“He must look just like his dad!” the woman says with a bark of a laugh after a quick glance at my son. I laugh back, but as she moves away I am momentarily stricken. Not from surprise – these encounters have happened more times than I can count since my son was born – but I will never get used to the disorientating feeling I get when people don’t recognise the similarities that, to me, are so clear. 

I am a Black mixed woman with brown skin, brown eyes and tight, dark curls. My two-year-old is blonde and light-skinned with blue eyes. But beyond our contrasting colour palettes, we are twins. Our bone structure, eye shape, and even our curl patterns are remarkably similar. His mouth, I will concede, is my husband’s – but when I look at my child’s face, I see my own. I see my mother, my sister. So, it is not only hurtful, but baffling, to have that denied on such a regular basis. 

All mothers will know how maddening it is to be told you don’t resemble the child you carried and birthed and care for every day – whether it comes from a thoughtless midwife or tricky in-laws – but when this observation crosses racial lines, it becomes even more complicated, and potentially harmful. 

For women of colour, our identity as mothers is more precarious, less supported, less safe. From the moment we fall pregnant, we are at greater risk of harm than our white counterparts. We are more likely to experience mental health struggles – and less likely to receive adequate support. As our children grow, we are disproportionately exposed to the motherhood pay penalty. On top of this, to find ourselves questioned at every turn is utterly draining.  

More often than not, the people who feel the need to stop me in the street to tell me I look nothing like my son, are white. Why can’t they see what I see? Or maybe it’s that they don’t want to. I get the sense that this reaction is triggered by a deep discomfort – the discomfort of having a limited world view challenged in real-time.  

In contrast, women of colour have no problem identifying the relationship between my son and me. And they make a point of telling me. 

“Is that your mummy? Yes, you have the same face!” 

I heard the woman talking to my son as I browsed the supermarket shelves. And I knew, before I turned around. It was a Black woman. She gave me a warm smile of recognition. It is the kind of validation you don’t realise you need until you are denied it. Whenever it happens, I find myself almost welling up with the relief that they can see us, see me as a mother. 

All mothers need to be seen. And as non-white mothers of interracial children, this acknowledgment is even more deeply affirming. Studies have shown that the experience of ‘racial incongruence’ – when a parent and child are not perceived as having the same ethnicity – carries distinct psychological, social and emotional impacts. 

A 2025 study on the dynamics of interracial parenting found that mothers, specifically, faced constant “external scrutiny” and “intrusive questions”, with researchers noting that “the frequency with which these experiences manifested across couples [was] astounding."

Being forced to defend your biological or legal relationship with your child (“no, I’m not his childminder. Yes, I am related to him”) undermines a fundamental aspect of your identity. But there is an additional undercurrent of fear attached to being publicly questioned like this when you’re part of a minoritised group. There can be real-world consequences of not being believed by white people. 

Last year, a Black man was subjected to a horrific hate campaign after Tommy Robinson circulated a video of him playing with his white-presenting grandchildren. 

Becoming a mother is far from my first experience of this unsettling phenomenon. I felt it as a child, with my own white mother. I witnessed the dismay in her eyes, heard the defensiveness in her tone, when people asked if I was hers. And I was just as confused then as I am now. My mother and I have the same face. We so clearly belong to each other. It is acutely demoralising that – even three decades later – I have been forced to defend and explain my family structure in a similar way.

This is racism at its most subtle. Microaggressions packaged as curiosity. And lurking just beneath every seemingly innocuous question is entitlement. As mothers of colour, it is not our job to prove our legitimacy, or make sure strangers feel comfortable about our existence. We already have more than enough on our plates.  

It’s why these other moments stay with me. The woman in the supermarket who doesn’t hesitate. She looks at my son and sees me immediately. The women of colour who smile and nod without needing any additional information. It may seem like a small thing, but in those flashes of recognition, I am simply his mother – no explanation required.