wasn't with him, would they have sent the kids into care until things got sorted out!

I honestly don't look at all mixed-race. Possibly some Anglo-Indian skeletons are in the family cupboard. And the dds, who are technically as 'half asian' as each parent, are blonde.

i used to be a nanny for a family from jamaica. I looked after 3 children all under 3 and used to get stared at all the time especially by people i went to school with. I still laugh because i left school 4 years before i became a nanny so technically they could have been mine!

Both my dd & ds are blond and blue eyed. DH is from southern Europe and has olive skin, very dark eyes and hair. His relations find it really odd that there are these two pale children in the family. I think they stare more than strangers!!

To be fair to the people who stare, it's not just a racial thing. People used to stop and stare whenever my father, me and my littlest sister were out on our own. Because we all look alike but there's 14 years between my youngest sister and I. So clearly people were trying to work out the family relationship and decide if my father was a disgusting old goat who had had a baby with a child bride, or a super-fertile being who had a very large family of which they were only seeing the book-ends IYSWIM.

I am black and married to a white man. Not only is he younger than me, but for a long time he looked younger than me. New people that we met couldn't believe that he was the children. I also had an argument with a woman in Budgens who told me that she had seen mixed race children and that under NO possible circumstances could the child in the buggy be mine. In the end I decided that to argue with her was pointless because I'm the one who underwent 6 1/2 hours labour and that when I got home my dd would still be my dd. The fact that dh and I now have 5 children scares more than most people we meet. My implast buggy which I push the twins in looks like a large single and causes people to glare until they see the babies. The list is endless and having spent my entire shopping life being followed around Brent Cross (because clearly when not procreating I have nothing better to do than steal lol)I have decided that my best defence is to be stocked up with deadpan oneliners. When asked how long the gap is between the babies (M being 5lbs bigger than K) and knowing that what they mean is OMG did she get pregnant before the 6 week check I simply reply 4 mins. Life's too short to care that much what people say or how they stare.

I think it's really like Thomcat says. People stare at something that they find unusual and it's not necessarily meant to be done in a derogatory way. Some years ago I travelled around China for several months with a group of american architecture students. We found it really funny that when we were at tourist sites, people would often ask if they could take a picture of us with their family and then they'd put their arm around us and grin like they were having their picture taken with an oddity...which of course we were...for them. There were three of us with major amounts of freckles and in the more remote areas, people would come up to us point at the freckles laugh and try rubbing the freckles to see if they came off! Some of the people in our group got quite agitated by it all, but I sort of felt that it gave me license to stare in return (not in a nasty way, but just because I wanted to visually explore things that were different to me).