The apple doesn't fall far...

My shiny new Ontario Health Card just arrived in the mail. When I opened it and looked at the picture, I couldn't help but think of how much I look like my mother. That's not a bad thing, it's just strange. Other people mention it all the time, particularly my sisters, mostly to tease me. For example, when I got my first pair of plastic rimmed glasses both of them remarked how very similar I looked to pictures of Mom when she was not much older than me. As I grow older, and more self-aware, I do realize how much I am becoming like my mother, in more ways than one.

I repeat: This is not a bad thing. But it can be strange to realize you are turning into the likeness of another person, both in physical appearance and behaviour. But I think part of me has always known it.

I'm listening to a Cowboy Junkies CD (black eyed man, "A Horse in the Country") and a song came on with the lyrics "And all my friends have settled down/become their mothers and their fathers/without a sound." *Shudder.*

It's not that becoming your parents is a bad thing - in fact, my parents are wonderful people, and I think I should consider myself lucky to be like them. But at the same time, I'm a completely different person, and I think evolution of the world only happens when people change and strive to be different and strive to change. I love my Mom, but I don't want to be exactly like her. I can be like her, without being her.

She worries, she needs to feel needed, her house is her domain to the extreme degree of cleanliness, she wants everything to be just right, she feels the weight of the world on her shoulders, but doesn't know how to fix it, she gets hurt easily, she has let herself go, she doesn't get out enough, she is so damn stuck in her ways.

Am I describing me or my mother you ask? Well, for the most part, my mother, but I can see a lot of myself in those negative aspects of her. OR what I see as negative aspects. She has a bunch of other really positive qualities too. She is full of love for her family, she takes care of us, she makes sure we have everything we need, she takes an interest in her family, she has spent countless hours caring for our elderly family members, other people's kids, pets, etc., she is unconditionally supportive of whatever we do, she's a good friend to her friends, she's a good person.

So why this age-old dilemma of "becoming my mother?" I don't know. But I know others can definitely relate.