Sometimes now when my mother’s sisters see me, with my gray and black hair pulled back and framing my pecan-tan face, they see my mother. “You sho’ look like Nadine….you look just like your mother,” I am told increasingly by relatives young and old at family gatherings.

On occasion, my husband has looked up from reading the newspaper or watching television to glance at me when I enter our family room. His eyes linger for a moment, arrested by pleasant remembrances of encounters with my mother. “Girl, you are looking like Miss Nadine.”

I see her myself sometimes as I stare into the mirror. The shape of my eyes. The slope of my nose. The swell of my cheeks. The shine of my smile. I see the gentleness of her face in mine and I don’t mind that the years have soften my too-serious, sometimes dour countenance. “Smile,” she often urged the moody, aloof teenager that was me. You’ll look better and feel better, she advised.

As women mature, we often begin to take on the appearance and sometimes the mannerisms of our mothers . Or they sometimes overtake us, for better or for worse. We hear ourselves saying the same things that they said –that we vowed to our younger selves that we would not say to our own children. Over the years, I have found more and more comfort in becoming the type of woman my mother was and prayed for me to be. I am still a work in progress, even as my children have left home to chart their own paths.

When people comment on my facial similarities to my mother, I believe that it’s not just the physical reflection of my mother that they are seeing. I think that somehow in my eyes, which are said to be the windows to one’s soul, the faith instilled by my mother is also shining through. On my face, perhaps, is the same peace that emanated from hers.

As I wrote in two earlier blogs, as I was growing up my mother’s faith in God sustained and protected me when I did not know how to pray for myself. Through her example, I learned to live by faith and to trust God. I taught my children, am teaching them to do the same.

Years from now, perhaps, when someone is looking anew at my son and daughter, they will see me in them. Or better yet, they will see God in them.

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