Having just experienced a lovely Mother’s Day last weekend, where my two teenage sons took me out for dinner, I felt I had plenty to be grateful for.

It is inevitable on Mother’s Day to stop and think of our own Mothers and after discussing this with my friends, we all noticed that as we get older we are certainly becoming more and more like our Mothers.

My Mother is an amazing, strong, inspirational woman, who brought up 4 children, does a lot of Charity work, is a wonderful friend and has been the most wonderful wife and for the last 17 years Carer to my Father – so if I do turn out to be like her I could not have a better role model.

These days my Mother and I enjoy a very close relationship, as do all my siblings, however, especially as a teenager, I did not always see eye to eye with my Mum. Now I have my own teenage children I am finding that I have a great deal of empathy and sympathy towards my Mum’s handling of my teenage self. I also find myself apologizing, as an adult, for some of my behaviour when I was younger.

I am dreading the day when my sons pass their driving test; I will be a nervous wreck!

I think that being a parent in the 21st Century is actually harder than when we were young, as in addition to all the things are parents have to worry about, we also have all the Social Media and Internet issues to worry about as well.

We have all noticed ourselves doing and saying things that our Mother’s do, especially things that annoyed us as children that we swore blind that we would never say to our children.

So, the Jury is out, in the same way our children’s behaviour is not unique, we did the same things ourselves, is it also inevitable that we will turn into our Mothers?

Some examples we have come up with, see if any of these sound familiar:-

“What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand?”
“I don’t have to give you a reason, it’s just because I said so.”
“If your friend jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?”

We often find ourselves:

Commenting about the type of music that young people like today – all that Rap music, with its bad language is in my opinion totally unnecessary and the volume of music at parties does seem to be much too loud.

Not wanting to go out drinking when we have work the next day, also is it me or do late nights take their toll much more than they used to.

Much preferring comfortable shoes over killer high heels and taking a pair of flats with you to change into at some point during a party. Having to wear hold in everything, just to look good in that dress.

Is it nature verses nurture, perhaps we are how we are because our Mothers are such positive role models to us and we want to give our children the same sense of love, warmth and security that our Mothers have given us, or maybe it’s over 40 years of conditioning coming back to haunt us. Either way, it’s highly unlikely that ‘What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand?’ or “because I told you so” is going to disappear from our repertoires anytime soon.

Anyway a Happy Belated Mother’s Day and good luck to all Mothers out there!