Queen of Rambles

I have fun confusing my husband.

When he woke up this morning, I was staring at him, just waiting to ask the burning question that had kept me up all night. “Do you have any ugly relatives?”

Last night I became obsessed with knowing what our child will look like and was trying to calculate the chances that he’d turn into an ugly man. As far as I can tell he has a one in three chance of looking like the missing link. He could look like a B@dorek and that’d be fine. They are a good looking bunch until they become broken down alcoholics. If he takes after this side of the family he’ll probably be huge. The P@lsson blood line also runs strong. If he takes after them he’ll be a smallish guy, but very fit and cute.

Then there’s the third category. The category that I fear.

He could look like a Dickins0n.

I fear this because I have the Dickins0n look. In girls it is fine. Not beautiful or anything, but not particularly ugly. My mom, myself, my mom’s cousin and my mom’s cousin’s daughter could all be identical twins. If I was to show you pictures of the four of us at various stages of our lives there’s no way you could guess who was who. You could probably separate out the generations just because of style issues, but the faces are the same. When I was six we went to a family reunion and I was confused and scared all week. I never knew who my mother was. My mom and this cousin could have been twins. When I was thirteen I found a packet of pictures from a camp out on my grandma’s table and could not for the life of me figure out who or when my mom had been camping. It wasn’t until my grandma came home and explained that it was the cousin. Her daughter looks exactly like me from the pictures I’ve seen, but I’ve not ever met her.

The thread runs even stronger in the male side of the family. There are six guys in my mom’s generation who could all be twins, including my uncle. There are four in my generation that all share the distinctive look, including my two first cousins. Unfortunately it is just not a good look. It involves a really heavy brow, a huge jaw, and lots and lots and LOTS of hair. They always remind me of Neanderthals, thus I secretly call them “the missing links.”

How shallow am I that this concerns me? When I see my child I know I will think he’s the most beautiful person to ever live. I know I’ll post way more pictures of him than you want to see, with captions saying “He’s the most beautiful child in the world, and unlike those other parents who are just blinded by love I really mean it.”

But I just really hope he doesn’t look like a Neanderthal.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 26th, 2005 at 8:02 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.