My Mother, Myself . . . My God!

I have turned into my mother.

There. I said it. Like leaping headfirst into a chilly pond or ripping off a Band-Aid, it needed to be done quickly, decisively, with absolutely no hesitation, or it might not have gotten done at all.

I actually noticed quite some time ago that my mother was lurking about the inner recesses of my psyche, threatening to take over. Now Mom wasn’t a bad woman. She was actually quite pleasant for the most part. But, heck, she was my mother. We’re supposed to grow up and be independent and totally, utterly different from our parents. We’re supposed to be the new and improved version. Just--better!

It began with small things, inconsequential things such as using phrases that Mom used (like saying, “Oh, shhh-ugar!” when she was angry) or doing things because Mom did, such as using liquid laundry soap rather than powder. When setting the table, I had to put the fork on the left side of the plate on top of a paper napkin that was folded into a triangle, not in half. Ironing the handkerchiefs. Making sure that the silverware went into the drawer neatly and properly--no mindless tossing of utensils into their individual compartments. No, no, they had to be “nested.”

I told myself that all of these idiosyncrasies were merely remnants of my upbringing; it was the way I’d been taught, of course, and we tend to carry that into adulthood. But then, I began to notice that it irked me, truly irked me, when my way was ignored or forgotten by my husband, that he was doing things . . . well, the way he’d been brought up.

I should have sought help at that point, but I did not.

I graduated to the big-time Mom-isms: I began to say things to my husband such as: “That pot is Teflon and you’re stirring with a metal spoon? Are you insane?” The fact that my husband was cooking was not taken into account; the fact that he was using an alloy on my precious nonstick surface was of utmost nagging import.

Then there was the terrible day when I asked my husband, in a voice as grim as Death and with a jaw so tightly clenched that I could feel my upper mandible making its way into my eustachian tube: “Why did you open a new bar of soap?”

See, Mom hated waste: She used to gather all those bitty slivers of soap (and it didn’t matter who used what, Lifebuoy or Irish Spring or the Yellow One You Can See Through). She’d wet them down and squeeze them together like Superman creating a diamond from a lump of coal. But what she came up with was a misshapen blob of soaps that she’d hand to me, triumphantly, and say, “There! You can use this for at least another month!” Oh, no, not really, Ma. Upon first use (and I did feel guilty enough to use it!), the blob would again become bits that inevitably washed down the drain. I rarely tried to stop them. I’d just sneak a new bar of Ivory out of the hall closet when Mom wasn’t looking.

Which is what made it so shocking when I found myself incredibly distressed that there, in the shower, were two nearly see-through slivers of Camay. The slivers from my childhood, the slivers that I had rolled my eyes at, as I watched Mom do her imitation of a printing press. But suddenly I really, really wanted to hold them in my warm hands and mold them into something Mom would be proud of. And my husband had gone ahead and opened another cake. Two perfectly good slivers of soap, going to waste!

Mom also took hourlong naps in the afternoon. She went “tsk tsk” when she thought people were being foolish. My mother also collected string, rubber bands from the newspapers, grocery receipts, matchbooks, coupons whose expiration dates were in the Nixon era.

I do that. I do that!!

The clincher came last week. I was playing tennis (something my mother would never have been caught dead doing) and needed to blow my nose. My husband offered to fetch a Kleenex from the car, but I waved him off, saying, “It’s OK, I’ve got one” and pulled a tissue from my bra. From my bra! And the fact that it’s a sports bra just doesn’t matter. That act was, in and of itself, the final cog in the cycle of transformation.

While I simply wasn’t paying attention, I became my mother.

That Mom also taught me how to play fair and how to make a killer chocolate-chocolate-chip Bundt cake and how to actually fold the fitted sheets and that she laughed at my jokes and loved that I wanted to be a writer, well . . . these were normal Mom things, not to be taken into account . . . not just yet.

Not just yet.