“I never thought it would happen to me,” says Janice Eidus, queen of the bohemians, “but here I am. I’m using coasters. When someone comes over and it’s raining, I make them put their boots in the bathtub. I tell my husband we’re low on Melba Rounds and it turns out we have eight boxes.” She pauses, gulps. “I’m turning into my mother.”
Eidus, author of the short-story collection “Vito Loves Geraldine” (City Lights, $7.95), is not alone. Across the world, women and sometimes even men are following in the high-heeled footsteps they moved eight states away to avoid. Says Eidus, “I find myself rebelling against my own rebellion.”
Not to worry, kid. Most psychologists agree that while anti-mom rebellion is inevitable somewhere along the way, so is the pendulum’s swing back. And by the time you realize you’re like her again-you like her again, too!
“When you start looking through the movie credits for your ethnic group,” says Manhattan’s June Golden, “that’s it.”
“One of the things I do to my husband is, `You’re not going to wear that shirt, are you?’ Which is exactly what my mother used to do,” says publicist Andrea Kaplan.
“My mom always used to fall asleep on the couch,” recalls Judy Fazekas, a nurse in East Windsor, N.J. “We’d say, `Mom, why don’t you go to bed?’ And she’d say, `I’m not tired.’ Now I’ll lie down on the couch and say, `I’m resting my eyes.’ ” Right. And pretty soon, it’s morning.
Could be it’s genetics, but there’s a good case to be made for nurture over nature here. See, mothers are our first role models. Naturally, we pick up their behaviors and attitudes.
As we get older, however, we want to become our own selves, to be individuals. Boys begin that process with relative ease. “They have an easier transition to make,” says Mara Gleckel, director of the Woman’s Counseling Service of New York. “At a certain age, a boy begins to identify with his father (or another male), moving away from extreme dependency on the mother. But what does a girl do?”
What indeed? Well, you’ve probably seen it in action. She wears awful clothes. She picks awful friends. She rolls her eyes at the stupidity of everything her mother says, from “Did you sleep well?” to “Sweet dreams.” She may speak in monosyllables or insist on a new name or simply retreat into books. Her objective is to reject all her own momlike characteristics to prove she’s not a clone.
Occasionally, women get stuck in this stage. “A woman was referred to me and she came into my office and I was shocked,” recalls psychologist Gleckel. “She was probably the most unkempt human being I have ever seen. Her skin was pouring oil, her fingernails excessively dirty, hair in disarray and her clothing was pink and red and purple-everything clashing with everything else. She told me she wanted to do anything, be anything, as long as she was nothing like her mother.”
As Gleckel probed, she learned that this woman’s mother was part of the country-club set. Mater always sported a matching handbag, hat and gloves; her hair was coiffed twice a week. “But in the daughter’s attempt to get away from the conformity of her mother,” says Gleckel, “she became the exact same thing, only in another form. Her outfit was so emphatic, it was a uniform. And that proved she was still defining herself in anger with her mother.”
Moral of story: If you’re still doing everything to escape from your mother, you haven’t escaped from her yet.
Life’s courses
Most of us, however, don’t end up 180 degrees opposite Mom on everything. “The ways in which we are not like our mothers are the ways we have decided not to be like our mothers,” says Georgia Witkin, a psychologist. In other words: A grown daughter may make a conscious effort to be more even-tempered, optimistic or organized than her mom, and succeed.
On most other fronts, however, she starts returning to her roots as soon as she leaves home. If mom always had enough toilet paper around to roll on through the millennium, you can guess what’s in the daughter’s closet. (Hint: It’s absorbent.) And, on a more profound level, if Mom was always looking after people, making them comfortable, or making them laugh, you know that’s a priority here, too.
“Very often, what happens when we’re young adults is we try to get as far away from our mother as we can, both in residence and behavior,” says psychologist Witkin. We leave home to see “what’s left” of our mother in us, when she’s not around to observe. “Whatever seems to be left we assume is the real us,” Witkin says. And that way we don’t reject it.
The more your circumstances begin to resemble your mother’s, the more her behaviors start to resurface. Taking care of a home is the first milestone, then kids.
It’s really happening!
When Gigi Cohen finished graduate school, she noticed herself beginning to empty the wastebasket before company came over. “I always used to think that was silly when my mother did it because, of course, wastebaskets get filled up,” says Cohen. “That’s what they’re there for. But it started as soon as I got my own place.”
Cindy Calder’s big change came with motherhood. For the first 10 years of her adult life, the Brooklyn whiz kid took Wall Street by storm. The fast-track banker lived a life “totally unlike my mother,” she says. “But after I had my own children, it just dawned on me one day: That wasn’t really me.” She quit her job-hitherto unthinkable-and opened Calder Translations, a French-English translating firm.
Looking back now, the switch seems preordained. After all, Calder’s mom was translating a book when she was pregnant with Cindy. True, Mom never became a professional translator, but obviously something seeped through. Today, Mom works as an editor-at her daughter’s company.
Mothers watching these changes in their adult daughters experience long-awaited satisfaction. Whether they say anything aloud, the air grows thick with “I told you so” vibes.
“She would never put her things away,” recalls Ruth Eidus, Janice’s mother. “Even when she ate, and the table was full with her peanut butter and crumbs. And, of course, she never thought of worrying about, `Will it rain?’ But now she’s like her mommy. She’s saying, `Oh, I have to take an extra little sweater,’ or extra pencils. She takes half her house in her purse! They always laughed at me, `Mom, you’re a bag lady!’ but now she’s the same way.”
Mirror, mirror . . .
A growing physical resemblance also gives mothers a boost (and sends many a daughter scurrying to the gym).
“You catch a glimpse of yourself in the store mirror and you just get shocked, almost on principal,” says fashion consultant Marilu Menendez. “As I get older, I’m looking exactly like my mother!”
Naturally, moms love this. “There was one occasion where there was a certain way she was wearing her hair,” recalls Della Dinkins of Westchester of her 24-year-old daughter, Adrienne. “I looked up at her, and it was like looking at me! So I smiled and she said, `What are you smiling at?’ and I said, `Nothing.”‘
A final tribute
Alas, daughters seem to become most like their mothers only when the last hint of competition disappears. And that doesn’t happen until their mothers die.
“Those who have had their mothers pass away find that they really embrace the part of themselves that reminds them of their mother,” says Witkin. “Very often they begin to laugh the same way, dress the same way. The part of her that was internalized can come out now, because there’s no more struggle.”
Sometimes, it’s hard to recognize that transition in yourself, but everyone else seems to notice. “You sound just like your mother!” “That’s just what your mother would have said!” “You remind me more of your mother every day, may she rest in peace.”
This is how mothers live on in their children. “She becomes warm and comforting and one of the best parts of you,” says Witkin. “Many women feel she’s still there, guiding them. But the real goal is to let your mother be all of that to you while she’s alive. …”
