Tone-Deaf Birds of a Feather

Today's Reverb Broads prompt: How are you like your mother? And if you're a mother, how is/are your kid(s) like you?

I have had the good fortune to have been raised by an incredible woman.  Pretty much everything I like about myself are things that resemble her.  Some of the ways I'm not like my mom: I'm not short, I'm can't tan, I procrastinate terribly, I don't like to clean, and I'm socially introverted.  But here are the fabulous traits I've been blessed to inherit: intelligence, kindness, sensitivity, feisty attitude, Irish temper, crooked mouth, and the tendency to talk too much.  But you'll get no blarney from us, we tell it like it is.

Our childhoods could not have been more different.  She had 11 siblings, I had one.  She went to catholic school, I didn't even go to Sunday School.   She was overweight, I was rail thin.  She has overcome so much more in her life than I have had to.  After high school, I knew I was going to college, and my parents were giving me the money to do so.  She had pretty much two options.  Become a nun or get married.  It probably says a lot about the eligible young men in her small Iowa town that she chose the former.  Thankfully, after a couple of years in the convent, she decided that wasn't her path.  I have enormous respect for the strength it took for her to leave the convent, move to Milwaukee and get a job as a secretary.  Eventually, she went to college.  Then she got married.  Both of my parents were still in college when my brother was born.  My mom had to wake up at four in the morning to find time to study.  Pretty impressive for an Iowa farm girl in the early sixties.

It is as I grow older that I notice more and more how similar we are.  It's in those moments when I suddenly burst out loud singing the song that was inside my head.  When I do a silly dance, and my kids yell "Mahh-Ahhm!"  Falling asleep on the couch.

Maybe it's too soon then to see how my children are like me.  When I was a kid, I loved school and had an unhealthy disrespect for authority.  My kids are well-behaved, but dislike school in a way that just baffles me.  Lauren shares my love of reading, Alex my fear that something bad might happen at any time.  But I'm pretty sure they get their silliness from their dad, and if one thing defines my kids, it's their silliness.  It doesn't bother me though.  I feel as though I was fated or destined to become like my mom.  And my kids have as close and loving a relationship with me as I did with my mom, so I'm sure to get my footprint on them in one way or other.