Often, I have told people I feel like the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter. My mother and I look so much, and sound so much, alike that it is a little freaky. Witchy, even. When Maria was in utero I knew she would pop out and look the same. She did, right down to the crazy head of hair and fold in her earlobe. (I would show you, but my scanner is having a bad day.)

A while ago, I read a quote attributed to Adrienne Rich in a book called The Mother Dance: How Children Change Your Life by Harriet Lerner: “Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are there for the deepest mutality and the most painful estrangement.”

I read it several times over. It stuck with me and described the mother dance in my own clan. The three of us look-alikes push and pull at each other. If my grandmother were alive it would be the four of us, for sure. Push and pull. Enchant and enrage. Boss and bow. It is exhausting. And yet, without these two people — the one who labored for me and the one I labored for — life would not be as rich. Or interesting.

Today is my mother’s 65th birthday.
Happy Birthday, Mami.
I love you.