Every time I open my mouth recently, I have heard my Mum speaking through my lips. And it scares the hell out of me. It’s like I have turned into her. I hear her phrases and intonation, it’s like I have been possessed.
Please don’t get me wrong, I love my mother, she is an amazing woman who has been a fantastic home maker, is successful in her career and is a wonderful and loving grandmother. The moment when Sam met my mother’s boss at an open day was classic. He was dumbfounded to find out that there was someone who was the boss of Nana. She is the boss of everyone else so how could someone be the boss of her?
But the point is that no one wants to be their mother. As a teenager we do our very bests not to turn into our parents, we rail against them, laugh about them behind their backs and we vow not to do the same things when we are older. In our 20’s we begin to have an appreciation for them and then all of a sudden you are friends with the people who no longer have to discipline you.
No one can make me feel like a teenager again like my parents though. I guess that there is no end to their interfering and they can’t help from giving their opinions warranted or not. And just like when you are a teenager, they can silence you with a look and nothing is more upsetting then hearing or feeling that they are not angry, they are disappointed.
But the upside to all of this though is that they don’t want to be their parents either. My mother gets very upset when you say that she is beginning to act like my Nana, her mother. She hates it when she looks like her in photos and I guess that she is thinking in her mind, I will be a different mother and grandmother than my mother.
Then the icing on the cake, is that apparently we look alike. To those that have not met my sister, I am the spitting image of my mother. So not only do I sound like her, I now look like her. The last time I was at home, a friend visited from Sydney with instructions to get a photo of us side by side. The cringe moment is when we realised that we were dressed in the same colours and clothes. AGGGGGHHHHH it’s like invasion of the body snatchers. On their recent trip to the UK, on the day they arrive, I took my parents to my fav pub – The Castle, to meet my best mates. They were all astounded at how much we looked alike. In fact one of them told me that they thought they heard me talking and it turned out to be my Mum. They were a little stunned at the resemblance as well.
But as I have said there are worse things. I could be turning into someone completely foreign to my family. I could be turning into a biggotted old woman – which I am definitely not. I could be turning into a boring old woman – something that if the last few weeks are anything to go by I am definitely not. There are a few things that I have inherited from my Dad – we both like going up monuments and finding out about stuff. As much as he drove both me and Mum insane with constant questions about stuff, at least he was interested. (I can imagine what it would be like to have both him and my nephew in the same room asking constant questions. Maybe my Mum is a saint after all.) We both have a very similar sense of humour and we both enjoy good times with a cold alcoholic drink.
So I guess that the point is, although we all vow that we will not turn into our parents – in some way shape or form we do. We might just pick the best bits, but we definitely inherit something. So are you also turning into a clone of the older generation? How do you feel about that?
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