My Mother & Her Alter Ego

"You can do anything you set your mind to"
"If there is a will, there is a way"
"You can be anything you want to. Everything is possible. Nothing is impossible. Reach for the stars"

These exhortations and many more similar were drummed into my very fibre from my birth, all through my growing up years and are still being told to me by my mother. I was brought up with clear guidelines to be a career woman, not to stay home and be a housewife. I was sent to driving school months before I was of age to take the driving license. No housework was ever given to me - I neither washed the dishes nor learned to cook. I never picked up a mop or a broom. Neither a featherduster nor a brush. She did them all for me.

My mother brought me up to live the life she never had and which she desired, which she kept saying she would have if she had not succumbed to my father's persistent courtship. In fact, from the age of 22 until today, she has been living vicariously through me, taking the ups and the downs, the failures and the successes. She kept track of everyone in my life be they friends, colleagues, clients, bosses, suppliers.

I have never felt hampered by this at all. It had seemed very natural when I was young, to come home and relate everything to her. It must have been a habit she started with me when I was very young. Because casting my mind back as far as I could, I have always seemed to be telling her about this classmate or that teacher, what I learned and what I liked. My classmates and teachers were amazed when they meet my mother for the first time to realize that she knew them intimately. She made herself my friends' friend too. She was like an extension of me.

When I went to a co-ed school at the age of 18, she also got to know all my male friends and so, when I finally started dating guys at the ripe old age of 20, she was still "in the loop" and knew everything, and so could watch out for me. She was very popular with all my boyfriends, she maintained friendship with some of them even when they were relegated to ex-boyfriend status.

She laid down the ground rules to all my boyfriends (regardless whether I would eventually marry him or not): "My daughter has never been trained to keep house - she can neither cook, wash up, sweep or mop the floor, wash or iron clothes" Her reasoning: better they know up front. When she met up with Larry's parents for the first time (6 months prior to our wedding), she prefaced that line with: "I'm a bad mother, I love her so much, she is my only daughter. I never let her do any housework." I still remember the non-plussed looks on my in-laws faces and the embarassed one on my father's. He tried to soften it with "But of course she can learn" to which she vehemently replied, "No she will not because her place is not in the kitchen but out in the business world."

All my life, she isn't just my mother but my best friend, my confidante. She knows all my secrets and she wore with immense pride all my successes. Someone once accused her of living a second life through me, charting a life as different as hers could be.

Today I still don't see any malice in that. I see a lot of love guided by a mastermind at planning and psychological motivation. She did not know some other gurus had called it "The Law of Attraction" but she had planted it so deep in me and trained me well to use it unconsciously and unknowingly.

I cannot conceive of a better upbringing than this.