I'm Like My Mother, After All

“Hello Little Mabel,” my Aunt Ruth declared on meeting my newborn self. I’m quite sure my tiny nose must have wrinkled in disgust. But my mother, “big” Mabel, would have been pleased.

Many mothers like to think that their young daughters are simply smaller versions of themselves and will grow up to embrace the beliefs that they cherish and the way of life they picture for them. In retrospect, I know that’s what my mother had believed. Perhaps she, like many others, hoped to have a second chance at dashed dreams through me. What a shock it must have been for her to discover, when I was in my late teens that I had other plans.

Not many young women want to be thought of as “just like her mother” and I was no exception. Most of us want to be understood as our own person; very different from our mothers, especially if we’ve argued with her about the length of our hair, the clothes we liked to wear and the boy we wanted to marry.

A few years later, my own daughter was born. From the moment the nurse first put her into my arms, still groggy from anesthesia as I was, I instinctively knew my girl would never be a carbon copy of me and I was quite content with that. As she grew into a toddler, I was delighted by her bubbly personality, loving nature and eager curiosity. As she matured into a young woman, it was inevitable that our tastes in clothes and hair styles would also be different.

And yet, in the back of my mind, I had envisioned for her a life much like my own; married to her own prince charming and with a child or two of her own by the time she was thirty.

Well, she eventually found her prince, but marriage was not part of the picture and my career-minded daughter will never make me a grandmother. These are my issues, not hers, and I never want her to feel that she’s let me down in any way. My daughter has made me happy in so many other ways.

When she was still a teenager, my daughter was the one to point out that I was, after all, my mother’s daughter. “You sound just like Gramma,” she said casually one day, and I cringed inwardly. I knew it wasn’t a criticism, simply a statement of fact but wasn’t it enough to have inherited my mother’s long nose and triple A feet? Must I also end up sounding like her?

And yet, would I be my mother’s daughter if I didn’t mirror her in more than a few ways? I’ve had instilled in me my mother’s unwavering sense of honesty and her stubborn determination to carry on, no matter what. These are qualities I am glad to have received from her and to have endeavoured to pass on to my own daughter.

With age I’ve mellowed some and have come to terms with the fact that I’m more like my mother than I had first wanted to admit. I even look a lot like her, having inherited her lop-sided smile and her hazel eyes set in an oval-shaped face. I also realize that my own daughter is even less like me than I had first suspected. Instead, she looks like her paternal grandmother as a young woman.

It’s not our job, as mothers, to raise clones of ourselves. Our daughters can’t help inheriting some of our traits, either physically or ideologically, or perhaps, a little of both, Ultimately, though, they will be who God intended them to be. All we can do is to hope that we have influenced them to choose rightly in life and instilled in them a sense of responsibility to themselves and to others. Then we must let them be themselves – beautifully unique.

Author's Note

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