I said something to a friend last week and stopped mid-sentence because my mother had said it first.
Not the words. The way. The particular rhythm of it, the way the thought built and turned at the end, the way I used my hands for emphasis the way she uses her hands, the way the sentence landed with a kind of gentle absoluteness that does not ask to be argued with. I heard her in my mouth and stopped.
My friend said: what?
I said: nothing. And then I finished the sentence.
I spent a long time not wanting to become my mother.
That is not a criticism of her. It is the truth of a certain kind of daughter in a certain kind of era, when the message was that your mother’s life was the template you were supposed to exceed, that becoming her was a failure of ambition, a failure of progress, a settling. I absorbed that message and did not fully question it until I was old enough to see what it was doing to my relationship to myself and to her.
She is eighty years old and she has been brave in ways that no one documented. She raised children without a safety net. She worked without anyone tracking her contributions. She loved in the hard years with a stubbornness that I understand now as a form of courage even when I did not understand it as a child.
And I am becoming her.
Not the whole of her, not the parts that were shaped by things that happened to her that I did not inherit, not the silences she kept because her generation kept them. But the way she pays attention. The way she notices what matters. The way she still laughs at her own jokes before she finishes them, which I also do, which my children find embarrassing in the same way I found it embarrassing, which I hope my children inherit because it means you find yourself genuinely funny and that is not nothing.
I am becoming her and I have stopped being afraid of it.
I am, slowly, becoming grateful for it.
