I can feel myself turning into my mother. Help!

In East of Eden, John Steinbeck quite correctly suggests that it “takes courage to raise children”. Whether they are biologically related to you or not, the people that raise you work hard to do so. One assumes it must then be very frustrating for parents to see their children rejecting not only their help, but their very identity and being as they get older.

I’m not denying that I’ve never felt a strong desire to be as different from my mother as possible; I think it’s only natural to want to fight against what we perceive to be holding us back. Obviously this feeling is amplified when we actively disagree with our parents on certain things (Mum, I’m sorry, but our political views will never be aligned, and your hatred for Lily Allen kills me a little bit more everyday). We just need to make sure that, beneath the surface tension that often causes friction in our relationships, we recognise that ‘becoming like our parents’ isn’t the soul-crushing precipice of growing up that it is often made out to be.

Personally, mothers are a continual source of inspiration for me in my day-to-day life. Think of all the silent favours you’ve done for your friends, or the roles you have adopted that return little reward or acknowledgement, and then multiply that feeling of dissatisfaction and indignation by a thousand. Somewhere around that mark is where I assume mothers rank. If they choose to (or must) hold down a job on top of this invisible daily labour, their workload exceeds the imaginable. And yet, growing up, as our mothers perform what I will quite frankly term incredible feats of humanity, we do little but assume that it is ‘their job’.

“Wanting to reject the identity of your mother means rejecting the things she has taught and passed on to you, which, like it or not, are unavoidable consequences of being human”

This, it seems, is the sacrifice parents make when they have a family to look after – reconciling the profession of raising children with job satisfaction is seemingly impossible. As such, dear reader, I think the least we can do, as we reach an age at which self-reflection and awareness preoccupy our daily thoughts, is try our hardest to repay our parents for their lifetime of hard work. You may disagree with your mum about the election, or TV shows, or even what you want to do with your life, but it’s insulting to her and yourself to suggest that she didn’t do the best she could at raising you. Wanting to reject the identity of your mother means rejecting the things she has taught and passed on to you, which, like it or not, are unavoidable consequences of being human.

Facebook has been flooded this week with reports that we inherit our intelligence from our mothers, and although the articles announcing this are incredibly simplified, and arguably even misrepresentative, the point stands that we are shaped – physically, mentally, and genetically – by our parents. You aren’t so much ‘becoming’ like them as you are already like them – in a literal sense. Even those of us whose parents are not related to us by blood can appreciate the intense psychological contribution of parental attention and love to our identities.

What we are actively trying to do when we complain about the similarities between ourselves and our parents is reverse a process that’s been occurring since we were born; a task not only exceedingly challenging, but ostensibly pointless. Being like your mum or your dad doesn’t mean you have to subscribe to the same newspapers or shop in the same places as them when you reach their age; becoming like our parents means that they’ve done their job and that we are ready to uphold our side of the bargain by fleeing the nest and being adults ourselves.

Of course, sometimes, mothers and fathers might not embody all that is good and pure in the world; they make mistakes, they can upset us, and often we resent them for this. We might disagree about the fundamental things in life and often children can go years without communicating with their parents. But there is something to be said for knowing they are there, regardless of how active they are in your life. Having lost a parent last year, and having friends who can sympathise completely with that feeling, I know that even if, hypothetically, my father was a criminal who I saw only once a decade, having the knowledge that he exists and is living his own life would make me happy.

Agony Aunt: Managing Exam Isolation

It might not be your life’s ambition to become a banker, a florist, a teacher, or whatever career path your parents followed, but if I can ever fill the shoes of a mother or a father, I would be proud to know that I’ve followed in the footsteps of my parents. And, dear reader, I think you should be too