I do not look like my parents. I don’t look like my sister. And my sister doesn’t look like either of our parents. Growing up, I heard, “you don’t look like your mom” and “you don’t look like your dad” a lot. I once had someone tell me that one of my friends looked more like my sister than my actual sister does. Our family portraits look like Olan MIlls grabbed four randos off the street to create a sample family portrait to lure legitimate families in for a sit.
This isn’t a case of adoption or babies swapped in the hospital (I maintain that my mother made us do the ancestry DNA thing because she was sure that she’d taken the wrong babies home). We aren’t total strangers. My eye color comes from my dad and his dad. I sound like my mom’s sister and sometimes my sister and sometimes my mom. But, the point is that I’ve gotten used to not seeing myself in my family. I’m not like my cousins or my friends who ended up being carbon copies of their parents, or have children that are replicas of themselves. I look like me and no one else.
Except maybe not so much anymore.
A long time ago, my dad’s aunt told me that I had the same kind of cheekbones as my grandma. I dismissed it at the time because I didn’t really see it. I’ve always had excellent cheekbones even at my heaviest and I admit that my grandma had some fabulous cheekbones, too, but I never thought they were similar.
Carrie once told me that she always wondered where my nose came from until she saw a picture of my grandma. I never thought our noses looked that much alike, so I dismissed the notion of similarity. After all, I’d always looked like me and nobody else.
And then one day, a friend of mine and I took a selfie and when I saw it, I immediately thought, “Holy shit, I look like my grandma”.
Because I kinda do.
It seems that as I’ve gotten older, I’m aging into resembling her.
This is not a bad thing. I think it’s a good thing. My grandma was a beautiful woman. It’s just not something that I anticipated happening. I spent my life only looking like me. It never occurred to me that I might age into looking like someone else in my family. Obviously, I’m not evolving into her mini me (except maybe in attitude and willingness to use a fly swatter as a weapon), but the similarities that we do have, the features that I did inherit, have become more pronounced as I’ve aged. It’s honestly kind of wild.
My grandma died in 2004 when she was 65. I was 24 then. I’m 46 now. I admit that sometimes when I catch sight of myself in the mirror or in pictures and I think I’m look like my grandma, it’s a little bittersweet. ‘Cause I miss her.
I can only hope that I continue to age well in her honor.
Let’s have a terrible love-ish poem for Valentine’s Day.
Almost 30 years ago at my first legit paycheck job, I entertained my coworker’s toddler daughter by telling her a story. I told her to pick five words and I’d make a story out of them. And I did. I told her a wild fairy tale using all of her words, which kept her preoccupied while her mom was able to finish what she needed to do without worrying about her kid. All I remember about that story is that it had a gasoline fairy in it. My coworker at the time was impressed with my talent to come up with a story on the fly, but honestly, for me it wasn’t hard. I’d been telling myself stories all my life.
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