The face in the mirror

 When I look in the mirror, I find my mother staring back at me

Increasingly over the past few years I find that when I look into the mirror, I find my mother staring back at me. This is disconcerting because as I have been told all my life, I look nothing like my mother, who was a certified beauty in her youth. And rationally speaking, other than her eyes and her forehead I have not inherited any of her features. 

 

And yet, there she is in the mirror, looking back at me. I don’t know quite what it is. The best explanation I can offer is that there is an ineffable expression in my eyes, a specific turn to my mouth, or just the slant of my eyebrows. But there is no denying that as I turn older, I find myself morphing more and more into my mother. 

 

It’s not just about looks, though. There is more to it than that. Just like mom, I find that food has turned into my love language. I take intense pleasure in feeding those I love, thinking of new recipes to tempt their appetites every day. My idea of hospitality revolves around food rather than flowers and free-flowing drinks. In fact, the first thing I ask people who drop by is, “Have you eaten?”

 

There are other habits of my mother – that used to drive me crazy when she was alive – which seem to have seeped into my behaviour without my even noticing. The most annoying of these is “buyer’s remorse” that my mom suffered from all her life. She could never buy anything without agonizing over it afterwards, and in two cases out of three, returning it to the shop the next day. On the contrary, I took great pride in being a decisive shopper, who knew what she wanted, bought it and then thought no more about it. Well, guess what? These days, more often than not, every purchase I make is followed by “buyer’s remorse”. It’s really as if my mom’s spirit has taken mine over.

 

It's not just my mother, though. My father too comes alive in my everyday behaviour. When I was young, I used to giggle endlessly at how my father took the news so personally, talking back to the TV as if the people inside it could hear him. But now, when I am watching my streaming shows, I find myself shouting at the TV too – much to the amusement of my husband – when the plot points get particularly absurd.

 

But I guess that I am not alone in this. All of us, in varying degrees, are destined to end up as versions of our parents as we get older. All the stuff that we complained about as children – unreasonable curfews; the insistence on good grades; early bedtimes – and swore that we wouldn’t subject our kids to? Well, that’s exactly the kind of stuff we do as parents. 

 

That’s the least of it, however. It’s in our own interior lives that our parents live on – long after they have departed from the material world. It’s almost as if we become a version of our parents because we can’t bear to accept the fact that they are gone. And telling ourselves that they live on in us at least makes the loss a little more bearable.