Mirror, Mirror In My Mom

When I was just a little girl,
I asked my mother what will I be.
Will I be pretty, will I be rich?
Here's what she said to me:
"Que Sera Sera, Whatever Will Be, Will Be."

It seems to happen to my daughter and I every time we're shopping for makeup. Since she's not quite 14, that's not very often. Nevertheless, here we were in the department store trying to purchase a few basics that wouldn't turn her into a teenage Tammy Faye Bakker when the "cosmetics consultant" said: "Next week we're having free makeovers. You two could do a mother-daughter thing." I chuckled and my daughter gave her a bewildered and somewhat annoyed look. Later, as we walked away, she said to me: "You know, I don't know why people think we look alike because I don't think we do at all." I sympathetically patted her on the back and said: "I'm sorry honey, but we do." I was OK with this. She was not.

I know that's a bitter pill for my daughter, or perhaps any daughter to swallow. Our mom's face is the one that's been staring at us since birth. When we were babies, it was an oasis of comfort and understanding. As we got older, it was still the one we ran to, or sometimes hid from if we were in trouble. When the teen years arrived, filled with intense self-examination and emotions, it was a face that we simultaneously loved and hated. It was the face which we gazed at with more scrutiny than our own. (Only because staring in the mirror constantly would be so weird!) We looked at that face, mapped it in our mind and made mental notes on what we would do differently to upgrade the family genes.

My daughter and I look very much alike. In fact, my best friend since 4th grade took a photo of my daughter and showed it to her father recently. She asked him if he knew who it was. "Of course," he replied. "It's Karen." It was a story that amused me and irritated my daughter.

I understand her feelings. Ironically, it's one of the few issues between us that I don't take personally. You see, as much as my daughter looks like me, I look like my mother. It seems to be the common denominator between generations, for better or for worse. I'm sure that when I was 14, I reacted similarly when people commented on the resemblance between my mother and I. I only hope that I had the good sense to be subtle in my objections.

Today, I think of my Mom's face as a comforting roadmap of the future. I look at her softened features and I instantly feel at home, even though we live 90 miles apart. I see the wrinkles and crows feet as testimony to a life lived; sometimes sad, sometimes joyous, and often challenging due in no small part to my stubborn attitude, another trait still swimming in the gene pool.

Although none of the women in our family have been blessed with the Demi Moore gene, as in the freakish ability to get better looking as we age, I'm very much at peace with the idea that I, in my middle ages, and my mom, in her senior years, are easily pegged as mother and daughter. Maybe part of that is having friends who have lost their moms much too early and who would give anything just to gaze upon that face again.

To me, the resemblance between the women in my family is a sort of badge of honor. It's that genetic stamp that connects us forever, whether we like it or not. Eventually we learn to accept it. My daughter will get there someday, despite her best efforts.