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My Mother’s Nose • Laurynn Fanale On being a carbon copy ...

For a long time, I wished I looked more like my dad, with his eyes, freckles, perfect skin, and button nose. Instead, I ended up being the spitting figure of my mother – not that my mother is ugly by any means. She's radiant, and always has been. So I never minded being told that I looked exactly like her – I was flattered, even, except I have always hated my nose.

The nose became more than just a physical feature – it symbolized everything I feared becoming. Each morning, I would study my reflection, watching how my nose would scrunch up exactly like hers when I laughed, how it would flare slightly when I was angry, just like hers did during our countless arguments. Genetics had played a cruel joke, ensuring that even in my attempts to separate myself from her, I would always carry a piece of her.

Growing up, people would constantly comment on our resemblance. "You're a carbon copy of your mother!" they'd exclaim at family gatherings, at the grocery store, at parent-teacher conferences. I would smile politely, accepting what was meant to be a compliment while inwardly tracing the bridge of my nose with my mind's eye. Our shared feature was a permanent reminder of a connection I wasn't sure I wanted to claim.

From the ages of 15 to 19, there was no one I wanted to be less like than my mother. I couldn't be in a room with her for longer than thirty minutes before we would argue. To me, she was judgmental, inconsiderate, impatient, and horribly draining to be around. I did everything I could to distance myself from her, physically and emotionally. I was never home, or I stayed in my room so I wouldn’t have to hang out with her. But she was always there: every time I looked in the mirror, I saw her.

Those years were filled with slammed doors and silent dinners, heavy with unspoken words and misunderstandings. I would sometimes catch glimpses of her watching me, her expression a mixture of hurt and confusion. But I was too wrapped up in my own drama to care. I created elaborate plans for my future, each one carefully crafted to be the opposite of her life choices. I would never settle for a conventional job, never lose myself in marriage, never let motherhood define me.

Yet beneath my defiance lay a complicated truth: I couldn't escape the parts of her that lived in me. How I organized my closet by color, how I couldn't sleep if there were dishes in the sink, how I went out of my way to make others happy – these were her habits, her ways of showing love, unconsciously absorbed, reproduced in my own life.

One night, my mother knocked on my bedroom door, asking to speak with me and sitting on the edge of my bed. Instead of the usual complaints or lectures, she spoke about herself.
 "I don't know who I am if I am not a mother, a wife, or a worker. I don't know me," she admitted, quietly.
 Her confession cut through our usual tension like a flashlight beam piercing through the darkness. My mother would always compliment my confidence and drive. I never once realized that she wished she had that for herself as well. The guilt I felt was immeasurable.

Our conversation centering only on her, I began to learn more about my mother. She, too, had struggled with the reflection in the mirror, rebelling in ways more extreme than I had ever done. Drinking. Running away. Never listening.

The woman I had been pushing away for years became human – a person wrestling with her own identity, her own doubts, her own dreams deferred. I, then, saw her as someone who had once been my age, full of hopes and fears, who had made choices and sacrifices I was only beginning to understand.

These revelations made me see that we are as one: we love the same way, we fear the same things, we hold grudges like no one else, and we really do not know what the hell we are doing.

These days, when I look in the mirror, I see my nose differently. It's still not what society might consider perfect. But it's a bridge between generations of women in my family who have struggled, loved, and grown. It's the nose that crinkles when we share private jokes, that lifts slightly when we're proud of each other's achievements – the same nose we've both stopped trying to hide in pictures.

© Laurynn Fanale - 3.1.25-
Senior, English major at College of Charleston.

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