Smile

My Mom always said that she couldn't see any resemblance between me and her side of the family--I look like my Dad. I have his height, his eyes, his skin-tone, and his sisters' build and bone structure. I'm the one who gave birth to you, she'd say; why do you look so much like your father?

I, too, told everyone who ever asked that Frances looks exactly like Erik to me. People tell me all the time that she looks "just like me," and I think they are on drugs. It's true that we have the same colouring, that her hair is about my shade of dishwater (though at her age my hair was very blonde), and our skin is similarly pale (though she is not quite as pale as I am, and can tan in the summer), and both our eyes are blue. But her blue eyes are large and glowing and expressive, whereas mine--well. If you took a picture of Frances now and a picture of me at four, and put them side by side, they would not look anything alike. So I have always maintained.

When I was in grade four, my Mom volunteered to be a group-leader on one of my field trips. I think it was Ontario Place, but it might have been Canada's Wonderland (the educational value of both excursions is apparent to all, I'll assume). While there, I spent some of my allowance money on a caricature portrait. I don't know why, I must have thought they were amusing and wanted one of my own.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" the caricaturist asked.

"An author," I said. (I've been giving that answer since I was five, with brief excursions. I still give that answer, and I'm 32.)

After our ten minutes, she handed me a large piece of paper with a sketch of me, as an adult. It was in profile, and I was holding a small book called "The Mystery of the Missing Goldfish." She'd put a male fan, panting and drooling and prostrate, in front of me, which was a nice touch, considering it would be six years from then until anyone would think I was dateable.

It's a little eerie, how well she drew what I would look like as an adult, except that my head is not ten times the size of my body. I still have that sketch, now ripped and creased and faded.

That night I showed it to my Dad, and he looked at it with my Mom; she said, "You look just like Aunt Heather in this." (Minus, I'll assume, the disproportion between the head and body.) Aunt Heather is my Mom's sister (and one who did indeed often have boys drooling and prostrate).

Somehow, this stranger found and elucidated a familial similarity between two people she'd never met. It was the first time either my Mom or myself had seen any physical resemblance between me and her side of the family.

And it must have been about eight years ago now, when my parents had just moved in to where they are living now, and were in the midst of one of their renovation projects and proudly showing it off, when I saw a Sears family portrait of the four of us that was taken when I was probably about seventeen. My brother was, by then, already taller than me; I was wearing a purple velvet dress, and my hair was long and brown, and my Mom's hair in this picture is 80's curly and highlighted blonde. We all stared into the camera and grinned. I saw, for the first time, that my brother and I had both inherited my mother's smile.

Identical. You could have cut it off of her face in that photo, if you were very careful, and pasted it onto ours, and if you could accept the idea of a fourteen-year-old boy wearing lipstick, you would not have been able to tell the difference.

A year ago I saw that smile again when I got Frances's daycare photos back. There it was, plain as anything: my mother's smile on my daughter's face. My smile.

And now, when she gives me on of those nuclear-sunrise smiles, and her eyes light up like two blue suns, and she looks like the very platonic ideal of happiness, beaming and glowing all over the place, I think--she got part of that from me. It's obvious that as is expected in the course of evolution, her version is an improvement on mine; still, there it is. One of my favourite things about that cherubic face, with its perfect round cheeks and adorably pointed chin, is something she got from me.

(Her smile makes me smile. We make quite the mutual admiration society, the two of us; where her grin gets me grinning, and we grin back and forth, each grin amplifying the other like candles by a mirror until, grinnier and grinnier, we collapse in laughter for some invented reason or another.)

And there might be something else, too--something else of me in her, though like my own mother, I can't see it. Since Frances herself is perfect (or as close to perfect as a person can be), it only stands to reason that whatever she got from me, must be good.

It's a nice antidote to what sometimes can feel like the continual ego-blows of parenting. Like the first time you realize that you have learned how to diaper a crying baby and can burp successfully--you're getting better! You don't just suck as a mom! There is something redeeming and hopeful about the first time you realize that part of this gorgeous, amazing, loving little person you made actually came from you--and you can point to it, and name it.

She got my smile.

Posted by Andrea at December 6, 2007 6:02 AM under Beanie Baby Brags , Me

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