I've been told many times how much I look like my mother -- now that I'm older. When I was younger, everyone always said I looked like my dad.

My siblings often wonder aloud where I came from, because surely I wasn't raised by the same parents that they were raised by........

So no. But not out of spite or specific effort. I have always, even from a small child, found some of their habits, values, and stronger personality traits to be.......undesirable. I bristled against them as a youngun and now that I am an adult I simply live as a wish, and it happens to be in a way that they never would. I am told it is because I do not have children that I fail to share common personality traits or values with my parents or siblings. I was unaware that motherhood changed ones basic nature, but how would I know?

Both of my sisters have turned into our parents. My brothers not so much......

I can deny who my parents are. I am a clone of BOTH. LOL

I have always thought that my father was an over-bearing bigot. To have the missus state that she sees a lot of him in me is astounding. I cannot change my ways. I just cannot happen!!!!!!!

she sees a lot of him in me

Everyone is multifaceted to some degree. I'm sure your Dad had his good points and maybe that is what the missus is seeing. Why not ask?.

I'm told I look like my mother. She usually had one girlfriend at a time, that's my MO. She cooked and sewed, after that we part ways. ☺

I often say things and hear my mother talking, which is scary :-)

DH has a lot of his father's traits, and he hates it when I point this out :-)

I'd give a billion dollars to be like my parent. My mom is AMAZING! Everyone loves her. I've been told, without prompting, how opposite I am from her.

I'm a pistol, feisty, fearless... She's nonconfrontational, kind, soft spoken....

I gotta be me 😊

Looking at old family photos, I am clearly morphing into my father's sister.

I am a lot like my mother, in good ways and bad. My sister says she doesn't understand how we came from the same family. We have different ideas and feelings on a lot of things, mostly politically. I don't want to lose my relationship with her, but I think she wants a clone of herself instead of a sister.

I am plenty like my mother, thank goodness.

There are times that I feel I have turned into my mother which is indeed very scary. Even stranger sometimes when I look at what I am doing with my hands mentally I see hers with the same gestures. My mother was simply not a nice person and I have tried very hard not to become the same type of person. One of the best days of my life was when my husband put his arms around me and confessed that he now understood why I disliked my mother.

No, I am not like either of my parents and I do not look much like either of them. I might look a bit more like my mother, but our personalities are certainly very different, and I am close to being the opposite of my father.

I went through extensive psychotherapy when I went to college in order to recover from the damage done by my parents. Because of the way I was raised, I never wanted to have children of my own, especially not biological children.

I do not blame my parents for being the ways they were, as they were raised by their parents to be a certain way, but I was able to break the chain and be different. My brother and sister are also not like our parents, but our other brother (who is in Texas) is very much a child of our parents, although his own children are very different - except for his son.

My father was cruel to me when I was growing up, but then I've been told that his father was cruel, and probably his father before that. My brother in Texas has a cruel streak in him and his son even more, but my nieces not so much.

My mother was not cruel and did her best, but her mother was a lot like my father, and those two fought constantly and seemed to hate each other. The one thing they could agree on was white supremacy, and this was one thing that I could never understand about them. Racism has to be learned, and my family did their best to teach it to me, but I wasn't buying it. It hurt me very much when they told me that my friends were the wrong color, but that did not stop me from choosing friends by character instead of by color.

That is interesting Lars. We were raised as strict Catholics and were taught in no uncertain terms that racism is a very very bad sin. One of my sisters grew up, married a southern baptist and then became a racist. Not the "burn em all" type but definitely the "we are better than them simply by being white" type. (her husband clearly influenced her on this. they are good people generally, but they are also quite misguided in some ways) And also the type that cannot help but say stupid things. SHE HAS TO MAKE SURE that other people know her views. She is the type that CANNOT get through a whole conversation about anything without the phrase ,"I am not racist BUT..." She tells me all the time about how the bible says I am sinning by being in a relationship with a man of another race. Her behavior mortifies my parents and siblings.

(I always answer her "concerned" warnings about my romantic choices by reminding her that I also fornicate, swear, work on Sundays, don't go to church and *gasp* mind my own business when it comes to other people. Then I suggest she try it.)

I am not one bit like my parents and neither are my siblings. I think we learned by seeing their mistakes

My mother died when I was young, so I don't know what she was like. I am turning into my dad's sister.

But OMG, my DH is a clone of his dad. Not so much personality, DH is nicer. But physically! Put a ball cap on both and they're hard to tell apart. Unfortunately, DH has already started dressing a bit like dad. 😖

I had to laugh when about 15 years ago I noticed I was holding the stering wheel in the car just like my Mom used to; we’d tease her about it all the time as kids. My sisters and I all feel fortunate to have had the parents we had. They taught by example which as a parent I can appreciate now. Was it perfect? No, but they did their best with what they had to work with and we all turned out to be decent people because of it. My Father’s childhood wasn’t easy, looking back at how he responded to certain situations, I can see that now. I‘d like to believe that I’m like them. I have my mothers hands and gestures and my fathers knack for thinking outside of the box.

I am an only child and I could not be more different than my parents. They were conservative, not blatantly racist but had I brought home a black boyfriend, all hell would have blown loose. I remember how they would talk with my aunt about how terrible it was that a friend of my aunt's had married a black man. My aunt once remarked when she saw a black family in a commercial....now they're taking over TV. This woman taught third grade for 45 years and went to her Lutheran church every Sunday. Even had her own pew. When I was a little child, she and my grandma gave me a little black doll as a Xmas gift and chuckled when I opened the box. I didn't get the joke and played with it. Needless to say, my kids and their kids were raised 180 degrees from this.

My mother was simply not a nice person and I have tried very hard not to become the same type of person. One of the best days of my life was when my husband put his arms around me and confessed that he now understood why I disliked my mother.

maifleur, I could have written this. My mother was a fascinating, stylish, and highly intelligent woman, but also full of neuroses. If you weren't related to her, you liked her a lot; if you were, however....

In any event, I am coming more and more to resemble my mother physically, which is a good thing. But I was determined from a very young age not to be like her in her dealings with family, and am happy to report that I seem to have succeeded in that regard.

My mom was mad at me a fair amount - not abusive or mean just mad at me. As her eldest daughter I think she wanted a clone of herself and I wasn't living up to those expectations. Unfortunately for her and yea for me - I am just like my father just as are her other 3 daughters.

The older I get the more I look like my mother, and I am like her in some ways. One way that I am different, she loved family gossip and thrived on getting you to say something bad about someone else so she could go tell them. I would never participate in that, but my sister would. My mother and sister were very close, much closer than I was to either of them. My mother was a good cook, good at growing things, good with animals. She got along better with men than women. She had excellent health and I don't ever remember her being sick. She didn't have a whole lot of tolerance for people who did get sick.

My mother was given away when she was 4 yrs old...about like you would give away a puppy, and it had an adverse effect on her whole life. She had been illegitimate, born in 1904. Was taken in by a well to do family who treated her badly. The last words she ever said to me were, "When I was 4 yrs old, my mother gave me away". At the time she was 94 years old, and didn't know who I was, but that was one thing that never left her.

i'm pretty sure i was switched at birth, at least my dad always used to tease me about it. i'm the only one in the bunch with blue eyes. mom and dad had brown eyes, as do all of my siblings.

i couldn't be any different if i tried. i'd rather spend my time with animals than people while my sister would sell a kidney to live in london and go to tea/crumpet parties all day, every day.

when i told mom we were moving to the family farm and had decided to buy a mobile home, her response was, "oh nina, do you REALLY want to live in a *gasp* trailer??" LOL! i will never forget the first time my mom visited me after i moved to the country. she and my SO were sitting on the glider under the trees, we were just visiting about this, that and the other. i jumped up to go feed the horses and clean stalls. my SO told me later that, as i walked away, my mom said to him (with a very big *sigh*), "nina is really in her element out here, isn't she". to this day, it makes me laugh.

at night, it's darker than the inside of a cow out here. while it never bothered me (and still doesn't even living alone since his death 14 years ago) to be outside any time day or night, mom wouldn't so much a stick her head out the door once the sun set. i thought she'd have a stroke the first time she heard the coyotes yipping. i don't think she slept a wink for the rest of her visit.

Mom used to drive me nuts as every time we were going somewhere or doing something, we always had to wait while she searched for her glasses. Well guess who spends a lot of time searching for her glasses now!

Physically I look like my mother, even down to the way my hair is going gray, which pleases me. My hands look like my grandmother's -- thin skin and veins in high relief. That's not so pleasing to see, but then I remember how much grandma loved us all and my "old lady" hands are okay. Personality-wise, I wish I'd had my mom's self-discipline, my dad's ability to figure out how things work, my grandfather's gregariousness ... instead I have my grandma's ability to worry about anything no matter how trivial. Oh well.

My DH resembles his father (tall, blond) but thinks like his mother (clever and quick). His brother resembles their mother (tall, dark) and thinks like his father (smart and methodological).

I resemble my mother, and my daughter resembles me. My mother came from a family that was very negative about everything. The glass is not half full, it's empty!!! Just a habit I guess.

My dad died when I was 23, but I was daddy's girl and admired him greatly. He was very outgoing and social. Everybody liked him. I never saw a bigger funeral. No one is left that remembers my dad, but I am like him in social situations and gestures.

However, being around my mom so much over the years, I have had to fight the negative attitude. I think I am doing pretty well, then I say something and I think "OMG I am becoming my mother. " My grown children tease me when I sound like grandma, so it helps. I am to the point that when I take Mom for a car ride I tell her she gets 2 negative comments, then that's all. ( boy that's an ugly house, or what's wrong with those people) She thinks it's funny, but she tries to comply. I know she wont change, but I have to protect myself.

I am beginning to resemble my mother at the same age, especially first thing in the morning when I look into the bathroom mirror and see her looking back at me! Yikes!! But other than her love of animals and a passion for gardening, I don't share many of her personality traits.

OTOH, my older brother is exactly like her.....to the point where my sister and I remark on it frequently. But always out of his hearing :-) He is super critical of the way she lived and how she focused her life and yet both my sis and I (and his very recently ex wife) can see those exact same traits showing through in his own personality.

It wasn't until I was fully adult and away from home that I realized what a strong animosity he had for her. She was by no means the perfect mom but not that bad at all and most of her negative attributes were just a factor of how she herself had been raised. Other than her being pretty self centered, I never had any issues with her. But then, both my sibs insist I was treated differently and spoiled by her because I am the youngest by a large gap. Of course they would say that!!

I would like to think that all three of us carry on some of my dad's features. He was the epitome of a proper English gentleman, mild mannered and with a great sense of humor. He was out going, friendly to everyone and very gracious. And he adored my mother.

I have very fond memories of my parents and my family while growing up.....but obviously not to the same degree my siblings do. What a difference 8+ years can make!

In terms of looks, yes - strong resemblance that is getting stronger with age, but she was much prettier. In terms of my life currently, also yes. Personality-wise, maybe a little bit - tendency to be a strong introvert and emotionally self-sufficient (aka a bit of a loner) comes from her and has gotten stronger.

My step mother often told me "You are certainly your father's daughter". I am not entirely sure what she meant (he was more social, an extrovert, had many friends, involved in many community groups - none of which I am - we did share a similar intellectual curiosity, work ethic, a love of the outdoors and adventure, gardening) but I don't think she usually meant it as a compliment.

That's very sad about your mother, Marilyn_c. I look very much like my mother and absorbed her love of cooking and good food. But the resemblance ends there with both of my parents - or so I believe. When I think more deeply about it, my interest in fashion and art comes from my mother's love of fashion (although no funds to indulge) and my deep interest in literature comes from my father's oral storytelling and his use of metaphors and allusion in speech. Both my parents had very little education and didn't consciously transmit these attributes. They couldn't understand my interests but never realized they planted these seeds - they wouldn't have understood had I tried to explain, would have considered it to be "highfalutin."

My parents both contributed to my current outlook. When I was 5 my dad gave me a putty knife, a big metal pan full of kerosene and the valve covers and oil pan from the engine he was rebuilding and said 'Get to work'. From then on was learning autos, building, patios and on and on. It has saved me a lot of money.

My mom always had all of us kids helping in the kitchen and garden. learned cooking, canning and gardening. I have always liked to eat so that was handy There is much that I liked and much that I learned but some I did not like, not much but some. Amazing what you can learn from parents that never went past 6th grade. Hope I at least turned out decent.

Lyrics:

Every generation

Blames the one before

And all of their frustrations

Come beating on your door

I know that I'm a prisoner

to all my father held so dear

I know that I'm a hostage,

to all his hopes and fears

I just wish I could have told him

in the living years

Crumpled bits of paper

Filled with imperfect thought

Stilted conversations

I'm afraid that's all we've got

You say you just don't see it

He says it's perfect sense

You just can't get agreement

In this present tense

We all talk a different language

Talking in defence

[

Chorus]

Say it loud (say it loud)

Say it clear (say it clear)

You can listen as well as you hear

It's too late (It's too late)

When we die (oh, when we die)

To admit we don't see eye to eye

So we open up a quarrel

Between the present and the past

We only sacrifice the future

It's the bitterness that lasts

So don't yield to the fortunes

You sometimes see as fate

It may have a new perspective

On a different day

And if you don't give up,

and don't give in

You may just be okay

[Chorus]

Say it loud (say it loud)

Say it clear (say it clear)

You can listen as well as you hear

It's too late (It's too late)

When we die (oh, when we die)

To admit we don't see eye to eye

I wasn't there that morning

When my father passed away

I didn't get to tell him

All the things I had to say

I think I caught his spirit

Later that same year

I'm sure I heard his echo

In my baby's new born tears

I just wish I could have told him

In the living years

[Chorus]

Say it loud (say it loud)

Say it clear (say it clear)

You can listen as well as you hear

It's too late (It's too late)

When we die (oh, when we die)

To admit we don't see eye to eye