As happens in, I assume, every single family, all of the older relative I have ever met have tried to classify me according to whom I had the most resemblance.
She's got her father's hands. The hair, definitely her mother's side. She's a spitting image of her great-grandmother. No, I swear she looks more like your side of the family. But look at the skin! It's got to be her grandfather!
Eventually, though, it became obvious that I was most like my mother. Place a picture of her at seven next to a picture of me at seven, and you would be hard-pressed to tell which is which.
Until the summer before my thirteenth birthday, I had never seen a picture of my mother as a child. When Sister Cousin and I were looking through boxes of forgotten boxes, one afternoon in the attic, a picture of my mother and her four sisters commandeered nearly fifteen minutes of our attention.
Dis... C'est toi, ça? Où bien ta mère? Putain, c'est pas possible! Vous vous ressemblez trop!
I'd never noticed the similarity before, but as I grew older it became more apparent.
Mother and I now look so similar that someone has actually mistaken us for twins in a restaurant once (whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, I do not know.)
Several years ago, one particularly mild New Year's Eve, my family and I spent a week in City By The Sea, enjoying the warm weather and surprisingly balmy water.
I was walking back to the water, to enjoy a final dip before we left to go eat dinner at a restaurant, when I happened to run into my mother who was getting out of the water.
Time stopped.
Or rather, it zoomed forward.
I knew, in this one single instant, that I would look exactly like her in thirty years. I'd previously owned a red swimsuit like she was wearing now, which made it all the more easy to imagine.
Coming out of the water, she had the same hair as I knew I did in that moment. Dark, uncurled under the weight of the water. The same nose, with a little bump on the end. The same smile, thin lips open and teeth showing. The same posture, arms angled slightly out and shoulders hunched against the drips and the wind. The same gesture to tuck a strand of hair behind an ear, out of the way.
It's a strange feeling, to be confronted with one's future so certainly when one is only fifteen.
Tonight, I was walking home from the grocery store, thinking about my family, as I had been the whole afternoon. I noticed my shadow projected on the sidewalk by a streetlamp.
And it struck me, for some reason, that if I cut my hair short, like I've secretly been wanting to do for several years, I would look, save for the hair color, exactly like my grandmother sixty years earlier. The same nose, the same smile. I would look so very similar to all of my great-aunts, to my great-grandmother. And to who knows who else?
It's an odd feeling. It's terrifying to know what I will look like in the future, almost exactly, but it is also, in a very shallow and selfish way, oddly comforting.
My grandmother is eighty and regularly hikes and skis and swims. My mother is nearly fifty and can wear a two-piece bathing suit unashamedly. My great-grandmother lived to be ninety-six and to meet ten of her great-grandchildren.
The thing with family resemblance is--it tends to run in families.
She's got her father's hands. The hair, definitely her mother's side. She's a spitting image of her great-grandmother. No, I swear she looks more like your side of the family. But look at the skin! It's got to be her grandfather!
Eventually, though, it became obvious that I was most like my mother. Place a picture of her at seven next to a picture of me at seven, and you would be hard-pressed to tell which is which.
Until the summer before my thirteenth birthday, I had never seen a picture of my mother as a child. When Sister Cousin and I were looking through boxes of forgotten boxes, one afternoon in the attic, a picture of my mother and her four sisters commandeered nearly fifteen minutes of our attention.
Dis... C'est toi, ça? Où bien ta mère? Putain, c'est pas possible! Vous vous ressemblez trop!
I'd never noticed the similarity before, but as I grew older it became more apparent.
Mother and I now look so similar that someone has actually mistaken us for twins in a restaurant once (whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, I do not know.)
Several years ago, one particularly mild New Year's Eve, my family and I spent a week in City By The Sea, enjoying the warm weather and surprisingly balmy water.
I was walking back to the water, to enjoy a final dip before we left to go eat dinner at a restaurant, when I happened to run into my mother who was getting out of the water.
Time stopped.
Or rather, it zoomed forward.
I knew, in this one single instant, that I would look exactly like her in thirty years. I'd previously owned a red swimsuit like she was wearing now, which made it all the more easy to imagine.
Coming out of the water, she had the same hair as I knew I did in that moment. Dark, uncurled under the weight of the water. The same nose, with a little bump on the end. The same smile, thin lips open and teeth showing. The same posture, arms angled slightly out and shoulders hunched against the drips and the wind. The same gesture to tuck a strand of hair behind an ear, out of the way.
It's a strange feeling, to be confronted with one's future so certainly when one is only fifteen.
Tonight, I was walking home from the grocery store, thinking about my family, as I had been the whole afternoon. I noticed my shadow projected on the sidewalk by a streetlamp.
And it struck me, for some reason, that if I cut my hair short, like I've secretly been wanting to do for several years, I would look, save for the hair color, exactly like my grandmother sixty years earlier. The same nose, the same smile. I would look so very similar to all of my great-aunts, to my great-grandmother. And to who knows who else?
It's an odd feeling. It's terrifying to know what I will look like in the future, almost exactly, but it is also, in a very shallow and selfish way, oddly comforting.
My grandmother is eighty and regularly hikes and skis and swims. My mother is nearly fifty and can wear a two-piece bathing suit unashamedly. My great-grandmother lived to be ninety-six and to meet ten of her great-grandchildren.
The thing with family resemblance is--it tends to run in families.
2 comments:
Sounds like there could be far less attractive folk to resemble.
This was a beautiful post. The love you feel for her is evident in the tender way you describe her, and I can tell you share more than just a physical resemblance.
Plus, if your mother can still wear a two-piece then you must have great genes!
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