"Shopping with My Mother – Then and Now" By Alisa Singer

Shopping with my mother is, surprisingly, much the same experience for me now, in middle-age, as it was for me in middle-school.  There are several reasons for this but they all flow from my mother’s unshakeable belief that, as God made Adam in his own image, so each of her daughters will eventually emerge as more-or-less duplicate copies of herself.  She appears to reject the concept of the separate and unique DNA of her progeny, perhaps subconsciously believing that we were conceived with a full set of her chromosomes through mitosis or other mysterious form of cell division.  From her perspective it’s a simple matter of peeling away all those layers of mistaken identity we call “ourselves” to reveal the true person underneath – that being “her”.  Understand that my mother is neither an egomaniac nor a control freak.  She just knows this.