Lord help me, but as time goes on, I'm slowly turning into my mother. I see it in the little ways - from my obsessive picture taking of the same thing (me: the eiffel tower, her: fall foliage). I can still hear myself as a child saying "But mom - the leaves change color every year. You have albums and albums of the exact same pictures!"

Or in the way that I have friends and acquaintances all over France, Europe & the US. And in the way that I make an effort to cultivate and keep those friendships. It used to drive me crazy as a child that no matter where we went, she always ran into someone she knew - which for me, meant standing there and having to be patient while she chatted. But now I find myself doing the same - making connections, bringing people together.

Funnily enough, my mother always told me my name meant "patience", something I was often in short supply of until moving to France. Though google disagrees and says it means "listener" in Aramaic.

I suppose it's inevitable that we all end up in some way like our mothers (or fathers) - it's just not something I ever pictured myself doing. My mother felt like she'd had a very unfair childhood growing up as the oldest child of an immigrant family, and in many ways, I paid for that. She was often selfish and she was a workaholic. She was very hard on me - pushing me to constantly do more and do better. I never got pocket money or an allowance from her, I was always told that if I wanted money, I had to earn it myself. So I started working from a very early age - at 12 - in order to have some financial freedom. To be able to buy clothes and cassette tapes like my friends. The same party line continued on when I went to college and I worked 30-40 hours per week to pay my way through school. Not that I'm complaining here - I absolutely loved the jobs I had in college and wouldn't have traded them for the world. And it made me self-sufficient. Independent. Able to take care of myself. I couldn't really say the same for my college roommate, who, as lovely as she was, seemed to think that money only came from the ATM.

But all of this meant that I resented my mother for a good portion of my youth - she was so tough on me and so easy on my brother. My father was my refuge, the one who always comforted and encouraged me - which was why it was even doubly harder for me when he passed away. It was often an "us against them" mentality, and I had lost my "us".

I don't know what's made me think about all this lately - maybe watching MJ's poor children having to deal with the death of their father in the public eye. Maybe my impending trip to the US, in which I know I'll be spending time a lot of time with her. And the thing is, since my father died, she's changed. Softened with time. Regrets that we don't have that typical mother/daughter relationship. It's so strange now for me to see her almost try to buy my love, and it's almost laughable to hear her offer to buy me a plane ticket home after so many years of extreme tight-fistedness.

Part of time thinks it's too late to change - almost 30 years of interactions can be a hard habit to break. But part of me thinks we have to - she's my only remaining parent. Many people out there no longer have that, including some of you reading this. And because of you, I think of what will happen when she's gone. I'm so far away and I don't want to have any regrets.

So this time around, I'm vowng to try to be more open. More patient. To talk more about my life. To appreciate what I can learn from her. And to accept her as she is.