Like Mother, Like Child
My mother would tell you that I picked the wrong lookalike holiday. Her line to me was that “you are the spitting image of Gene Martin” — my father.
Elsa Olivetti Martin might have been right. Nonetheless, my father was not a person any little girl wanted to look like.
She, on the other hand, was. You’ll see as much in her photo and mine, snapped by a street photographer on the Champs-Élysées in Paris on just about the day Jack Kennedy was elected president. She was 40; I was 17, and for that little epoch of our lives, I was trying to form myself in her image.
For many reasons, that didn’t take. Both of us had to grow much older before I saw the many less visible ways in which I am my mother’s daughter, if not her spitting image. As she aged, our latent resemblance grew stronger, but the mother I wanted to look like was the one I’d grown up with, my mother as I remember her when daughter was my life’s key relationship.
I don’t do a much better job of looking like my sons. At a certain stage of babyhood, Nathaniel resembled little me. Alex, my Bay Weekly partner, and I share one distinguishing characteristic, hidden over the many years he’s kept his curls short and tight.
Yet it was striving to see resemblance in one another — or hoping that others would — that inspired this week’s Mother’s Day photo feature, Who Looks Like Their Mama.
What fun, I thought, to see who looks like their mama … and I was right. All of us here at Bay Weekly have delighted in the photos you’ve sent. We’ve compared and contrasted for build, face shape, nose, cheekbones, eyes, lips and eyebrows — and tried to discount hair and beards in making our assessments.
More than one of you told us your mother was your best friend. What power that simple statement packs!
Most of us here at Bay Weekly found we had to get in on the fun. So as well as two dozen readers, Betsy Kehne, Kathy Knotts, Audrey Broomfield, Susan Nolan and Krista Pfunder Boughey shared their familial lookalike partnerships. All of them scored higher than I did, Audrey, Betsy and Krista with their mothers, Kathy with elder son Jonah and Susan with both her kids.
Thank all of you for sharing!
Now everybody gets in on the fun. Now it’s your turn to decide who looks most like their mama.
Send us your votes for your top three picks, and please add a sentence of explanation. Please score Bay Weekly staff independently as we’re out of the running for prizes.
Winning readers will be rewarded with tickets to one of the fun and fabulous events you read about in 8 Days a Week. Send your votes to [email protected] by Friday, May 17.
Plus Last Minute Camp Guide
Mothers (and fathers) still figuring out their kids’ summers get our help as well in the special Last-Minute Camp Guide in this week’s paper.