I need something more lighthearted today.
Heavy work and thinking weekend. Lots of pondering about what to do next in a certain situation, worrying about something going on in my family this week, and just general (normal-for-me) anxiety.
So, something a bit lighter.
I have officially turned into my mother. The tipping point was yesterday, when I found myself rinsing out Ziploc bags to reuse. I have a goal to not buy them anymore – to change to reusable ones. But the issue is that I still wash and reuse them all the time. And I said I would never do that! mostly because my mother did. And I thought it was absurd and ridiculous. Now, of course, I realize that she was absolutely doing the right thing, if she wasn’t going to (or wasn’t able to) switch to reusables (they didn’t exist when she started doing this…)
I put water in the dish detergent to get every last bit out of the bottle.
I squeeze the toothpaste tube from the bottom up.
I haven’t started telling the same stories over and over (and over) again, but I anticipate that will start soon.
I want to chop off all my hair, a move she made when she was just a bit younger than me.
We like the same books.
We like the same food.
We both laugh at my father and his overreaction to things like a man-cold.
If you saw us together, you’d know we’re related
And yet, I differ so much from her in other ways – important (to me) ways.
Politically, spiritually, socially. She’s an extrovert with a loud voice who likes to dominate conversation and doesn’t know what to do with a weekend without plans.
I am… not an extrovert with a loud voice, and there is nothing I like more than a quiet weekend without plans.
I shop at thrift shops, nearly exclusively. She shops at Talbots.
She wears makeup to go to the gym sometimes, and always, always, wears jewelry.
Um, yeah. My 1-minute makeup “routine” is the essence of minimalism.
And yet. There are still these hints of her in my actions, in what I do unconsciously on a daily basis.
It’s reassuring and comforting, in a way, to know that some of what I do is not new to me, but instead rooted in years of observation and absorbing her way of doing things, even if I once ridiculed it. I haven’t changed everything about who I was before, where I came from. I’ve changed a lot, yes, but there are still vestiges of who I was that persist.
And I’m okay with that.
