“She has your smile.”

It’s a weird thing to hear, I decide, holding my phone up, my smile tense, all but holding my breath as a friend squints at the picture lighting up my screen. “She has your smile, but that’s the only thing you guys share.” Oh, you have no idea.

My hand lowers, turns the phone towards my searching eyes, my one word response almost pathetic: “Yeah.” My voice trails off as I try to keep my tone civil, calm. “I think we look nothing alike.” As I mutter this, my estranged mother’s eyes look up at me, her smile frozen on the screen, and I shut the Facebook page down quickly.

Two days later, when my phone chirps to say “Wish Tammy H. a happy birthday,” I unfriend her, and consider blocking her.

My relationship with my mother is what one could call difficult if it wasn’t, in a word, nonexistent. When I was younger, my mother was an abstract concept I cried over, a voice on the telephone that I heard twice, the reason that I was angry all the time.

I remember comparing her to the other kids’ moms, though I had nothing to go off of besides the fact that she wasn’t present.

For the longest time, I didn’t know what she looked like. When I did, I was disappointed that I didn’t look like her, my hair dark, my skin more olive than beige, almost the complete opposite of her strawberry blonde hair and blue eyes. When I was first curious about what she looked like, I went looking for old pictures that her first husband, my dad (though not in the biological sense), had of her.

I suppose that I hoped to look like her so that I could comfort myself, that I could say that I had something from her, because she had a habit of keeping things to herself and never giving anyone anything. My dad told me, later, when I was older and all the anger was burned out of me, when resignation just stepped in when it came to thinking about my mother, that her big moment of generosity was when she surrendered her parental rights of me and my sister.

For the longest time, that made no sense to me, but as I’ve gotten older, as I’ve learned more about her, I realize how correct my dad was. This past week, my mother turned 44 years old.

I am 21 years old, which means that she was 23 when she gave birth to me, and 21 when she gave birth to my older sister. She wasn’t prepared to be a mother by any stretch of the imagination—she still had her youth to celebrate, still had adventures and parties she wanted to go to.

In her biggest moment of unselfishness, she was acting selfishly still, and for that, I do not begrudge her. If I hate my mother for anything, it is because she didn’t try to meet me, even though I spent half of my life waiting for her. If I hate my mother for anything, it’s because I have her smile and nothing else, and there’s something horribly ironic about it.

Nevertheless, I still smile. Just because I share a dimple with her, and my face rounds like hers when we grin, it can be odd to smile sometimes. However, just knowing that the reasons I smile aren’t hers and that I have grown to be nothing like her, is reason to smile enough.