I have been wondering if I am becoming my mother? It is said that all women do, but has anyone tested that theory?
My mum died in 1979 after a 10 year battle with breast cancer, and I have realized that will be 30 years next year. 30 years! I can hardly believe it. I have lived longer without my mum than I lived with her. That's kind of sad really. Sometimes I wonder what she would think of me if she could see me now. Since she died I have moved from my family home, worked in a hotel in Cornwall, trained as a nurse in London, and taken holidays throughout Europe. I have gained two degrees, moved to America, gotten married and had twin boys. It truly has been a lifetime!
Although I have been without her for so long, I still have so many memories of her that stick with me. She ALWAYS ate mints, Foxes Glacier Mints, wrapped in a little blue paper with a drawing of a polar bear standing on an ice block on it. They were clear, and hard and I thought they were the most boring sweets in the entire world! Even the fruit ones that were introduced later, were really boring! Hard candy is not what children want to eat! Now I live in the US I cannot buy Foxes mints, but I do buy Altoids instead and eat them all the time, and one of my twins loves them too! So I have inherited the mint habit! Have I become my mother?
My mum had dark, curly hair and would set it regularly in hard plastic rollers to help create more of her curls. But after sleeping, sometimes bits of her hair would stick out at odd angles, so she would just take a pair of scissors and cut that piece off! It used to make me laugh to see her chopping bits of her hair off before she dashed out the door to catch the bus to work! But guess what I have a tendency to do now? Yes, I will cut my hair if there's a bit sticking out that won't be trained or behave itself! Am I my mother?
And last but not least, my mum always had her favorite biscuits (cookies to my American friends). She loved custard creams (YUK! I don't know any children that like custard creams, let alone love them), and she loved wafers! These two types of biscuit were always the ones left at the bottom of the biscuit tin. As children we would come home from school and always checked out the biscuit tin to see what there was to eat, and if those two varieties were in there, we would leave them there! And now, I quite enjoy custard creams - when I can get them. And as for wafer biscuits, I have found that they are pretty nice, I even bought some this morning when I went grocery shopping!
So, have I become my mother??
