Is anyone else who is, like me, a woman of a certain age (I love that phrase. It’s so much nicer than middle aged or older) surprised when they look in the mirror? And I don’t mean surprised in the best way.
When I look into the mirror each morning, I expect to see my former face – the one I saw when I was in my 30s. That expectation is based, I think, on how I often feel – like I can do anything and the future is waiting for me. For the most part, I still feel young. And then I see my face, realize that it’s 20 or 25 years later and that future is now.
I see my mother’s face. I’m not an exact replica of her, but the general shape of my face is the same and my (real) hair colour – which makes itself apparent annoyingly often – is hers as well. It’s always a big surprise to see her staring back at me.
The bigger thing for me, I think, is that I not only see my mother in the mirror, but I feel like I’ve turned into her. It’s like we were running a relay and now she’s passed the baton on to me.
It started when I had a child of my own and started using the phrases and not-so-subtle guilt trips my mother used on me. I always swore I would never use those phrases or guilt my son into doing anything the way my mother did me, but – lo, and behold (one of my mother’s phrases) – there I was, as exasperated by my son as my mother was by me, and saying to him exactly what my mother said to me. At some point I realized what I was doing, and I mentally gave myself a piece of my mind (another of my mother’s phrases). It didn’t stop, though … what I heard and learned as a child I passed on to my own.
The next step of the transformation was turning into a domestic ... I was going to say “goddess”, but that would be pushing it. I was a stay at home mom who cooked real meals every day, had baked snacks waiting for my son when he came home from school, organized the household … everything that my mother did. I started thinking that her weekly cleaning of our house – a thorough, spic and span cleaning – wasn’t such a bad idea, even though I had pooh-poohed it throughout my teens and twenties. (I even tried doing it for awhile, until I realized that I was the only one in our house who cared what it looked like, so gave it up.) I often visualized my mother doing the same things in the kitchen and around the house where I grew up. Even though the days of my own domesticity have long gone, the images of my mother remain.
And now I look in the mirror and discover that I’ve taken on not only my mother’s face but her body as well. Gone is the shapeliness of my youth; instead, I have the thicker-set middle aged body that looks remarkably like my mother’s.
The baton has been passed. I never even knew we were in this race until I realized the baton came to me. But now I get to choose how the rest of the race will be run. Will I continue in my mother’s course or will I get off track and find my own way?
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