A Perfect Match

“Now, Mummy, just how is it you can call me an older woman, if you’re calling yourself an older woman?” my just-turned-31-year-old daughter asks this morning in one of our frequent telephone calls between her New York City apartment and my Bangor one. We both laugh. I can see the tilt of her head, her fine-boned hand balanced on her hip, the smile, the light in her eyes.

She’s a funny one, this girl of mine. People tell me I’m funny, too, but I’ve never recognized it in myself.

I have, however, seen my girl as funny from the day we were in the laundromat in Houlton catching up on the mountains of clothes and sheets and towels that families with young children generate. I was only recently the mother of multiple children—having one was challenge enough with a hand water pump and kerosene lamps. So here we were, a frazzled mother—we mothers are often frazzled, although it is only in retrospect that I can admit it—with two beautiful children playing dress-up with the clothes, maneuvering little trucks and plastic men through the mountains of towels.

A man comes over and asks me how old they are. “Three,” I say, still sorting the clothes it might have been smarter to sort back home—another towel to the mountain pile, their dad’s flannel shirt to the needs-more-drying pile.

“Oh, twins!” he says. I look at him a bit incredulously, wondering how my dark-eyed daughter with a headful of brown ringlets and my bright-blue-eyed son with sandy-blond hair could be taken as twins.

“No,” I say, “one is three, and one is three and a half.”

“Ooohhh!” His eyes widen. I think I know what he is thinking: no time wasted here.

“My daughter is adopted,” I explain. The man looks to my son, sure he is the adopted child, just as my daughter calls out, “I’m a doctor? I didn’t know I was a doctor!”

My normally shy child’s grin was huge. Mine, too.

But just as with all mothers and daughters, we’ve had our moments. Fast forward to junior high where I used to show up to volunteer in my mismatched socks. I only cared that the consistency be the same; the color or style made no difference to me. My daughter always greeted me by looking at my feet before my face. And then our eyes would say it all: hers, “Oh, my God, Mummy, what an embarrassment, what are you thinking?”; mine: “You silly child. I adore you, and so what about my socks!” Finally it seemed a small concession: Now I always mate my socks. And she jokes I was ahead of my time.

People who meet my daughter now would have a hard time envisioning her as that shy two-and-a-half-year-old who fisted my skirts up in her hands and used me as a shield for years.

People who meet me now would have a hard time pulling up an image of me as shy child, too. But here we are, my girl and I, out in the big world living our stories, probably seen as fearless extroverts. We are so alike, and so different—as are my son and I. I think what people don’t actually get is that the differences between parent and child don’t really line up on a biological continuum.

I couldn’t have birthed a more appropriate daughter. The plain truth is we were meant for each other.

[Editor’s note: Ms. Jakimides’ daughter was one of the first 12 children MAPS placed in Aroostook County.]

A writer and visual artist, Annaliese Jakimides (pronounced “jah KIH mih deez”) lives in downtown Bangor.