Mirror Image

When I was pregnant with Kaelyn, I used to imagine what she might look like. I imagined a baby and a toddler, with my dark brown, curly hair, greenish eyes, and pale olive skin tone. Looking back, I never really envisioned many of Roger’s features when thinking about her. I always thought that my features were the dominant DNA. Of course, I hoped that she would have the easy time tanning that he does and be as adventurous as him. I wanted her to have his generally friendly and outgoing personality. His musical and athletic ability. But, the general looks, I admit, I thought would be mine.


But, there’s a funny thing about DNA….

Kaelyn looks nothing like me. Try as I might, I can’t find one single trait that she shares with me. Obvious things, like her red hair, big bright blue eyes, crazy long eyelashes, and cute dimple on her left cheek, don’t look like they come from either Roger or me. But everything else she gets from him. The pink undertone to her skin, her bubbly personality, the shape of her head, her nose…all the way down to her blood type. All him.

I find myself clinging to any reference someone might make that associates her features with mine. Someone once told me that she had my mouth and I was elated! My mouth!! I’ll take it. But, looking at my baby pictures, no, she doesn’t have my mouth at all. And when she smiles, it’s obvious. She has the exact same crooked smile as Roger. It even skews to the same side as his.

Right now, I’m desperate to find something about her that is like me. I’m watching her pick things up and how she manipulates them, hoping that maybe she inherited my left-handedness. (There’s no evidence either way). So far, the only things I’ve come up with: Her hair is starting to curl (Roger has straight hair) and her ears don’t stick out like Roger’s did when he was a baby. Yep, I’m down to this: her ears may look mostly like Roger’s, but they don’t stick out and neither do mine!

Kaelyn is beautiful. And I’m not just saying that because she’s my baby. She is truly stunning. I’ve never seen eyes as blue and piercing as hers. I’m assuming the same grandmothers that passed on her red hair are also responsible for her eyes and I’m so grateful that Roger and I had those grandmothers and those genes somewhere inside of us! I find it funny, then, that I sometimes wish she had features closer to mine. I’m nowhere near the beauty she is destined to become. I guess that there is some selfish part of me that wants a visual of my DNA. Kaelyn is the perfect combination of what Roger and I put together can be…and I’m impressed! I guess there’s that animalistic instinct that I needed to reproduce to ensure the survival of my DNA and I suppose that I just wants to be able to see it.

All that being said, I wouldn’t change her looks for anything. A friend once told me that as she ages, she may start to look more like me and my first thought was, “Oh I hope not! She’s so beautiful, turning into me would be a major downgrade for her.” I might not look in the mirror and see my daughter staring back at me, but her features did come from me somewhere. That hair and those eyes are DNA that both Roger and I passed on to her. How unlucky for us that our looks don’t reflect those good genes, but how lucky is Kaelyn that hers does!



There’s no real purpose to this post. Just some thoughts I have every time I look at Kae or explain where her red hair and blue eyes came from.

We got the results of her head ultrasound Monday night. She’s perfectly fine!