By Kate Hodal
You swore it would never happen, that in no way would you ever be as monstrous, flabby, controlling or petty as her. And for a while you did well, paving a path completely unlike hers and rebelling like a good girl, until the morning you looked in the mirror and realised that the saddlebags, under-eye circles and general grumpy demeanour staring back at you were her very own.
There was no avoiding it now... You had become your mother!
"She's your first role model," sighs humorist Linda Sunshine, who wrote How Not To Turn Into Your Mother [Andrews McMeel Publishing] before realising she'd already committed the deed. "She teaches you about love and life and how to take care of things. So at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what you do: you're going to wind up just like her."
Having just spent the Christmas holidays with mum, it's quite likely that you've found yourself doing the same exact things that she always did. Did most of your shopping from the Lakeland catalogue? Got hot and bothered about home-made bread sauce that no-one eats anyway? Ran around the house cleaning and then found yourself too exhausted to properly socialise?
"It's written in our genes," giggles Judith Holder, stand-up comic and producer of BBC Two's Grumpy Old Women. "It's a chromosome that comes into its own in our early 20s and slowly becomes more and more dominant, loaded with all this genetic information that's been lying latently, just waiting to come out.
"Your radar suddenly becomes very sensitive to clutter, dirtiness, things that need doing and things you can control. Things that when you're young you just don't notice."
And sometimes it takes becoming a mother yourself to fully realise why your mother is the way that she is, as Judith found.
"The turning point was very specific for me," she explains. "The moment I had a baby, my whole world changed. It was like peeling off a mask and suddenly realising what my mother had been through. I understood what all her anxiety was about, realised how high the stakes were."
But women who haven't had children are just as likely to catch 'Becoming Your Mother Disease', as Linda unfortunately found, when her own incubation period came out of the blue.
"When I was growing up my mum listened to nothing but Frank Sinatra – it was all she would play," she explains. "So of course I hated Frank Sinatra.
"And then one day, in my mid-20s, I found myself passing a record shop and had this urge to go in and...", she gulps, "buy a Frank Sinatra album. That was the day I realised I was doomed.
"I was deep in therapy and trying very hard not to be like my mother. And I had this idea that I'd write a book about it.
"I was afraid to tell my mother about it, though, thinking she'd be offended, so I took her out to lunch one day and bought her a martini. I said, 'Mum, I have to tell you something: I've written a new book and it's called How Not To Turn Into Your Mother'. And she just laughed and said, 'Oh, you're always writing about me'."
Linda can laugh about it now, she continues: "There are two ways to look at it - there's the bad stuff you inherited and the good. My mother was a wonderful story-teller. In a group she was the one who would captivate everyone with her stories and I grew up to be a writer. So along with my thighs - which I can't stand - I also inherited the ability to tell stories."
But Judith has found that becoming her mother is just the beginning.
"I'm into Phase Two now, when you become your father," she says, "You get fussy about your car, you want to build a shed, you're always hungry - and you have the moustache to prove it."