Every time I go anywhere with my kids, no matter which ones, I always get comments from complete strangers on how they look like me. Now, I don't necessarily think that my kids look like I do now, but they definitely look the way I did when I was their ages. Lie my childhood pictures beside theirs and the resemblance is uncanny. Now there are a couple of reasons this seems a little odd to me. First, of all, growing up I never looked anything like my family. Of course, I grew up with a step dad and no one expected me to look like him, but I never had a cousin or aunt whom even resembled anything I looked like, but yet they all looked the same. Now, the second reason the resemblance is a little surprising, is my children have two different dads that have no similarities when it comes to their appearances! One is brown, brown and more brown, the other is as white as one can get. But yet, my girls all look exactly the same, like me. The joke has always been that I am so controlling I don't even let a mans DNA participate in the creation of my children.
The similarities between my daughters and I are not only visual, they also have a lot of my attitude, emotional craziness, TV/ chocolate addiction, etc... Now the little ones are around me pretty much 24/7, so of course they are going to be all mommy, some days I am all that they see. But the oldest one spends more time with her step mom than she does me, so I am always a little proud when she exhibits my behaviour, unless of course she is being psycho.
This weekend I saw some differences that I had never seen before. A little eye opening, but it got me to thinking, as opposed to sleeping. Now I was a single mother with my oldest, but yet she had lots of extended family. I was very close with her paternal grandparents and we did a lot of activities together. Her father, even though, was not present so much, due to distance, when he was there he was always with his now wife and her family. All of P's grandparents are divorced and remarried, she has never had a shortage of people surrounding her, her family dynamic may be confusing to her friends, but it is her normality and she has always felt supported. This is something I hope she will be able to carry into her teen years and keep the trouble she gets into down to a minimal.
Now my youngest two are a different story. There is no family for miles and miles. I see mine a couple times a year and their paternal grandparents are every other month at best. At least, that is how it used to be, now they too are a couple times of year, maybe. Now I know traveling is expensive and time consuming. That is not the issue to me. I have learned over the past couple of years to work through my issues myself. There are no times that I can drop my little girls off at a grandparents house, so if they are not with there father, which is minimal they are with me. Even though their father and I resided together for the first couple of years of their lives, I am starting to wonder if we ever lived together. Our lives were always separate, before we had children, it didn't matter though. I have always enjoyed my alone time. Believe it or not, I start to go crazy if cant spend regular time by myself. Now that my 3 year olds are no longer napping, I feel a little overwhelmed. Not until their 830pm bedtime do I get my much needed decompression time. After the twins were born, however, I thought his priorities would change, maybe family time would become valuable since there was now a family present. Nope, lives were still lived separately, I was still a single parent even though I was married. I must admit, he was a good provider, but that is were his responsibility ended. Maybe that is why, it is easier for us to hang out occasionally with our children and go to events now. We have spent so much time not communicating that why start now.
My worry is, will I be enough for them and will they be too much for me? Of course, there is no option available, and we must all use the hand we were dealt. But it saddened me when my youngest told me that she doesn't have a daddy in her family. I know what it is like to crave relationships. I know I definitely spend way to much time hounding my friends on the phone and I try not to take it personal when calls and texts are not returned. As much as I love my down time, I also love to interact. And lets face it, a woman can not survive on raising her kids alone. I love being a mother, but sometimes I would like to just be a woman.
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