This is a great thread!
My mother was a short, plumpish, reddish brown-haired woman built in the bust like the stereotypical German beer hall girl. I got everything
but the bust. I think I wrote here once that I got my hair colored a little redder, and was shocked at how much I resembled my mother. Unfortunately, I also inherited the tendency towards heart trouble in later years from her.
If my outsides were all my mother, my insides are all my father! This caused no end of confusion between me and Mom, and it wasn't until later in our lives that we accepted one another.
My dad was very introverted, and a real nerd (said with great affection). There was not one subject he didn't want to learn more about, even shrunken heads of the Amazon
. Through him, came my love for art, music and theatre, not to mention science. I often thought he would have been a tremendous teacher, better than my brothers and I (and we all are or were teachers), but he never did that.
What's most interesting to me is how traits in my family "skipped" a generation. My daughter is Miss Outgoing,like my mother, always wanting to be on the move and with people surrounding her. My mom loved to shop, but my daughter, given free reign, would win the Shopping Olympics. She has the same dry sense of humor and ability to out-talk anyone. How my mother would have loved this granddaughter!
I don't know where she got her looks, though. Neither I nor my parents, nor anyone on her dad's side is a tall, blue-eyed blonde. Maybe some generation even farther back. That can happen sometimes; my own brother is a tall redhead, but my dad's family had some very red Scots in it
.
My son looks like my father, and is more like me, inside. He loves music and books and while he has friends, prefers to stay by himself a great deal. He has the same love of science and the same curiosity as my father and me. Those two would have gotten on like a house on fire. I could see them reading together or visiting a museum, like I did with my dad.
The challenge of course is to love and appreciate my daughter for who she is, no matter how different from me she might be. I don't want the same pattern to repeat itself.