There are very few parents who will argue that their child belongs to them, but Alex McCurry was in such a situation and had to go online to explain it to the world.
“I try to handle it with grace and patience because this is not the most common-looking kind of family, but at the end of the day, it’s none of anybody’s business,” she told People of how she handles comments about her white child. “Like, as long as the kid looks healthy and is doing great and looks like they’re in a loving situation, that’s what matters. So coming up to us and saying anything is really exposing [the] racial bias that you have.”
After the birth of her youngest child, whom she affectionately calls “Pudge Pudge,” McCurry, who has been sharing content about her parenting online for years, was flooded with questions over the child’s parentage.
McCurry said she’s been working to change the tone of her page lately, showing more interactions with her kids rather than just talking about how their family looks. Although she is aware that the comments will likely continue, she doesn’t care much about what other people think.
“I try to keep up, but I’m only one person and I’m tired,” she said, joking that other parents know it’s “next to impossible” to keep up with three growing, active kids at the same time.
McCurry is a Black woman, and her husband, Rob McCurry, is White. Pudge Pudge, now 3, was born with light skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes. While the couple shares two other children — Chub Chub, 8, and Bubba, 6 — neither of their other kids is as light-skinned as Pudge Pudge.
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McCurry described how shocked she was when she saw her last daughter.
“The first time I laid eyes on her, I was like, ‘she’s light,’” McCurry said. “And I looked at her ears, and they were pink, because sometimes with darker-skinned children, their ears will come out darker, and that’s like an indicator of what color they’ll be. But her ears had no color.”
“I’ll be honest with you, one of the things I thought was somebody made a mistake,” McCurry recalled, noting that she and her husband used in vitro fertilization (IVF) when conceiving Pudge Pudge. “Nobody made a mistake.”
According to her, Rob reacted visibly to the skin tone of their youngest kid during her C-section, although he attempted to hide it to keep her calm.
“I was like, ‘Is the baby okay? Like, what’s going on?’ And he goes, ‘Everything’s fine. It’s all fine, don’t worry about it,'” she recounted. “I don’t know if he knew that I heard him, but he was like, ‘We’re gonna need the test on her,’ pointing to me.”
They ordered a paternity test because they thought there might have been an error in the IVF procedure. According to McCurry, the nurse came back and affirmed that Pudge Pudge is “biologically your baby”.
McCurry received a number of comments on her videos of her home life with her children, some of which questioned Pudge Pudge’s parentage. One viewer even implied that Rob had cheated on her.
She has continued to respond to seemingly endless questions and comments with grace. However, it is not just online critics who are comfortable doubting if Pudge Pudge is her real child; she claimed the first time she had such an interaction was in person.
“This lady complimented me on being such a great nanny, and I was like, ‘I’m her mom,'” Alex said of their first encounter.
She was inspired by that to create a video on her TikTok, which swiftly gained popularity.
“I was like, some of y’all haven’t studied enough biology to really understand or have that conversation,” she recalled.
However, not all of these contacts were well-intended. As an example, McCurry described how a woman who thought she and her best friend had stolen a baby from another family followed them around a grocery store.
“I’ll be honest with you, if I had seen another parent that looks like us, I would look, but I don’t know that I’d say anything,” McCurry continued. “I’d be like, well, I guess that’s just a different-looking family than I expected.”
Despite the comments she continuously receives, McCurry has continued to share her parenting journey online to showcase how some families look different, emphasizing that love is more important than a “traditional-looking” nuclear family.
She said her husband has only had to step in and intervene in one of these confrontations before, otherwise, she tries to handle it herself.
“I have cousins that are also biracial and they look like Pudge Pudge. So I personally am used to it, but I can see how people may not be used to it,” she said.
She makes an effort to take the time to empower all three of her children by educating them about their past, since she understands that Pudge Pudge will likely be asked about her appearance as she gets older.
“It’s age-appropriate, small things. Like this is where Ireland is and you have ancestors that have come from there, but you also [have] Dominican heritage,” she explained. “As they get older, we will continue to teach them more about their heritage and the history that they need to learn too. But for now, it’s instilling that positive energy in them about their heritage.”
She added that she plays James Brown’s “I’m Black and I’m Proud” for all three of her children, encouraging them to recite the lyrics in order to promote that “positive energy” in their heritage.
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