daughter looks like mom

My daughter stopped by the office on her way to her first job interview. She didn’t need encouragement; she wanted me to run an errand she was supposed to do. Having spent my lunch time running my own errands, I did not have time to take care of hers. I gave it back to her, walked out to the car with her, wished her well and sent her off to the job interview. Before she left, she reached over and adjusted my shirt.
Twenty minutes later she was back, glowing excited, barely containing herself, “I got the job. I start tomorrow.”
I glowed for a couple seconds myself. My daughter, the wage earner. Less for me to pay and more for her to save. All right!
After she left one of the reporters said, “It’s Joan talking to Joan. Looks like you, acts like you, talks like you,” the reported noted.
What? She and I look alike?
It wasn’t the first time I’ve heard that, but it still astonished me. From my perspective as her mom, my daughter and I are quite different. She’s blonde, 30 years younger, shorter and many years from having to worry about retaining her girlish figure.
We are similar in a couple of respects: we like the same sort of clothes and both stretch our clothing budgets by shopping the sales racks. The similarities end there. Everything she wears looks fantastic. I realize halfway through the day that my skirt is on backwards.
She regularly despairs of my clothing choices. She lets me know how I should dress as she frowns at the length of my slacks, tells me I am wearing the absolutely most awful socks and hands me the correct pair to wear.
How will I ever manage when se leaves for college? I will have no one to stop me as I leave for work and moan, “Mom, not that blouse!”
Nor will I have my in-house make-up artist. It didn’t take long after I gave my teenager permission to wear make-up before she began telling me what was wrong with mine. The one advantage to having a flawless daughter is when we travel I can count on her to remember every item I forgot to take off the shelf at home.
We may have many similar mannerisms, but it will take her a few years before she gets the same comments I did on a recent trip to Indiana. I went in to a fast food place for a hamburger. The young woman wrote down my order, looked up and hesitantly asked, “are you a teacher?”
I had never seen the clerk before. She had done nothing wrong. Yet one look at my face and she was ready to toe the line before I made her write, 100 times, “I will take orders accurately.”
The Look came as part f my facade for dealing with misbehaving children. Once I told a rowdy kid, whom I had never seen before, that it was time he went home. He gathered up his stuff, walked away, turned and asked, “Are you a teacher or something?” I guess teachers have The Look.
My teenager lacks one. However there is hope for her to develop The Look — this fall when she goes off to college to study to be a teacher.