I start looking like my mom, and I understand her negativity late in life much better

[Anonymous]

I find exercise makes me feel good about myself no matter what. I not only have started looking like my mom, but I've been dealing with some mental health issues that really make me fear I could wind up like her. But every time I make choices to affirmatively reject what my mom became in midlife (exercise, therapy, meditation and mindfulness, and above all SELF LOVE), it's like a ward against that fate.

I am deeply invested in the idea that you do not have to become your parents. You get to choose. Learn from their mistakes. Move your body, get fresh air, make and enjoy art, love yourself. I wish my mom had done this, but she didn't. I still can and I can showy daughter it's possible.

A few extra pounds at midlife are not the end of the world. A little cushioning to soften some of life's more difficult moments.

You deserve to love yourself OP.

[Anonymous]

My mom likes to view life through a negative lens and always has. I just spent an hour on the phone with her yesterday and she complained for 45 minutes straight, about everything from her car manufacturer (Toyota) to Congress to the people who installed her gutters to her cardiologist.

The first 15 minutes of the call was me updated her on the kids.

It's boring and tiresome. I'm not all about toxic positivity but, jeez, keep some of it to yourself.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:In my mid-forties I gained a lot of weight and started looking exactly like my mom. It is terrifying. When I was in my 20s nobody would have guessed that she was my mother.

Back then I didn't understand why, when I was a teenager, my mother became mean. Now I understand. It came from self-hatred. Previously she had been pretty, too. I am really working on not being so mean-spirited as she is.

Anybody else feels like you have morphed into your mother?

Lose weight

[Anonymous]

Right. I always thought my mother was stupid, but now I realize the isolation of being a SAHM caused cognitive issues as early as her late 30's. I'm a trailing spouse and WFH has made me just as stupid. It's made me fat like her, too. I hate it.

[Anonymous]

My mom has morphed into a gym-going, art-making, involved grandmother and matriarch of a big family. She is my guide to what aging well looks like.

It is a big effort to do all that as her body ages. Getting going each day to work out, make plans, make the effort. It's not easy at her age, but she just does it and I'm so grateful.

As you're making decisions about what to do with each day, it's so easy to rest and to stay home, which makes your world get smaller and your body weaker. I believe that's why people get grouchy as they age. It's much harder to keep moving and growing.

[Anonymous]

I miss my Mom and wish I had been more understanding of her. She gave 110% to everyone but herself.

[Anonymous]

My whole life I’ve worked to be very different from my mother. Mostly succeeded. We do have some physical similarities but not that much. Mostly emotionally and mentally: she was crippled by anxiety, driven by negativity, and harmed by self doubt. She blamed everyone else for her lack of success but she was a broken person who couldn’t handle much and had been both coddled and undermined as a child. She is also a kind and generous person , not selfish except in the way emotional fragility made her selfish. I am sad for her , she’s at the end of her life and feels like she has no purpose.

[Anonymous]

OP here. Thanks, everyone, for your thoughtful replies.

[Anonymous]

I don’t understand how self-hatred would lead to someone being mean to others.
Most of the time I really hate the way my body looks and my various personal failures but it doesn’t make me be mean to anyone but myself.
I guess depression comes out in different ways in different people.
I also try not to replicate things in my mother that I do not like. But I also try to keep my eyes open for the things that are good about her that she gave to me. It’s so easy to see the bad. It’s harder to see the good parts.