Designer Baby

My mother is of Swedish descent — 5'11", blonde hair, green eyes. She modeled a for a little while in high school. To this day, she can’t shop without the cashiers pestering her for a date.

You’d think that my mother would be confident about her appearance, yet she has always hated one aspect about herself: her height.

At 5'11", she wasn’t able to wear high heels without towering over her dates. At grocery stores, strangers asked her to reach items high up on shelves.

Even so, must have been willing to give up high heels because she married my father who is also 5'11". Though his height wasn’t ideal, something else was very appealing about him: his genes.

Being Mexican-American, he was easily the tallest in his family. My mother was absolutely ecstatic when she met my grandmother, a little Mexican women who couldn’t have been more than 5'0", for the first time.

She did the math: her brothers and dad were around 6'7" and her sisters were close to 6'0". Her fiances’ family was in the 5'0" range.

“Our children will be a normal height!” She was thrilled at the prospect. After struggling with her height for years, at last she felt relief — at least she could save her children from the same problem.

Some time later, I was born. Black hair, dark skin, dark-brown eyes.

A few hours after the epidural had worn off, I was taken out of the incubator and handed to my mother to hold.

I was the same baby she held immediately after birth and felt had an old soul. But now with clarity of thought, she looked at me and felt that something was amiss.

My mom tried to hand me back to the nurse.

“You’ve made a mistake. This must be some Mexican couple’s baby.”