My Mother's Face

Every time Miranda makes a certain expression I see my mother's face. She has this one little thing she does where she closes her eyes, raises her eyebrows and purses her lips. I want to hug and kiss her all at the same time and that little girl knows why. I've told her enough times and when I ask her if she knows why I feel the way I do when I look at her she answers, "Because I look like your mom." My sweet little girl! How it tears my heart into little pieces!

I tell my husband how I feel when I look at her and now I realize how my mother must have felt when she looked at me. The difference between my mother and me is that my mother never really told me how she felt when she looked at me. Honestly I probably wouldn't have really understood like I do now that I have my own daughter that looks like my own mother. She wasn't a very affectionate person and wasn't someone to talk about her feelings. She actually became more affectionate as I got older.

All I know is that my mom would say wistfully, "How funny that of all my girls the one who looks the most like my mother, and even has curly hair like her, was born after she died and she never met you."

The same thing happened to me. Miranda was born 1 year and 2 months after my mother died.

I never realized how much I look like my grandmother Mercedes (Meche) until now that I'm older. It was the most obvious when my daughter told me at 3 that the picture of my grandmother at my father's house was me. I told her "no," that it was my grandmother and she insisted that it was me. I made a copy of that picture and it now hangs in my dining room.

My daughter still says it's me, even though she now understands that it's not. And when I look at her and see my mother I laugh at the irony of life. I look like Meche and Miranda looks like Belia. History repeats itself and years ago maybe there was another mother and another daughter that looked like us too. Generation after generation.