NEED TO KNOW
- Alex McCurry shares three children with her husband, Rob McCurry
- The couple’s youngest child, whom they lovingly call “Pudge Pudge,” was born with blonde hair and blue eyes
- Alex often gets comments about her daughter’s skin tone, but tells PEOPLE she tries to “handle it with grace and patience”
One woman is handling questions about her child’s parentage with grace.
Alex McCurry has been posting content online about her parenting for years, but after the birth of her youngest child, whom she lovingly refers to as “Pudge Pudge,” she received a barrage of questions about her child’s parentage.
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 are as light-skinned as Pudge Pudge.
“I’ll be honest with you, one of the things I thought was somebody made a mistake,” Alex tells PEOPLE, noting that she and her husband used in vitro fertilisation (IVF) when conceiving Pudge Pudge. “Nobody made a mistake.”
Alex recounts how, when having her C-section, Rob visibly reacted to their youngest child’s skin color, though he tried to play it off to keep her calm through the procedure.
“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 recounts. “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.”
Thinking there might have been a mistake in the IVF process, a paternity test was ordered. Despite the initial doubts, Alex says the nurse returned and confirmed that Pudge Pudge is “biologically your baby.”
“The first time I laid eyes on her, I was like, ‘she’s light,’” Alex recalls. “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.”
As Alex continued sharing videos of her home life with her kids online, she received various comments questioning Pudge Pudge’s parentage, with one commenter even suggesting that Rob cheated on her.
“I was like, yes, he cheated and got me pregnant with his cheating baby,” Alex says sarcastically.
Despite shooting down any suggestions of infidelity, she’s continued to field the questions and comments, responding politely to the seemingly never-ending queries. In response to one commenter who asked how to block her page, she made a video showing the process.
Unfortunately, it’s not just online commenters who feel comfortable questioning if Pudge Pudge is biologically her daughter; she says 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 recounts of that first interaction.
The experience prompted her to make a video on her TikTok, which quickly went viral. “I was like, some of y’all haven’t studied enough biology to really understand or have that conversation,” she adds.
Not all of those interactions have been as well-intended, though. In another instance, Alex recounts that she and her best friend were followed in a grocery store by a woman who suspected they had stolen a baby from another family.
“At first, my reaction was like, why would somebody steal a baby? Like, do you know how stressful it is to have kids?” she jokes.
“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,” Alex continues. “I’d be like, well, I guess that’s just a different-looking family than I expected.”
Despite the comments she continuously receives, Alex 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.
“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 emphasizes. “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.”
Alex says her husband has only had to step in and intervene in one of these confrontations before, but 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 says.
Though she knows Pudge Pudge will probably be asked about her appearance as she grows up, she tries to take the time to educate all three of her children on their background in an empowering way.
“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 explains. “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 also says she has all three of her kids listen to James Brown’s song “I’m Black and I’m Proud,” encouraging them to repeat the lyrics back to enforce that “positive energy” in their heritage.
Lately, Alex says she’s been trying to shift her page’s message, showing more interactions with her children than just discussions about their family’s appearance. She knows the comments will probably continue, but others’ opinions aren’t her highest priority.
“I try to keep up, but I’m only one person and I’m tired,” she says, joking that other parents know it’s “next to impossible” to keep up with three growing, active kids at the same time.
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