www.roanoke.com

Laura Mock

Mock is a graduate of Hollins University who lives in Roanoke.

The older I get the more often it happens. It's my mother. She keeps popping up in my mirror. I catch quick glimpses of her when I'm trying to figure out what to do with my hair. I feel some of her expressions sneaking onto my face when I'm not expecting it. Maybe it's just a female thing. I don't know. Do men see their fathers in the mirror?

It's a well-known scientific fact that the older you get, the smarter your parents get. (I may be making that scientific part up.) Thank goodness for this, because when I was 15, my mom was one of the least intelligent people to ever walk the face of the Earth.

She didn't know anything that mattered. She didn't know or understand popular music (which is the heartbeat of almost every 15-year-old). For example, why the debut of Michael Jackson's "one glove" was a true watershed event in American music and culture. I'm certain I knew the importance of the glove at the time, although I can't quite remember anymore.

My mom didn't understand '80s fashion. My sister and I actually had to hide her pair of bell-bottoms behind the dryer. She thought Pumas were as good as Nikes. For heaven's sake, she's never even had her ears double-pierced. Actually, she's never had them single-pierced.

She didn't know that it was not cool for her to talk to my friends when they came over. And it was idiotic for her to judge my friends based on whether or not they would talk with her. I mean, get real. You can't judge someone's character as a person based on how they respond to an authority figure with no relationship to them.

It's completely beside the point that she was always right. It is also beside the point that my friends thought my mom was cool because she wanted to talk to them even though she was an adult.

Now that I am a bit older, my mom is approaching supergenius status -- really. I'm pretty certain she doesn't understand the molecular structure of Byzantium, but she's about to become an amazing grandmother. (Don't look at me. My sister and brother-in-law are having identical twins in July -- won't that be fun!)

You know, a strange thought occurred to me the other day. I wondered if my mom ever sees her mom's face in the mirror. She said yes. Follow that train of thought back a few generations.

There's a kind of family history that plays out every time I catch a glimpse of someone else in the mirror. I have to be thankful for what those women passed down through the generations. Not just the DNA, but their values and morals, their insights into the world around them, their sense of humor, their hope for the generations that followed them.

I don't know how my mom survived me when I was 15, especially when I knew so much and she knew so little. However she accomplished it, I sure am glad she did because I need her advice. Again.

So, the next time you see your mom in the mirror, tell her thanks.