She has her mother’s eyes. And razor tongue
On the inheritance we couldn’t escape.
There’s a moment, a slip in the fabric of time, when you realise that no matter how hard you try, no matter how many circles you run to escape it, you are your mother’s child.
I remember watching her as a girl, her tongue sharp as blades, cutting through the world like a weapon she never learned to sheath. She wielded her words like knives, slicing through every lie, scrutinising every word.
I swore I would never be like that, I would never let myself get so angry. I would be soft where she was hard, gentle where she was fierce. But life and it’s twisted sense of humour, always dishing out stones when you ask for bread.
There’s a peculiar pain in recognising your own reflection in someone you swore you’d never grow to be. “I’m nothing like her, I’ll never be like her” you reassure yourself time and time again. Then one day, you’re in the middle of an argument, and suddenly there it is the red in your face, the arch of your brow, the venom laced in your words. And then you understand how it was possible to cross the line as she did.
When I was younger, I thought my mother’s sharpness was her biggest flaw, her tragedy. I watched her cut herself and those she loved. She was fierce, yes, but that wasn’t what I feared. There was a loneliness in her that I never wanted to inherit. She would stand tall, shoulders back, daring the world to take her down, but in the quiet moments, when no one was watching, I saw the way her hands trembled. I swore I’d never tremble like that. I’d be different. I’d be better.
But the irony of girlhood is that the harder you fight against your mother, the more you become her. It’s as if every protest, every rebellion, is just another thread binding you to her fate. You try to soften your words, to let them fall like petals instead of daggers, but they land bearing the same weight, the same impact. You realise, too late, that her razor tongue was never just her weapon; it was a family trinket meant to be passed down from her to you. You now understand it was a way to survive in a world that was never kind to women like her, women like us.
I’ve caught myself standing in front of the mirror, staring into eyes that are not just mine, but hers too, thinking thoughts that aren’t just mine but hers as well. And wondered if this is what it means to inherit something. To carry the weight of someone else’s life in the blood that runs through your veins.
It’s bitter, this realisation, like swallowing shards of glass. The parts of her I swore I’d never take are the ones that have planted their roots the deepest. I find myself standing in the same poses, saying the same things, feeling the same rage.
But there’s a strange comfort in it too, isn’t there? To know that I am my mother’s child. That the parts of her I resented, the parts that scared me, are the same parts that have kept me alive. The world doesn’t get to swallow me whole, I don’t get to go down. Not without a fight. And maybe that’s the greatest inheritance of all, the knowledge that survival isn’t always about being soft about bending and yielding to the wind.
So, I carry my mother with me, in the way I speak, in the way I hold myself. I carry her scars, her strength, her beauty, and her flaws. And though it’s painful, though it’s bitter, it’s also the only way I know how to be.