The Things You Inherit
I have my mother’s face.
By which, I don’t just mean that I look like my mother.
I mean that when I look in the mirror as a 61-year-old woman, the face staring back at me is my mother’s.
Not every single time, of course. But when my hair is pulled back in the same style she wore, when like her, I’m wearing no makeup or have my glasses on, hers is the face that I see.
Growing up, everyone said I took after my dad. I had his flat feet and slender fingers. I had his long legs and dark brown hair. I had his olive-toned, Italian American skin that tanned without burning.
But somewhere along the line, I seem to have transformed into my mother. Although I was a lawyer and Mom was a homemaker, I began working from home long before it became popular, which means that like my mother, I spend most of my time in practical, comfortable clothes and sneakers. Also, like my mother, I’ve got permanent dark circles embedded under my eyes from too many sleepless nights with young children and too many years of midlife insomnia. I even started lightening my hair to hide the gray, which brought me closer to Mom’s dark blonde shade.
The transformation occurred so gradually that I didn’t realize it had happened until the night before Mom’s wake, when we started collecting old photos to display at the funeral home. Everyone at the visitation and the funeral told me how lucky I am, how much I resemble my lovely mother.
Which I am.
Which I do.
My mother used to say that, unlike her, I am “tough.” I don’t think she meant it as a criticism as much as a statement of fact. I’m not much of a crier, and I’m not terribly sentimental. I like to get rid of things, a good quality to have as the person tasked with closing Mom’s credit card accounts and returning her cable box. Perhaps a less desirable quality for dealing with the rest of her stuff.
So much stuff.
The big things: Mom’s house, the furniture, the car. The little things: the books, the dishes, the clothes. The really little things: the crochet hooks, the dental floss, the packets of Splenda. (So much Splenda!)
Some decisions were easy. The “good” jewelry—keep. The towels and socks—donate. The out-of-date cold medicine and perishables in the fridge—throw away.
But what to do with the beautiful tweed shawl that Dad bought for Mom on a trip to California in the late ‘70s or early ‘80s? The one he saw in a window and in a rare romantic gesture insisted they get even though at $300, it was way too expensive for the frugal parents of five children. A beautiful tweed shawl I will never wear.
Or the afghans she’d labored over for weeks and months, a night owl crocheting deep into the night, alone at last and finally doing what she wanted to do? By the time we were emptying her house, Mom had already gifted all of us children with our own, special creations. And how many afghans does any one person or family really need?
This week it will be three years since Mom died, and with the passage of time, I sometimes wonder if I let my unsentimental side go too far, if we should have put more things in the “keep” pile. So much went. Then again, so much stayed: Mom’s recipe box and old address book; her engagement ring and the “cheapie” earrings she liked to wear at home; the old cast iron pot she used for so many family dinners; her favorite Lenox vase.
And the memories stayed.
When I was five years old, my mother taught me to swim in our living room. We’d just moved to a neighborhood outside of Baltimore so my father could complete a fellowship in pediatrics at Johns Hopkins, and in an exciting development, our new apartment complex had an outdoor pool. An elegant, strong swimmer herself, Mom wanted me and my brother to learn how to do the crawl stroke properly. She’d have us lie on our stomachs on top of our slippery tan leather ottoman and practice kicking our legs while simultaneously syncing our breathing with our arms. First, reach your left arm overhead while your right arm pulls back through the pretend water, then reach your right arm overhead while your left arm pulls back, and at exactly the right moment, turn your head to the left to take a breath. Keep kicking. Don’t lift your head, keep your face in the water, just turn to the side and breathe. Repeat. Repeat again. Keep repeating. Until finally, after all that indoor training, Mom let us test our skills in the pool, and we got to enjoy the singular thrill of jumping into the cold blue water and proudly swimming to the other side.
I think of those swim lessons whenever I feel guilty about not keeping one item or another that meant so much to my mother. Maybe I should have found a way to take them with me. But at least I have so much else.
I have her love of swimming.
And cooking.
And reading.
I have her need to carve out time alone to do my own thing.
And now, it seems, I have my mother’s face.
[Image: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Girl Before a Mirror (1912/1913), Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington]