Mirror, Mirror

Frequently I get these surprise visits from my mom and grandmothers when I look in the mirror. Only when I look closer I realize I'm not seeing a ghost or something super natural; it's only me. My late 50's age is making me look more and more like my female relatives. I am not sure if I like looking at myself and seeing how much I look like my mom, or my grandma Barnett, or my Gram, or even my aunts. Yet in someways it is nice to know that these wonderful people have influenced me. The women in my family seem to be able to pass on their genes really well. And they played a big part in my mental attitude toward life, too. Not sure if that is good or not, either. I just hope I am leaving out a lot of the bad parts.
I don't see as much of my dad, or grandfathers in my physical self but I do think I have a lot of them in me mentally. My son and my nephews seem to be taking after their male relatives a bit more than then my sisters and I are.
Getting on in life is not always the fun that it is made out to be. All of the twinges, cramps, aches and pains are - well a big pain in my life. And yet my mind seems to want to pretend that I am still a lot younger and wants me to do things that younger people do. It can be quite a surprise to try to lift something that I would have done with ease 10 years ago and find that I can't lift it at all now. I find I can't do the gardening I used to do. And even cleaning house takes a lot longer as well as taking a lot out of me. Using a vacuum cleaner is one of the worse things I can do. It makes my back really hurt. I would thing that some company would come up with a vacuum cleaner that easier for older people to use. And cleaning the baked on gunk of the top of the stove. Any time I do that I know that my hands will swell, and be useless, as well as painful for days.
I have found that I do not appreciate my relatives for passing on bad feet, big bunions, scoliosis or curvature of the spine causing a really bad back. But when we are in our 20's and having children we usually don't realize that these things will be that bad for us when we get older and usually don't realize that we may be passing these things on to our children.
I am hoping that that my son, nephews, and niece will have enough of their fathers genes that they won't have these problems.