We’ve all heard the oft repeated trope that one day we’ll turn into our mothers. It’s funny when you see yourself doing something that reminds you of your mother—nagging not to eat hard candy, inexplicably adding a pinch of salt to a perfectly sweet watermelon, gesturing emphatically over crappy drivers on your patch of road.

At least when we’re young, though, it doesn’t seem to matter how much we love them, because we all want to be the antitheses of our mothers. If anything, that seems to be the common thread between mothers and daughters. If the mother is one thing, the daughter will try desperately to be the exact opposite. If a mother is staid and polite, her teenage daughter will be “rebellious,” acting out with either piercings, black lipstick or tattoos. If a mother still wants to look and act like a teenager, her daughter will buckle down and become the valedictorian of her class.

Why do daughters feel the need to be so different from their mothers? In the end, young daughters are just reliving identical rebellious phases to the ones that their mothers went through when they were young. Young people seem to think that they’re the first to do anything, to be wild, to be unencumbered by social rules and it isn’t until years after that they realize they were only mimicking their mothers.

But it’s equally as strange when you become like your mother regardless of any intention to be like her or unlike her. The trope seems to be true both physically and mentally.

I’ve come to look like my mother for the first time in my life. People say that we look alike. I’ve picked up her gestures and her mannerism and her speech patterns—something that I never recognized before. I have her same perfectionism—though I don’t indulge this proclivity to the same degree that she does, as well as her work ethic.

So what is it about growing into your mother? Perhaps it is this very stubbornness to try to act differently than our mothers—to truly believe that we are so different—that shields from our similarities and then they come to emerge when we least expect it. I think that we have always been like our mothers—how could we not be?—so a more accurate cliché would be that we come to recognize that we are like our mothers, not that we have only come to be like them.