Please Don’t Tell Me I’m Like My Mother! Mother Daughter Relationships

Have you ever said to yourself, “Oh, please don’t let me turn out to be like my mother”! Every once in a while, I catch myself doing or saying something that is typical of my mother. Don’t do that, I say to myself. I guess that is negative thinking because I know I inherited from my mother the two very important traits of self reliance and independence. Here’s what I mean. In the 1950’s my father was in the Air Reserves and was gone 2 weeks out of every month. We lived on a working ranch about 10 miles from town. Our nearest neighbors were an elderly couple who had no phone. On one side of the ranch was a creek called Peach Creek which was a tributary of the Lavaca River. Our house was a big old stone house that sat on a rise in the middle of the ranch. Whenever it rained a great deal, the land around our house would flood. Because we had a septic tank, during or after a flood you had to be careful lifting the seat on the toilet. There may be a water moccasin in there. So, when it flooded, here was my mother alone with my sister and I and with no way to get out or no way for anyone to get in. I guess I was 3 or 4 at the time and my older sister was 5 or 6, when we had a really bad flood. My father was gone. I don’t remember the exact circumstances as to why my mother felt we needed to leave, but my mother got one of our horses, Nancy, saddled her up, got my sister and I up behind her and off we went with Nancy swimming part of the way. We went to our neighbors and they put us in their 1940’s pick up truck to take us to town. When my mother was in her 40’s, she decided to get her GED and go to college and get her degree. She then taught elementary math for 25 years. She has an independence streak and a healthy dose of self reliance. I know I have these traits in me. My husband says it scares him because he knows that I can get along just fine without him. But those same traits also attracted me to him. Read more…

My father grew up during the depression and when WWII came along, he knew he wanted to join up and that he wanted to be a pilot. He had a high school education. When he went for his first physical, he failed due to malnutrition. I never really realized how hard it was to actually make it to being a pilot in the old Army Air Corp until I read Stephen Ambrose’s Wild Blue. I don’t remember the statistic, but if you wanted to be a pilot in the Army Air Corp , the chances were you wouldn’t be one. Well, my father became a pilot flying bombers in the Pacific. He then went on to become a successful business man and and for 20 some odd years, was the mayor of my home town. The trait I inherited from my dad sometimes can be misconstrued because there is a fine line between self confidence and arrogance. Arrogance, of course, is thinking highly of one’s self or having excessive pride. Confidence is self assurance. My father always told my sisters and I that we could be anything we wanted. You just had to have the confidence that you could do it. So, for the people that know me, they know I have a great deal of self confidence. I just hope that for those that don’t know me well that it isn’t coming across as arrogance.

I asked my husband what traits he inherited from his parents: from his mother, a great sense of humor, from his dad, his work ethic as well as his impatience.