What demeanor do you possess that make you realize you have become your parent(s)

A particular “mean mommy face” I used to hate. There’s one day I saw a celly pic someone took of me when I was cranky and I had the same face, it mortified me.

I find myself sitting like my mom used to. She sat on the couch with her forearms on her knees, reading from a magazine or something on the coffee in front of her. When I find myself in that position, I move immediately. I am proud of my good posture and sitting like that will not enhance my efforts to have a straight back. My mom would approve of my doing that. She was proud of my posture too.

Great question!

1. I hated it when I was 10 and my mother would insist on teaching me how to clean the stove, wash the dishes and clean the sink just exactly the way she does it. I never did any of that until I got to college and lived in a house dorm where I ended up, without noticing it, washing dishes and cleaning the sink exactly as she would have done it! Now that’s how you brainwash somebody! ( no pun intended )

2. I easily get emotionally riled up rather quickly like my dad and I cuss exactly like him.

I always told my dad that smoking was nasty shit and that I’d never do it. Alas. I’m also a real pushover, and let myself be stepped on, which comes from my dad’s hippy nature. Fortunately, I seem to have my mother’s psychotic genes to make up for it lol.

Most of the things my mother used to say and do I’ve managed to avoid. She could be pretty abusive. She could be very intelligent, funny and engaging too.

I’ve been sitting here thinking and thinking and I cannot think of one thing I do that she did besides occasionally watch Jeopardy.

My mom has always talked WAY too loud to be socially acceptable. I was embarrassed to discover that I’ve started doing that too. I had no idea. There is hope though. My mother suddenly stopped this “bad habit” out of the blue once she got hearing aids last summer. So perhaps I didn’t actually pick up her bad habit, I just inherited her hearing loss.

My mom cannot have a brief conversation if her life depended on it. No matter who she’s with or what she’s doing, if she sees someone that she knows, she has to stop and talk for way longer than is acceptable to the person she is with. I have caught myself doing this at work and realized that “OMgosh, I becoming my mom.”

Being caustic and necessarily rude. Once, when my oldest was about 8, I was upset with her about something, and was reading her the riot act. At one point she burst into tears and said, “Mom! You can be mad at me but you don’t have to hurt my heart!” Stopped me cold in my tracks. I turned a corner that day, and never did that again, that I know of. I hope. No one has accused me of it, anyway. Mom never stopped.

I’ve spent my life trying to emulate the ideal models my parents set for me.

I could only wish to copy them.

I will say, though, that when my kids were young, I used a line on them that my mother had used on me when I wouldn’t finish some of my vegetables: “If you don’t finish that, then I’m going to give you more!”

Of course, from a strictly logical point of view, that line should never work. If I’m not going to eat ‘x’ quantity of vegetables, then I’m less likely to eat ‘x+y’. Nevertheless, if you’ve been forced to eat ‘x’ in the past, and you know that if there’s ‘x+y’ and you’ll have to eat that, too, then you hold your nose and eat the ‘x’.

Yeah, it worked for me, too.

Ach @WasCy! My folks never forced me to eat anything! I’m glad to say I passed that on to my kids too!

Well, @Dutchess_III, I eventually found better ways.

I recall once getting a salad at a salad bar and putting raw broccoli and carrots on it. When I got up from the table to go back to the buffet, I told the kids sternly, “Don’t you dare touch my broccoli or carrots!”

The vegetables were all gone when I got back to the tables, and both of them grinning up at me impishly, Mom trying to hold her face together to keep from laughing out loud. It was all I could do not to grin back at them. Took them years to figure out what I had done.