I think I have finally gotten over worrying about becoming my mother. It took me almost three decades, but I am (almost) there. I have spent a lot of time wondering where this common disquiet amongst women comes from. I think I have become more interested now because I have daughter.  I would be horrified if she ever felt like being able to relate to me, or making some similar decisions in her life, was the end of her world. I got a little insight this weekend — my Aunt Rose and Uncle Bob came to visit.

Aunt Rose has three sons, no daughters. I am about the closest thing she has ever had to a daughter — she and I are pretty tight. We talked a lot about my mom and my relationship with her. We spent many (many…) hours talking about family history, the good and the bad, and really got to the bones of what our family is about. I talked to her about how I and just about every girl I know has an innate fear of becoming like their mother — of repeating histories and making the same mistakes as the women in their family. I brought this up to her because it seems this emotion isn’t shared with women of her generation — at least it isn’t with her and my mom. They seem to work their hardest to be exactly like their mother, even though they know that she wasn’t happy for a lot of her life. As she talked about her mother, I realized it was pretty complicated — you have to know the long a drawn out history of my family, which I won’t delve into, to really understand. But the bigger picture is this: for them, they are, in some strange way, trying to make their mother’s life work out long after her death, hence the urge to recreate her emotional choices. It almost seemed a duty — which made me wonder why I don’t feel that same duty to my mother. This led to another conversation with a girlfriend of mine — we both have wonderfully, crazy, brilliant mothers whom we love more than life itself, we just don’t want to ever be identical to.

We talked about the inevitableness of some of it and how we have already made decisions that set us apart and have taken us on a different journey. What we realized was that we simply wanted to have the ability to define ourselves without any preemption. We didn’t want to be sized up based on what the women in our clan before us had done or not done. As younger women we had yearned for a clean slate. Thankfully, none of us are born with one. The older we get the more we realize that if we are anything close to the greatness that we have in mind for ourselves, it will be because of all the history and layers of the women in our family - not in spite of.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 20th, 2006 at 10:58 am and is filed under Adolescence, Daily Living, Parenting, Relationships. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.