I’m definitely more silly than my parents. My mom has shaken her head and laughed more than once about my “big imagination.” But they both tell me how smart I am (because I know how to use computers and cell phones and I read a lot) and they love me no matter what. I’d love to have my dad’s knowledge of literature. My mom used to write songs for the piano and I’ll find myself humming one of them once in a while. I can write poetry that could be turned into lyrics if I set my mind to it, but writing music is a whole ‘nother ball of wax.

I deliberately try to avoid laying worrywart vibes on my kids, as in my mom is apt to ask if I need a jacket or worry needlessly about some chance remark. So I’m consciously avoiding that type of stuff.

The key parallel is in our solitude (I also had a relentlessly independent, solitary battleax auntie), and when I was a young slip of a thing, I used to find this trait inexplicably weird in them, but when I got to my mid-30s, I had one of those [foreheadslap] epiphanies where I belatedly grasp the obvious. Not only did I suddenly understand the attractions of rowing one’s own boat, but I looked back and saw clearly that I’d had this same tendency as far back into my childhood as I can remember. So to some extent, becoming “like my mother” is in some ways just becoming the person I always was but thought I wasn’t allowed to be.

Although I share my mother’s propensity for anxiety and depression, I deliberately deal with it much more holistically and effectively than she does, and I am much more focused on controlling my emotions than she is. For reasons unknown, I am not a dyed-in-the-wool codependent, defined and hypnotized by the men in my life. But for the most part, her upbringing and early adult mistakes have left her pretty ill-equipped to do any further character development, and I will never ever be like that. I am also much more educated than she is, and for that as well as every other gift I possess, like her social nature, her honest character and her award-winning legs (and I suspect her high sex drive, what with the men thing), and every freedom and advantage over her that I have, I have her love and hard work as a single parent entirely to thank. *Getting misty*

My father is a rotten asshole with an enormous temper, and for the piece of that I broke off genetically, which is substantial, I can only thank my mother once more for getting him out of my life so I didn’t pick up more of him.

My dad is one of the best people I know .. he’s smart, wise, kind and funny, and extremely generous with everything he’s got, including his time, and he looks for the best in everyone. I’d like to think I’ll become more like him in all those ways but it’s probably something I consciously emulate, or should try harder to emulate.

But I have not completely become them. Whenever people predict that I will, there’s great comfort in noticing the ways in which neither of my parents are exactly like their parents.

I am becoming my father in that I listen to NPR, have gray hair (way more than someone my age should be burdened with), go around the house turning off lights (my family can only—despite many hours of attempted behavior modification experiments—flick switches up), obsess over my car’s gas mileage, add more and more nonfiction into my reading queue, watch sports and “smart channels” (PBS, Discovery, etc.) almost exclusively if an when I watch television and prefer scotch to any other hard liquor.

I’m certainly more liberal than my parents; specifically, I am more tolerant of other ethnicities. For all I know, they were just as liberal at my age, but I doubt it.

I have told my kids “because I said so.” That, more than anything, surprised me. Not so much because I swore I’d never say and here I was saying it, but because I felt it to be true. I felt that I am the authority figure here, damn it, and you’ll do what I say for no other reason than because it was I who said it.