My Mother’s Body My Self

If I don’t buy a bathing suit this year, it will be my mother’s fault.

(Happy Father’s Day, by the way to all you biological and practical fathers. Alice is busy preparing a wonder meal for Patrick as I write this).

Back to my mother. And bathing suits. I have to get a new one this year. I buy bathing suits about once every other decade (I’m not kidding). But this summer we’re going on a cruise and I’d like to have something more fitting and more up to date and yes, more flattering to my middle age body. I hate shopping for clothes, anyway. But like many people, swim suits are the worst.

But while Alice and I were at the mall yesterday (yes, THE Mall) for her, not for me, every once in a while I’d see something and wonder how it would look on me, not swim suits necessarily. A scarf, earrings, a jacket. Each time I’d glance in the mirror I got immediate feedback: it wouldn’t look good.

At first I thought it was because all the shops we went to were filled with young women who looked like Alice does. Women like me stand out as well, not them. And I figured that because who I saw in the mirror didn’t look like everyone around me, it seemed not to compute.

But later I realized it was something more fundamental. I look like my mother. Seriously. There was never any question whose daughter I was when I met someone new at the nursing facility she lived in before she died. Our face shape, cheekbones, lips, body shape and height are all very similar. So, yesterday at the mall, when I looked in the mirror, trying on a new ‘hip’ accessory, I saw my mother wearing it and it seemed wrong. She wouldn’t wear something like that, unconsciously I’d think. Which meant that that was the overriding thought I’d have about me.

The curse of looking like your parent.  So when I go at this again, especially trying on swimsuits, I’ll have to do some seriously talking to myself and remind myself that it’s me not my mother, that that’s not an excuse not to find something to wear. Because when it comes to shopping for clothes, I don’t need any more excuses.

~ by modelmom on June 21, 2009.