I’ve always been proud my hands look just like my mother’s, even though we’ve had a strained relationship for most of my life. That’s because my mother’s hands look like her mother’s hands, and I never had a chance to meet my grandmother Ruth, although I was named after her. Somehow knowing my hands connected me to my matrilineal line gave me a feeling of belonging.
When my husband and I decided to use donor eggs to have a baby, resemblance was one of my first questions. Would my child’s hands look like mine? Or would his or her appearance belong to another family I’d never met?
At the time my husband, Rob, and I were choosing a donor, whether our child would resemble me was one of my biggest worries. Not just our hands, but the rest of us, too.
After all, we are living in a time when ancestry and genetic connection seem more important than ever — with more than 15 million people around the world spitting in a tube to send their DNA to 23andMe as of October 2024. Meanwhile, our Instagram feeds are filled with moms and daughters in matching pajamas, and there’s been a continued fascination with twins and doppelgangers. I’d seen friends with new babies post photos on social media and watched as their followers oohed and aahed about how their children looked exactly like them. I’d even done it, once telling a friend her newborn was a replica of her. Her husband turned to me and said, “DNA, it’s a powerful thing,” and I shook my head and thought to myself: “Yes. Yes, it is.”
Of course when we began pursuing egg donation, I understood, and made peace with, the fact that I’d be carrying a fetus made from my husband’s sperm and a stranger’s egg inside my body for nine months. It seemed vital, though impossible, to know whether our resulting baby’s face would forever remind me of another woman. And in turn of what I thought of then as my own failure.
The more I immersed myself in the world of donor eggs, the more I realized I wasn’t alone. In Facebook groups I frequented, other donor-egg recipients clung to the field of epigenetics and the idea that our DNA can be modified by the environment. Epigenetics gave them hope that even though they didn’t share DNA with their offspring, maybe they could still look like them. For better or worse, I’d spoken to a few geneticists and knew enough to understand this was highly unlikely and not really how epigenetics worked. But I also felt the longing behind their desire, the yearning for proof there was no wedge between them and their child.
Illogical or not, resemblance seemed to be one of the primary emotional concerns of donor-egg recipients. From the outside, it’s easy to wonder why. What is it about family resemblance that is so persistent and powerful — even when we know resemblance has nothing to do with love?
We understand plenty of families adopt children who look nothing like them and still feel bonded with them. And even those who have kids who are genetically related to them don’t always look alike. In fact, when I told our fertility doctor I was worried about how important resemblance was in this whole process, he reminded me kids often come out looking more like distant cousins or even great-grandparents than their biological mother or father. And yet, the desire to see ourselves in our children lingers.
What is it about family resemblance that is so persistent and powerful — even when we know resemblance has nothing to do with love?
While I was pregnant, I kept thinking about a factoid I’d found in my research: A study out of Cambridge University revealed women who used donor eggs didn’t bond as easily with their babies. The 85 women in this particular study didn’t smile as much at their child or respond as quickly — and because of that, the child was less likely to involve its mother by holding out or waving toys. There it was, my biggest fear — that I wouldn’t feel as attached to our baby because we didn’t share a genetic connection — cemented in the research.
I made a note in my journal: “Make sure to smile at our baby.”
When I think about that study now, I think about its flaws. How much of the mothers’ lack of attachment to their children was connected to the fact they didn’t look alike? Maybe the stress and anxiety of parenting had gotten to them? And who’s to say whether those 85 mothers would have smiled at their babies more if they were genetically related? Maybe these ones were just nervous because they had researchers watching them from behind a two-way mirror?
And what did these early interactions predict about the future? A relationship is long, isn’t it? Just because these mothers didn’t smile at their children then, did that mean they never would?
Nonetheless, when I read the study at the time, I figured there was no way to tell whether I’d be a mother who smiled at my kid or not. I decided to be hypervigilant to cover all my bases. In my mind that meant my baby and I should look alike, and I figured the best chance of that was to find a donor who resembled me.
Each clinic has its own rules about how aspiring parents can access donor databases. For privacy reasons, some clinics don’t allow clients to see any photos of the donors at all. Others allow only baby pictures. Because of the Wild West nature of this still-stigmatized industry, matchmaking agencies have cropped up as intermediaries, offering to help prospective individuals and couples locate the “perfect” donor who will produce the golden egg.
As more and more women have decided to use donor eggs, the demand for eggs of different ethnicities, nationalities, and even religious backgrounds has blossomed, and clinics have found themselves in the awkward position of needing to “recruit” women from high-demand groups, offering them larger incentives to donate their eggs.
Of course, there are lots of reasons why someone might want a donor egg from someone of the same ethnicity as them, but resemblance is certainly one of them. Some egg banks offer AI-powered facial feature analysis to help identify donor matches who most resemble the would-be mother. When my husband and I were searching for an egg donor, that wasn’t an option for us at our clinic. In my desperation for something to control in that chaotic moment, I might have wanted to upload a photo of myself into the system. I might have believed that if we found a donor whose facial features looked like mine, it would mean magically our genetics would be that much more similar too.
I know now that resemblance is about so much more than whether your facial symmetry can be detected by an algorithm. And creating a family is about so much more than genetics.
Instead, a funny thing happened. We picked a donor, as someone in one of my donor-egg recipient groups suggested, who I’d “want to have a coffee with.” Another way of saying it is she seemed familiar to me. After flipping through photos of her as a baby, a toddler, and an adult, I told myself she looked like she could be my cousin. Not that I look like my actual cousins. But in theory she could have been my cousin.
Six years later, we have a 4-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and you know what? People who don’t know us exclaim “She looks just like you!” when we enter a room or walk down the street together. Just as often, though, strangers and even those who know us say “She looks just like her dad!” We’ve been told she also resembles a cousin and an aunt on her dad’s side. All the competing messages make me realize one thing: Everyone sees what they want to see.
I know I’m in our daughter’s facial expressions and in the intonations in her voice. When she looks into my eyes and says “Mom, we look like twins,” I know objectively that’s not true, but I take her to mean she feels so close to me — and I to her — that it almost feels like we’re the exact same person.
I know now that resemblance is about so much more than whether your facial symmetry can be detected by an algorithm. And creating a family is about so much more than genetics. Despite what we’re told in rom-coms and greeting cards, love isn’t automatic or even guaranteed. It doesn’t happen all at once either, but over minutes and hours and months and years. Love is a process of commitment, a practice — smiling at my baby is mothering. Mothering is also holding her as she cries. Mothering has nothing to do with looking like her, which of course I’d always known, but as I grasped for certainty during the chaotic time when I wasn’t sure if I’d ever have a baby, resemblance seemed like something tangible I could hold onto. Over time, through the act of caretaking, my love for my daughter has become so overwhelming that I can’t imagine having ever not loved her. Her hands don’t look like mine. And yet, there’s no question in my mind that she belongs to me, and I to her.
Ruthie Ackerman’s debut memoir, The Mother Code, is out now from Random House.
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