Not everyone immediately recognizes that Sophia Blake and 4-year-old Tiara are mother and daughter. Tiara is an adorable little girl with blue eyes and white skin, while her mother is dark-skinned. This always raises questions for people, and hospitals and educational institutions ask Sophia Blake for documents that prove Tiara is her daughter.

For Sophia herself, the birth of a child with white skin came as a shock.”I was so shocked when she was born I actually said to the midwife, “Is she mine?” I simply couldn’t get over her being so pale and blue-eyed. Doctors explained it was a million to one chance that Tiara was so white and it was likely there was a white gene in my family which had remained dormant until now.”

A recent hurdle was when Tiara started school. “When Tiara ran out of class and shouted “mum” to me I knew what those mothers who don’t know me were thinking – that Tiara must be adopted.”

Sophia Blake lives with her daughters in the suburbs of Birmingham, England. Her oldest daughter from her first marriage is 17 and has dark skin like her mother. Sophia’s husband Christopher lives separately, and little Tiara spends most of her time with her mother and sister.

Sofia admits that the hardest thing to explain to her daughter is why they look so different. Because of her age, she doesn’t understand the explanation about race mixing and it confuses her.