Mixed feelings

'I love my mixed race baby - but why does she feel so alien?'

...mixed-race children can receive a hostile welcome from both white and black communities. Being neither one thing nor another may get you on the cover of Vogue, but it isn't an easy way to make friends. But this is 2007, surely things are more enlightened than that? I hope so, but I fear not.

One reason for my fear is my own mixed reactions to my daughter. Don't get me wrong, I love her. She is the child I didn't think I'd have after my first marriage broke up. She is the only granddaughter in our family and we all dote on her. But when I turn to the mirror in my bedroom to admire us together, I am shocked. She seems so alien. With her long, dark eyelashes and shiny, dark brown hair, she doesn't look anything like me.

But it is more than that. I am frightened, frightened of others' reactions to her, as well as my own. I didn't think of myself as racist and yet my daughter has shown me a side of myself about which I feel deeply uncomfortable. Even admitting to having mixed feelings about her not being blonde and blue eyed, I feel disloyal and incredibly guilty. I know the obvious comment is that I must have known how a child of our union would look when I married an Indian man, but it is a wise woman who thinks that far ahead when she falls in love.  (emphasis mine)

Lowri Turner, who married a dark-skinned Indian guy, seems shocked that the child of that union isn't blonde and blue-eyed like her other two children. Doh! She worries for her daughter about how people will react to her being 'mixed race'. She's right to worry. Her daughter is only 12 weeks old and she's already being treated as an 'alien' ...

BY HER OWN FUCKING MOTHER!