Woman to Woman: We're turning into our dead mothers

by Erin Ellison

“Morning, sunshine — time to rise and shine!” My mother used to greet me this way every morning. Now Google does.

When you were about thirty, did someone tell you that you were starting to turn into your mother? And did you react in surprised horror?

Yep, same. My mother?

But now that my mom has been gone for twelve years, I love hearing that. It makes me smile and miss her all at once. Now, I do what I can to be sure I live up to her legacy.

My mother was the consummate hostess. She was welcoming, warm, kind, and an amazing cook. She was also shy, quiet, anxious, and a total book hoarder. And I am for sure turning into her. 

My mom was also an Olympic worrier. Building mountains from molehills was her specialty. She could anxiety herself into a little ball of stress and stay up half the night in the process. Oh, yes. Overnight fret fests is a skill set I have also perfected. 

She was fearful of public speaking like others are scared snakes, rats, or spiders. Her worst nightmare was standing up in front of a crowd and speaking a word. But she put that fear down when she had to present to elected officials or a classroom full of students. I can also compartmentalize like a champ and just fake it ‘til I make it through a stressful situation. 

My mom made grocery lists that turned into meals. Some of those meals are the stuff of legend — her chicken cordon bleu and rum chocolate mousse among then. I can cook well, and I love to potter around in the kitchen, but meal planning escaped my education. But there are many recipes in her collection when I need to impress the guests. 

My mom hoarded birthday cards and wedding programs — some of which I inherited from the box in her dresser. They date back to the 1950s. I believe that I inherited my purger DNA from her in a direct response. I may be emotional, but I am not sentimental. I think I might have the program from my wedding? Maybe. 

My mom could read a book in a day. And often read things twice because she read for pleasure, not for memorization. Guilty. I remember the books I’ve read, but rarely the super specific details. Exactly like her, I own five times more books than I could ever finish reading and can sweep through a bookstore and pick up ten more without breaking a sweat. Here is where the hoarding is so real. 

She didn’t own a piece of workout gear and never jogged more than a mile in her life. I run with the same glee as one of those cats being dragged on a leash behind their owner. Minimal. But I go for a walk every day just in case it really extends your life. Can’t hurt, right? 

I also look just like my mom — or so I was reminded at a recent family funeral. She had beautiful hair and just a ton of it. More than anything she wanted my curly hair, and I wanted her straight hair. Shrug. She got her hair done once a week for decades, and I dream of a weekly blowdry. #goals. 

And even if none of this was true, I’d still be an awful lot like my mother. And, every single day, I am truly grateful for that. 

by Katy Wise Greer

Sherry is dead. Long live Sherry. 

“Fine as frog hair split three ways,” I uttered, not bothering to look up from my computer.

I let out a small gasp. My new coworker, whose only mistake was nonchalantly asking me how I was doing today, chuckled meekly with a quick “Alrighty, then!” 

Cringe. I didn’t mean to hit him so hard with this especially quaint – and exceptionally country – colloquialism this early on in our professional relationship, but it just slipped out. Sherry slipped out. She does more and more these days, which is strange because Sherry’s been a long time gone. 

If you knew my mother, and chances are pretty good that you may have if you ever so much as stopped for gas in middle Georgia, you either loved her or loathed her. She was a woman of extremes – wildly self-confident yet woefully broken from unresolved trauma. I, too, have been told I inhabit the spaces on the outer edges, so I understand the dichotomy that was Sher. And she wasn’t exactly an easy person to understand.

Most everything about my mom was imposing. When she walked in a room, people noticed, and looks had little to do with it. She was not classically beautiful. There was no softness in her face; it appeared as though it could have been whittled from the wood of one of the loblolly pines on our property. She was proud of the high, sharp cheekbones left over from the Creek Indians on my PawPaw’s side. Less so of the layers of undereye folds from a lifetime of restlessness. Genes are where we differ… my own face is nothing but curves. 

She possessed what she called “a warped sense of humor,” which she loved to tell people she passed on to me. Me, her daughter, chosen from all the others at the Friends of Children adoption agency because I shared her rare combination of features – pale skin, dark brown hair, light blue eyes. It would seem from the onset that I was meant to turn into my mom. 

“That nose of yours, though. We were afraid to take you out in the rain as a baby for fear that you’d drown,” she’d remark about my wide, upturned schnozz. I would grin and giggle, and implore her to tell me the story again. She had a way of poking fun at you that actually made you feel glad she chose you as the target for her blade-sharp wit. 

Unless you’d landed on her bad side… then, you felt something different entirely. She was known for working up a rage so powerful that the only way of satiating it was hurling a sizzling plate of catfish and fries across the kitchen of my family’s seafood restaurant. Intense women giveth, and intense women taketh away. This is a truth I recognize. I, too, have been accused more than once of burning too bright.

“Women like us are an acquired taste,” she’d say. “And we’re not for everybody.” 

She was right, of course. 

Forged from a long line of no-frills matriarchs, she’s the reason I speak what’s on my mind, plainly and usually without forethought.

And she’s the reason I regret it later. She walked this world with a fervent desire to tell everyone to fuck off, and an equally penetrating longing for everyone to like her. I know that feeling intimately.  

She’s the reason for the gnarled scar interrupting my abdomen, not that I regret it. She was scarred, too, and I liked sharing that with her. 

And she’s the reason why, six years after her passing, I still smile and say “thank you” when I hear, “You’re just like your mother. Bless your heart.”