Clicking over to huffingtonpost.com to zone out on some celebrity news, I was stopped by the headline “Photos Reveal Startling Transformation.” Did someone’s innocent pictures show a scary monster? UFOs? The wrong face? Actually, yes. The writer’s photos revealed that she, like we, was turning into her mother.

Author Elise Sax wrote, “My vacation to Hawaii was great, but who is this woman in all the photos? It can’t be me. I’m much younger (and much thinner)…In fact, it’s not my face at all. It’s my mother’s face. When did this happen?”

I noticed I was turning into my mother a few years ago. My body settled into the same shape as hers. And when we were out together, people increasingly commented on how much we resembled each other (Two beauties, I’d say). One night, I clearly remember shouting something to my son, Max, and thinking, oh my goodness, I sounded just like Oma (our name for her after Max was born). Max came out of his room and said, Mom, you sounded just like Oma. It happens all the time now.

My mother makes her presence known in other ways, too. For example, a few months after she died, I asked my husband Jerry to pick up new license plates for my car, since the revenue office was in his building. Jerry showed the agent the paperwork and she handed him a set of plates. But then she immediately took them back, saying, Wait, these aren’t the right ones. She went to the back room and came back with two other plates: OMA 776. So mom’s still guiding my path, in a way, at least when I’m driving the Subaru.