“Don’t forget to turn off the stove before you go,” Lizzie calls up the stairs to me.  She’s noticed that there’s a low flame under the stockpot.  She’s about to leave the house, and she knows I’ll be leaving a few minutes later.  For a split-second, I am annoyed.  She’s telling me?  I’m the one who tells!  She’s reminding me?  I’m the one who reminds!

But the instant I note my annoyance, it is gone, replaced by a warm glow that takes me completely by surprise.

“Got, it. Liz,” I yell back.  “And thanks.”

After she leaves, after I turn off the stove (which, in truth, I would have forgotten), in the car on the way to do those endless errands that expand into and sometimes take over one’s life, I think about that little interchange.  What was I feeling?  What happened?

It’s interesting to untangle.

Here’s what I think: The warm glow that displaced my annoyance?  That was the warmth of recognition: I heard myself in the words of my daughter.  She noticed what I would have noticed.  She said what I would have said.   And she said it in a grown-up, matter-of-fact tone of voice that I recognized as my own.

As a daughter, one of the worst things I can imagine hearing is  …“You sound just like your mother.”  (Which is always meant as an insult, right?) Yet as a mother, I am delighted, delighted and warmed all over, to say: “My daughter sounds just like me.” (For that one moment, at least.) Lizzie would die a thousand deaths if she heard me say this, so of course I won’t.  As she is blissfully – or sometimes willfully – oblivious to most of what I do, she won’t be reading this blog post.  So I am safe.  Safe and happy.

Maybe you think I’m making too big a deal out of one comment, but to me there was a rich subtext: her attention to home and her sense of responsibility about what goes on in the home.  She was, in that moment, a – dare I say it? — thoughtful adult.

My own thoughtful adult moments were few and far between when I was a teen.  Mostly, I figured that the world revolved around me and that my parents became part of that world only when they were directly serving me: driving me some place, handing me my allowance, etc.  I would not have noticed a flame under the stockpot.   I would not have noticed a flame under my father’s favorite chair.  With him sitting in it.

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