Since I was a gangly teenager, I’ve been the spitting image of my paternal grandmother. At 15 I didn’t look like my grandma when she was 15, rather I looked like a non-wrinkley version of her 76-year-old self. The resemblance was uncanny.
Over the past couple of years, however, I’ve gone to shave in the morning and staring back from the mirror was a stubbly-faced version of… my mom! And when you see photographs of my mother in her mid-30s… it looks like me in drag. I look more and more like her every day.
Note: My mother and my paternal grandmother look nothing at all alike.
I do look like both my parents, but it’s weird how the resemblance has changed over the last 20 years.
This isn’t true of me, but my son. He used to be my husband’s twin, now he’s mine. His face has gotten rounder and his hair longer, but that doesn’t explain all of it.
I have always looked like my dad. When I was 12, I looked like my dad when he was 12, etc… The only difference was the hairstyle. But since we both went bald in our mid-20’s, it’s not really a difference.
All three of us kids have our dad’s facial bone structure (I’ve also got his build – long skinny arms and legs, all my extra weight in my belly). My sister and I looked amazingly similar when we were in our late teens and early 20s (she’s four years older) – but recently someone meeting me for the first time as I was standing next to her commented that we look nothing alike. Of course, the other person standing there (who knows me but was meeting my sister for the first time) saw a strong resemblence.
As I blaze through my thirties, I see more and more of my father in the mirror. It’s a bit weird, because my mother is strikingly round, while my father was strikingly angular.
The button nose of my childhood has somehow made a glacial change into something much closer to the old man’s hatchet proboscis.
Or maybe it’s just that I’ve acquired a habitually cynical expression. I don’t know.
I don’t see any resemblance with my mother, but a lot of her friends who’ve never met me before have commented on how much we look alike. They even knew I was her daughter before they’d seen the two of us together.
Genetics is a really funny thing. My ex-wife and I do not bear any resemblance to one another. But ye gods, our daughter manages to look like both of us at the same time. Up to the time that she was about three, Kizarvexilla was the spitting image of my baby pictures. Since that time she’s started looking more and more like her mother, but my features are still there to see.
I’ve always looked like the female incarnation of my Dad, and he looks like his dad looked, and he looked like the few pictures of his dad.
And if you trace it back down through my grandfather’s other son, who also looks like him, through his twin sons, my cousins, who look like their father, and the sons of one of the cousins, who look like their father… suddenly they and I share features, and it’s odd to see my ears in a 20-year-old boy who I haven’t seen in person since he was eight.
I look like my father at the appropriate age. Our high school senior pictures sat next to each other on Mom’s shelf for years, and it was uncanny. If my face was a little thinner now, it would still be startling.
But as I age, bits of my mother’s features are slowly creeping in. It’s unsettling to look at a picture of the three of us now and recognize bits of her face in mine, when my self-image was always so tied up with how my Dad looks.
I don’t look like anyone. Other than Julian Lennon (and the person who told me that I no longer speak to). Since I’m adopted, I don’t look like anyone in my family, which makes it odd when people see a picture of my mom and say I look like her. I think the people who say that are most likely high, though. Maybe I developed the resemblance over the years just living with her? :rolleyes:
Shoot - I meant to add that my son, on the other hand - is the spitting image of me. From the time he started school, teachers could take one look at me and say, “you’re Kid2U’s Mom” after never having talked to me, seen me, seen a picture of me, nothing. People comment on it all the time. It really is kinda spooky.
Strange, maybe you’v picked up body languge and posture. The way I smiled in photos, with a very slight head tilt made me look even more like my paternal grandmother.
I have a buddy who was adopted and met his birth mother and half-siblings for the frst time in his mid-20s. He said it was mind blowing because he’d never looked like anyone before. (He gets along just fine as friends with his bio-mother, but his adopted mom is “Mom”.) A lot of people think he looks like his adopted mother.
I get that all the time – people who know my dad come up just start talking to me. I look very much like he did when younger (and lighter). My brother also has the strong family resemblance, but got more of our mom’s features.
I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or not – I look at my dad, think “oh, man, is that what I’m going to look like?” – and then generally go work out soon thereafter.
My oldest nephew now looks so much like my brother at his age, that when I see pictures I have to check the background to see which one it is of. Uncanny.
From my earliest memories, I’ve always been told that I look just like my Dad and his side of the family, especially his sister and mother. It got to the point that my parents were a little concerned that I would somehow feel not “unique” or something. Or, even worse, that I would feel I had to mirror my Aunt’s and Grandmother’s lives (many of the events in those lives were things my folks did not want me to repeat, e.g. dying violently at the age of 34).
I have to agree there’s a strong resemblance; in the only picture of my Grandmother (whom I’m also named for) she looks incredibly like me.
With my two siblings and our children, it’s kind of odd: My son looks like my brother, my brother’s son looks like my sister, my sister’s oldest son looks like me. And it’s not only facial features, but mannerisms and speech patterns.
Growing up I always looked like my mother. To the point of, when I was working summers at her office building, people would ask me if I was “Thelma’s son”. I wasn’t with her, mind you – this was people coming up to me in the cafeteria, at the elevator, etc.
Once I hit 40 though, I really started to look more like my father. At this point I think I look much more like him (at a later age) then my mother (when she was younger). My brother followed the same path – looked like mother most of his life, and as he got older, started to look like father. My sister, on the other hand, has always looked like my father. Well, until she got the two face lifts and the boob job.
When she was younger, my Aunt Mary didn’t seem to resemble my grandmother (her mother.) Aunt Mary’s daughter (my cousin) didn’t look like my grandmother either. For that matter, Aunt Mary and her daughter didn’t seem to resemble each other, except in the most superficial way.
Now that my cousin is sixty-ish, and Aunt Mary is in her late seventies, not only do they look very much like each other, they both look strikingly like my grandmother. Hell, Aunt Mary now looks pretty much exactly like my grandmother did.
And it’s not because they look old–they are very young-looking for their ages, as was my grandmother when she was alive.
I look like a combination of both my parents although as I age, I think I am beginning to resemble my mother more. However, my daughter is a female version of her father. She has absolutely no resemblance to me whatsoever. Side by side their baby pictures were identical until my daughter was about two. The joke as that I was just a host to my ex husband’s seed.
I look exactly like my mother. In high school I actually had a friend do a double take and make us stand next to each other so he could see how much we look alike. She started dying her hair blonde though instead of the auburn red color my hair is because blonde hides the grey better apparently. When I was growing up I got a lot of “You two could be sisters!” (I kind of wish I had gotten my father’s side of the family’s metabolism though, because then the whole weight loss thing would be much easier.)
Heh…I SO get this. My Mother was a fraternal twin. She was a fair-skinned redhead with freckles and green eyes; her twin brother was olive-skinned, with dark hair and dark eyes. I am dark-skinned with dark hair and eyes, but my uncle’s daughter, a mere six days older than me, is a redhead with freckles and green eyes. And it goes on - my sister, blonde and blue-eyed, has a daughter that looks exactly like me, whereas MY daughter… could nearly be my sister’s twin (except the kid has my brown eyes.)
I have three full siblings. We ALL look like my mother, and we don’t look anything like one another. When my Mom died, we went through family pictures and were amazed - when Mom was a toddler, she looked like my sister did as a toddler. As a teenager, she was the image of my daughter at the same age. As she grew older, we could see more of one brother, and later, me. Before Mom died, she looked exactly like the other brother.
I don’t look like anyone in my family, since I have a syndrome that has facial charteristics. VERY surreal going to the conferences and seeing all these kids who looked like I did when I was younger.
My mom and my sister could be identical twins. LOL…I remember Mom’s cat would get so confused when he headed for my sister’s lap, and my mom’s voice would be coming from somewhere else.
EVERYONE says that I sound like my mom on the phone. Which is weird seeing as most of the rest of the time, I have a VERY distinctive “deaf” voice.
Who does she look like now?