Recently, scrolling through my news feed on Facebook, I came across a post by a girl from work. It was a picture of her and her mother side-by-side, same cute smile, same long, blonde hair, same eyes crinkled by their grins. She tagged it "#TWINS.” “Vote for me and my mom!" the caption said, with a link to a local radio station hosting a mother-daughter lookalike contest for Mother's Day. Intrigued, I clicked on the link to see the other contestants. But as I scrolled through them, I felt unexpectedly deflated. My mom and I would never win this contest. It would hardly be worth entering. 

I'm biracial. I look neither wholly like my mom or dad. All three of us have different coloring. I have features from each of them: my mom's dimples, my dad's nose. But no one would ever look at my mother and me and say we looked like sisters, let alone twins. When I was growing up, strangers mistook her for my nanny. When she chaperoned me and a friend who shared her ethnicity, people assumed my friend was her daughter. These days, when we're together, I suspect some think I'm her hired help. I recognize when others try to figure out how we're related. I can practically see them arriving at the conclusion my mother adopted me. "She looks just like you!" said no one ever.

Children are attuned to the associations between appearance and resemblance; look at self-portraits of them with their parents, and you'll note they often draw themselves as the adults in miniature. Having a parent that didn't look like me often set me up for mean-spirited comments kids are apt to make. Worse, they mocked ethnic stereotypes in my presence, feeling safe to do so because I passed as nondescript. What they didn't know, and I felt too hurt to tell them about, was that they made fun of people who looked like my mom. The only thing that saved me from the same treatment was that I didn't look like her. That this was a safety net made me simultaneously relieved and guilty. I sought out kindred companionship with other multiracial children. We referred to ourselves as "mutts" or "hybrids," trying to take ownership for who we were and what we looked like.

Society equates looking like someone as being like someone. This always stings because it implies the opposite is also true. My mom and I are incredibly alike, and it has nothing to do with how we look. If you catch me at the right moment, you can see my mother's mannerisms in me, but that's hardly the extent of our similarities. As a child I was like her little shadow, never far from her side. I have her no-nonsense approach to problem-solving, her plucky attitude in the face of the unexpected, her wry sense of humor. These she instilled in me as armor against the world, one I needed as I went through growing pains. It was there in the face of teenage heartbreak, a diagnosis of cancer in the family, a bewildering move to college. As I get older, I recognize more of her in me than I ever wanted to, although I'm increasingly grateful for it. What I have from my mom runs deeper than any of my physical features. And it makes me no less her daughter because of it.

I hear often from friends who are parents how nice it is to see themselves in their children. I asked my mom once if anyone told her when I was born that I looked like her. She waved it off in her usual, pragmatic way. "Of course not," she said. "All babies look the same when they're born." I get the impression our lack of resemblance bothers me more than it does her. She is simply thankful to have a daughter who is happy and healthy.

At the end of the day, the contest is a silly, lighthearted game, meant to celebrate women and their mothers who admittedly, adorably, resemble one another. I'm sensitive to it because being told I look like my mom, and by extension, being told I am like my mom, has always been withheld from me. I know when seeing young children, it's natural to tell the parents, "Oh, they look like you!" The traits my mother passed on to me developed slowly over many years; a person could hardly be expected to recognize them in a baby. I know all this. Most importantly, I know the bond we share doesn't depend on looking like each other. We might never win a mother-daughter lookalike contest, but we're more alike than a photo could ever show.

-Lisa Ruohoniemi

Lisa Ruohoniemi is a Virginia-based writer and pharmacist. Her stories have been published in outlets as varied as the Christian Science Monitor and EHospice News (an online resource for professionals in the hospice field); she is also pursuing a career in medical writing. She is the 2009 recipient of the first place prize for the University of Connecticut’s Aetna Writing in the Disciplines First Year Writing Award. Also an avid traveler, she can often be found obsessively crafting itineraries for her next trip, real or imagined. Her travel stories are chronicled at www.canuckrunningamuck.com and visually on Instagram as @canuckrunningamuck.