Unfiltered Story #259998

My mother and I tend to get mixed up a lot, to a point where even close family members (such as my younger brothers and my grandparents) can get us confused. The only real obvious difference is that I have glasses while my mother wears contacts. I tend to be mistaken for either younger or quite a bit older than I actually am, due to looking younger but acting twice my age. This combination has led to some interesting circumstances.

I’m at a family reunion for my mother’s side of the family across the country and am thirteen or fourteen years old. A distant relative of ours, a man about my parents’ age, strikes up a polite conversation with me and we make small talk for quite a bit.

As we’re talking, my mother walks up to me because all the other kids are about to go swimming and she wants to ask me if I want to go get my bathing suit on. The male relative looks between us with the most dumbstruck deer-in-the-headlights expression I have ever seen.

He looks at me and says, “I wondered when [mother’s name] got braces.”

I still talk about the time I had a full conversation with an adult relative without him realizing that I wasn’t my mother or me realizing that he thought I was her when people bring up how similar my mother and I look!