It was not until my mother was in her early 80s that I was rooting through some old family photos and ran across the picture of my mother featured in this post.  The minute I saw it, I realized there was something very familiar about that facial profile.  Looking back through the other photos, I found a photo of another young child with a bowl cut hairstyle, a rounded face, and a wide closed-mouthed smile.  And to my shock, that child was me. It was like looking in a mirror, only 33 years earlier. We nearly could have been twins.  There was no way around it.  I do resemble my mother. I very much resemble my mother.

If you had told me this from between the time I was a teenager and the time I was middle-aged, I would have been aghast. For many reasons, I was desperate to carve out my own identity. My mother was desperate to maintain some type of tie to me, especially since I was the last child. So I fought every suggestion she wanted to make, starting with how I wore my hair and when I had my bangs cut. When I was a child, she tried to cut it for me, but you can see how that turned out. Somewhere around the third grade, I cried after one haircut because every other girl in my class was going to a hairdresser to get hers done and their bangs were nowhere near that short. I just knew everyone was laughing at me behind my back for wearing those bangs that resembled Moe’s in The Three Stooges. So my mother begrudgingly let me have a neighbor, who had a beautician studio in her basement, cut my hair. It took me several more years to stop my mother from telling her how short to cut my hair.

Why is it that how we wear our hair is such an integral part of how we see ourselves? All I know is that winning that autonomy over how my hair was styled was the beginning of having the confidence to choose my own path. The following Easter I put my foot down when my mother picked out an Easter dress that was A) yellow and B) extra chiffony. I knew myself well even in fourth grade to realize yellow was the worst color for me to wear and that I was never going to be the chiffony type. I refused to wear that dress again and that was also the end of my mother picking out my clothes.

Naturally over the years, there were many other battles won (and sometimes lost) between my mother and myself. But somewhere in my fifties, I began to realize that no matter how much she annoyed me, she always had my best interests at heart. And that is when I began to take note- and delight – in our similarities.

We both had crooked smiles (probably has something to do with genetics) until my mother finally needed to get dentures. My mother loved to laugh at the silliest things and so do I. Actually, so did my father so I have a double dose of wackiness. Christmas was her favorite holiday. When Christmas came, Mom decorated the tree until you couldn’t fit one more ornament or the whole tree would come down. I also love Christmas and I especially love decorating our large (artificial, but hey – no pine needles) tree. One Christmas, my mother came to the house and just oohed and ahhed over how beautiful my tree was. And that made me proud. If I had achieved Mom’s approval, I had arrived as far as Christmas Tree splendor was concerned.

And there are countless other similarities I am discovering over the years. But this photo really pulls it together. I am my mother’s child, there is no doubt about it. And I couldn’t be more proud.