You Look Just Like Your Mother!

Flipping old body image narratives.

Grandma, Mom, and me each around age 49. Images ©Cynthia Edstrom 2023

“You must be Sylvia’s Edstrom’s daughter,” the young woman behind the counter in the new coffee shop said as I walked in.   I was visiting my parents in my hometown years after having moved away (which I did as soon as possible following high school graduation).  I had never been in this shop and surely had never met this woman.  “You look just like her!” were her next words.   This scenario happened time and again when I returned to the small Wisconsin town where I grew up and where my parents continued to live until their retirement “up north” to yet a smaller town.   Even when visiting up north, I might also walk into a store to exclamations of “You must be Cindy! You look just like your mother!”. 

Besides people I had never met recognizing me because of my resemblance to my mom, these people would often be privy to intimate details of my life, because with Mom there were no secrets.   She would tell anybody she met pretty much anything that was on her mind that she found relevant to the situation at hand.  I was not fully aware of this until after many interactions with strangers in which they would comment on something personal about my new job, or ask questions about private struggles with my children, or they might expound on the details of my current visit and itinerary that I didn’t yet know.  That’s just how things went.  

I didn’t clearly realize that Mom had basically no privacy filters until I was in my late 40s. I had told her some private physical health detail intended only for her, but soon I heard about it from Dad and people in their community.   With that embarrassing experience, I learned that whatever I told Mom needed to be carefully composed suitable for wide broadcast to anyone.   That knowledge affected how close I could feel to Mom.  She couldn’t be trusted with private details even if I might want her support or input on the topic.   And that was difficult because Mom was very engaging.  She was gregarious, friendly, talkative and, well, she was my mom. I wanted to confide in her.  I was the only daughter; Mom was an only child; Dad had no sisters; and the only grandmother I ever knew was gone by the time I was 24.  Who was I going to confide in for those family-only-things women share? 

People started to comment about how much I looked like Mom when I entered my teens.  Lucky for me, Mom was a good-looking woman.  When I was a girl, I thought she was beautiful, even though she would complain about how hideous she looked (hideous was pronounced hhhhhideaous, with a lot of “h” for emphasis and drama).    Mom was highly critical of her appearance, almost as much as she was of others and she was highly, highly critical of people’s appearances (as I wrote about here).   Yet, she would often tell the story of how critical her mother had been of her - that she was too skinny, that she wasn’t shapely, that it was too bad she wasn’t pretty like Grandma with her nice legs, therefore Mom must have taken after J. Vance (my grandpa).  Of course, this is me describing Mom recounting what Grandma said, so we are in the realms of story, not fact. 

Not only did Mom not keep secrets but she embellished stories for effect.  The inherent truth of the stories seemed not at all important to her.   I say this as someone who was present in situations that she then would describe later. As I listened, she often included events that never happened or that happened in completely different ways than what she recounted.  Descended from a lineage of talkative storytellers, Mom embraced and expressed her stories with joyful exuberance (while criticizing those storytelling relatives for not “letting a person get a word in edgewise!).   What mattered, then, was the effect on the audience at hand and the message she wanted to share.   Truth…pshaw! 

This stuff bothered me greatly when she was alive. In her final years as she declined from the relentless progression of the ALS that would take her life, she would tell the same, mostly untrue or highly embellished stories, over and over and over. Before she became ill, I did not have the skills to talk to her about my concerns directly, so I just withdrew some of myself from her, protecting myself. But I also lost the chance to get to really know her or to let her know me.   By the time she was sick, it was too late and by the time I had the skills to talk with someone more directly about difficult things, she was gone.

As someone who thinks and feels deeply about most things, I developed lots of defenses from growing up in the vocal shadow of someone as exuberant, talkative, and unfiltered as Mom. I tried to be very considered and cautious with my speech and with what I divulged to others or imposed on others.  I wanted to be as sure as possible that whatever I said was as true as possible within my knowledge and state of development. Being naturally introverted and not particularly talkative, and as a reaction to Mom’s talkativeness, I didn’t want to make people sit and listen to me talk if they weren’t interested in what I had to say. I became careful how much of me others get to see, reminding myself to disclose only that which I was willing to have broadcast to an unknown audience as if Mom were listening and might share the news.

Writing this column, then is a step for me to test stretching some of those constraints and armoring.  They’ve become kind of tight, overly confining.  In sharing my writing, I’m finding new strength through affirming of the value in my own voice. There is space now to tell my own story; space Mom once filled to brimming so there wasn’t room for anything more. And you are free to stop reading anytime (although I hope you don’t), so I can drop my concerns about imposing my ideas upon you.

This memory series I’m sharing with you arose out of my current exploration of my self-talk about my body. Recently, I caught view of myself in the mirror (dang mirrors!) and heard a voice in my head say with some distain “My legs look just like Mom’s”. The comment was meant as an insult and warning. But I also immediately noticed the comment and became curious about it.  As I invite myself into kinder relationship with this amazing biological reality of a body that I live within, I feel the struggle inside my skin not to be Mom, and yet to make some sort of peace with Mom. Of course, while I do look uniquely like me, I have physical features that resemble both of my parents and other relatives; my hands are similar to my brother’s and Dad’s; many of my bodily features are a lot like Mom’s.   I’m short like she was, my hair is a similar color still not very grey.   My legs, my body shape, many features of my face are very much like Mom’s, and Grandma’s, similarities you can probably see in the photos included with this article.  And herein lies the real struggle.  They didn’t like their appearances.  They were highly critical of themselves and those same features they saw in their daughters.   How far back does this disgust toward one’s female body go?  I would guess, many generations, because it feels so very deep.

Why is this, I wondered? While I was reading about something unrelated, I had the sudden realization that for much of history women did not own their bodies. Their fathers, or male relatives owned them until they were transferred to a husband.  The versions of Christianity I, and several generations of women before me, grew up in reinforced that God owned our bodies, and “He” transferred the power over them to our fathers and husbands as women.  When I was a girl, I was told that women had no marital property rights in our state, so divorce wasn’t possible. A woman was to “save” herself for her husband. We are watching this old belief structure, that women’s’ bodies are not theirs, play out clearly in our country today.   In the U.S., women never were explicitly given legal rights to themselves, and so what many had interpreted as rights can be and have been easily whisked away by people with power.

Given this, it’s unsurprising that women would not love or enjoy their bodies, since they were essentially just the caretakers of someone’s else’s stuff. How can a woman come to confidently live embodied when culture continually bombards her with images, messages, rules, and laws intended to keep her in her place of expected subservience? Granted, much has changed in the past 50 years, but the underlying feelings and deep-seated, often unconscious beliefs remain. What mattered to the women in my linage then, through most of U.S. history, was having a good male protector - father, brother, husband.  Otherwise…well. What do you expect? You get what you deserve and that isn’t much.

I doubt that my mom or grandmother thought about these things this way if they thought about them at all.  I do know that I sized up where family power was at an early age and determined not to be restricted like the women in my family, but rather to try to have control of my destiny like I believed my father did.   I didn’t want to have to manipulate my place in the world like Mom did.  I wanted to go directly, based on my abilities, like my dad.  That turned out to be only partly possible and much harder than I had imagined.

I had judged Mom and Grandma as lacking power and as a result I worked hard to be different from them and the women in my family, to be self-independent. However, I now can see that Mom and Grandma both made big gains over prior generations.  Grandma worked outside the home, so she had her own money, unlike her mother who had worked extremely hard but only in the home.  Grandma married a kind, quiet man who was a good provider. And she limited her reproduction to one child compared to her mother’s 12.  I never asked her how she did this and she never volunteered.   My mother would have four children, start a successful business with Dad and go back to college achieving her BA in fine arts in her late 50s.  As things changed and opportunities opened, the women in my family took those opportunities to their best advantage within their circumstances.

As I’ve pondered this, I coming to the idea that the struggles with body appearance so pervasive in the women in my family may be deeply rooted in our struggles for freedom.  In the absence of the freedoms longed for, lacking the power to become fully themselves, the women turned that frustration toward the bodies they inhabited.  Like the neglectful care or distaste often levied toward rental cars, women may have learned to despise the bodies they could never fully move into.   Instead, they focused on the assumed societal purpose of those bodies, obtaining and keeping a male protector, and having children to carry the lineage on.  And so, bodies were squeezed into corsets, adorned with fashion and ornaments, covered with sometimes poisonous makeup - all in the attempt to make the particular female body one lived in look the way they were ‘supposed’ to look - to get a man, to be respected, to be the best version of themselves they could imagine within their circumstance. Those attitudes stuck and were passed down even as their situations evolved.

This, then is my inheritance.  This is what the waves of feminism and counter-culture movements have been trying to change, sadly with only limited success.   The knowledge of the old ways of oppression lives deep within each of our bodies, and arises as these distortions of self-image, in demeaning self-talk and criticism of others, that then bursts forth into public, into politics, religion, and culture into what we see and experience around us today.  We are far from free. 

Recently I had a dream with two scenes.  In the first was a demonstration of a hateful interaction common in our current political discourse. People on opposite sides of a belief and issue fought, each group despising, belittling, dehumanizing the other side. The second scene showed me dialogues of the same sort of fights, thoughts and self-talk occurring within myself toward myself and toward others.  The message was “As long as you are engaging in this action inwardly, how can you expect the greater world to change?”

I’m not suggesting here that if you and I change our inner conversation the whole outer world will change, but what I am intuiting from this dream awareness is that it most certainly won’t become a kinder, freer, more caring place if I (and probably you) continue as is. Within me, the inward meanness is so normal, so pervasive and likely so multi-generational, that it is hard to notice, to catch, and to change. I know I can change with awareness and then intentional step by step change, because the inner conversation already is more visible.  As I practice being more aware, more inwardly kind and caring, I am softening, less afraid, and that allows me to be more alert to my inner dialogue.  In the process, things like insulting myself for thinking my legs look like my mom’s can pop up for a closer look, asking for inquiry and enabling change.

 My mother, grandmother, and the women before them used what power they had to improve their lot in life and that of their children.   Today the systems - social, cultural, religious, political - are rapidly changing in ways they could never have imagined possible. 

As I listen to my inner talk, hearing voices of Mom, Grandma, and women gone long before I was born, I notice that much of that messaging, originally meant to keep them safe, is now destructive.  It needs to come to the surface and be rewritten.  With focus and attention, I can flip those learned messages of antagonism aimed toward our bodies, toward my body, and rather interpret them as messages of frustration, of longing - longing to become more fully human, more free to be authentically oneself. 

I live in a body very similar to Mom’s and Grandma’s.   My challenge now is two-fold.  First, I need to individuate from them more consciously.  My body is mine.  It doesn’t matter who I look like for me to enjoy living in it.   Secondly, can I more fully embrace their ingenuity, opportunism, feistiness, and honor their successes and advances? Those advances and accomplishments of my foremothers hide, mostly unacknowledged in the family lineage.   It’s time to acknowledge them, to embrace those gifts within myself.  

I have the awesome opportunity, then, to translate these inner lineage messages.  Surely, they were once meant for our survival, safety, even our flourishing.  But the messages were written in ways that now just sound mean, scary, and unhelpful.  While I’ll continue to heed their warnings where warranted, I’m consciously looking for the hope, the love, the caring, the humanity hidden in the undertones.  It’s there.  I’m sure of it.  They were human just like us.

When I began to wonder why I had such a strong aversion to the comments that I look like Mom, I had no idea so much information would hidden within those body image struggles.  One just never knows where secret messages are hidden and what they might be waiting to reveal. To me, these are exciting discoveries, full of possibilities.

What might you find if you choose to look?

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I want to take a moment to acknowledge that I am writing from my particular lineage with its privileges and challenges. As someone who identifies as white, cis-gendered, and heterosexual, my use of the words ‘woman’ and “she” represents my experience from my specific vantage point. I recognize my experience is only one lens out of many and I intend no disrespect or exclusion to people who see through different lenses, identify differently, or use different language to identify themselves. I also recognize that my ancestors, including all of the women in my lineage, were colonizers upon the ancestral land of indigenous people who were here long before any of my ancestors arrived upon the shores of North America. I take this moment to honor all of our shared humanity, while recognizing I speak only and uniquely from my own lineage and experience.