For many years, February was a difficult month for me after the death of my parents. My father died on February 15 and my mother’s birthday is February 27. For years their loss cast a pall over the month. I missed them terribly, but time has changed things. I see my father often in the face of my son and I run into my mother daily each time I pass the hall mirror.
I think I began to realize I was morphing into my mother when I first read a quip by Erma Bombeck who shared a story of putting on a sweater and seeing her mother’s arm come out of the sleeve. I laughed hysterically before I realized it would only be funny if I could relate to it. In a panic, I took a long hard look at my hands. Sure enough, they bore a striking resemblance to my mother's. When did that happen?
Then there was the less than tactful family friend who said at my mother’s wake, “You look more like your mother than she does.” Now that’s a wake-up call. For a time I was disturbed that I was unable to craft my own “self.” But part of my maturing process has included becoming comfortable with the fact that I am not just my own person. I am my mother’s daughter.
I no longer need to be told that I look like her. I see it, as much as I see that I bite the tip of my finger when I’m thinking, just like she did. Sometimes I’ll carry a Hersey Bar in my pocketbook, like she did, and we both share a penchant for stenographers’ notebooks, jigsaw puzzles and birds.
And I am set in my ways, as she was. I have had the same framed child’s paintings, my artistic son’s first masterpieces, standing on the mantel in my kitchen for 20 years. She had a blue plate with a furry skunk on her backsplash.
From her I learned that tea is the soother for all of life’s problems, and I have had more than my fair share, of tea that is, since she died. And though I already had children of my own then, I don’t think I really began to grow up and grow into me until I had to bear her death.
“When I stopped seeing my mother with the eyes of a child, I saw the woman who helped me give birth to myself.” -Nancy Friday
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