And everyone probably also notices that your bangs are obscuring your vision-and their view of your eyes. “Your mother may assume it goes without saying that she is proud of you,” Deborah Tannen wrote. As a teenager, I was continually annoyed by some of her requests: comb your hair pull up your jeans (remember when low-rise jeans were a thing? It was not a good look, I can assure you!). In her note, my mom confessed to doing many things that the writer of this piece had done: checking my hair, my appearance. Above it, my mom had written a note: “Dear Benny”-I was “Benny” from the time I was a toddler the family folklore was that when we were babies, a man approached my parents, commenting on their cute baby boys, and my parents played along, pretending our names were Benjamin and Beauregard, later shorted to Benny and Bo. My mom, and her mom before her, loved clipping newspaper articles and cartoons from the paper to send to Barbara and me. On one visit home, I found an essay from the Washington Post by the linguistics professor Deborah Tannen that had been cut out and left on my desk. My mom knew this and wanted me to know it too. “Mother-daughter relationships can be complicated and fraught with the effects of moments from the past.
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