The Flow Chart of My Family

I met all the kids, their Dad and their step-mom a super funky vegan restaurant for lunch. It is the kind of place that woman have body hair and my son with dreads is the “norm”. Not the kind of place I expect my family to be the “odd ones out”…

As we are siting having lunch I heard people behind us trying to “place” all the children-

“Well those blondes are theirs (referring to my ex and I)”

“That one (pointing at Tennyson) must be hers (pointing at their step mom)”

Later on Tay was holding the baby and they asked “do you think the baby will have red hair?” clearly trying to put together if Tay and Tag were siblings…

Let me draw this out for everyone-

My Ex and I are the biological parents to-

• Tajh
• Teagan
• Tayer

Together we adopted-

• Tennyson
• Tru

My Ex has no relation to-

• Taggart

I get where it is confusing, all white people with blonde hair look alike and all. This means, Tajh, Teagan, Tayer, Tru, and Taggart all look like my ex and I. Tayer’s hair is a little red which could be confusing, but he gets thrown in with the “all white people look alike” thing most of the time.

Where this is most confusing for people is Tennyson. Tennyson is hispanic, just really dark skinned. My children’s step mom is black and most people assume Tenny is as well, so they “match”.  While I can understand normal curiosity, at some point it’s just frustrating that strangers need to make sense of my family. More then that, it’s frustrating that people like to point out how different one of my children is from the others. As an adult, you should know better. Most likely if you are a stranger and question why one of my children looks so different from the others I will do my best to politely change the subject. There may be a point made of how I did not give birth to all of them, and I will move on… But if you catch me on a bad day politeness may allude me.