Scan the bookshelves every Mother's Day season, and you'll find new nonfiction volumes, such as this year's You're Wearing THAT?, linguist Deborah Tannen's explanation of the tangled, judgmental conversational exchanges between mothers and daughters. Or ask a dozen Salt Lakers that question - just when did you realize you had become your mother? - and you'll hear a dozen answers.

When D'Arcy Dixon Pignanelli and her mother, Katie Dixon, talk about their relationship, they recount a list of genetic and philosophical legacies. There's the resemblance in their small, hard-working hands and brown eyes, passed down through the women of the Loosele, Griffith and Heggie

family lines. "I think I got all my mother's facial features," says Dixon Pignanelli, 45, of her 70-something mother. "I think I'm the spittin' image of her."

Dixon, who raised four children while working as a high school English teacher, quoted Shakespeare passages as bedtime stories, passing down her love for the arts and her commitment to local politics. For a record 20 years, from 1975 to 1995, the Republican Dixon served as Salt Lake County recorder. Dixon Pignanelli forged her own record as a Democratic campaign leader and state party officer, and now serves as executive director of administrative services in the Republican administration of Gov. Jon Huntsman.

"We just get along so beautifully," Dixon says. "She's the joy of my life. We were always soulmates."

As her daughter tells it, just as adoringly: "I am absolutely my mother's No. 1 fan."

More weighted relationships: For other adults, hearing their parents' words in their voices can be more complicated. You can hear that ages-old generational conflict as women recount how they nag their own daughters to "Get that hair out of your eyes!" in the same tone of voice they once ignored.

Or in the stories told by professionals with executive-level salaries who find themselves needlessly worried about finances, every bit the penny pinchers their Depression-era parents are.

Ask Salt Lake City marketing executive Lorena Riffo Jenson, 38, how she channels her mother, and you'll hear her discovery that she reverts to her native Spanish when she's schooling her two daughters. It's then that she recognizes the words and the language inherited from her 66-year-old mother, Ana Maria Riffo.

Sarah McGee, 21, of Cottonwood Heights, who works as a paralegal in her mother's family law practice, is reminded regularly by callers that she has her mother's voice. She recognizes the echoes of her role model whenever she catches herself repeating, emphatically, "I don't think so," a phrase her mother, Mary Paxman McGee, 52, is known for.

There are sons like salesman Andrew Pratt, 43, who hears his mother's British accent whenever he calls a stranger "love" or "sweetie." Or Fred Gottlieb, 51, who credits his mother's work as a social worker in rural Appalachia in the 1930s for his own commitment to social causes.

Gottlieb, who has taken off from his Salt Lake City geriatrics practice on medical treks to Nepal, Indonesia and the Philippines, attributes his spirit "as a gentle troublemaker" to the example of his 86-year-old mother, also a longtime hospice and political volunteer, who lives in Parkersburg, W.Va. To mark her 80th birthday, Gottlieb surprised his mother with a trip down the Amazon to fish for piranha.

Mary Dickson, KUED's community services manager, says laughingly, "I inherited from my mother empathy, which makes me a sorrow sponge." Myra Dickson, 80, lives in the Canyon Rim area.

"I also inherited from my mother her great gift for taking in the underdog," says Mary Dickson, remembering shopping in downtown Salt Lake City as a young girl where her mother introduced herself to visiting Swiss tourists, and then invited them home to dinner to show them "American culture." "My mother would bring visitors home, and I learned that's a good thing to do, that I should do that."

And then there's Dickson's colleague, Susie Paxton Flandro, a development officer at the public TV station. "I became my mother when I became a mother," says the 30-year-old mother of two young daughters. "I do a lot of ultimatums - 'Do this or you can't do that,' a lot of warnings about getting hurt or injured, and I hear myself sounding like my mother."

There's parroting your mother's words, and then there's channeling her behavior, such as the times Flandro finds herself scrubbing the kitchen floor at 11 p.m. At moments like this, she feels as if she's morphing her mother's Rees family genes, "as we're all pretty . . . obsessive about cleaning."

Flandro can see the family resemblance three mornings a week, when she and her two older sisters meet up with their mother for five- or six-mile runs; Betty Rees Paxton, 61, has been running for nearly 30 years. "She was a teacher, and very task oriented. She told me once she scheduled her life in 20-minute increments," and in Flandro's voice, there's both amusement and amazement.

Power struggle: Differentiation, the journey to break from your parents while forging your own road through adulthood, can be complicated, say therapists and development specialists. And that walk can be especially fraught for women, who "combine, on one hand, the deepest connection, the most comforting closeness, with, on the other, the most daunting struggles for control," writes Tannen in You're Wearing THAT? "Each yearns to be seen and accepted for who she is while seeing the other as who she wants to be."

The strength of parental influence, the power of shared genetic material coupled with conscious or unconscious behavioral modeling, tends to surprise people, says Cheryl Wright, an early childhood development professor and chairwoman of the University of Utah's Family and Consumer Studies department.

"We tend to resort to how our parents parented us," Wright says. "As much as you say, 'I will never nag my children,' unless you learn other parenting strategies, the research shows we will repeat the style of our parents."

Adults can throw off abusive familial relationships and negative parenting influences, but it can be difficult, and sometimes it takes the serious illness of a parent or even a death to mend parent-child relationships. "I happen to think that every generation can improve on the parenting they received," Wright says. "Some people go to great efforts to change their behavior, and you can do that. It's not hopeless."

Self-help books, such as Tannen's, might point out communication patterns, but it can take therapy or other training to replace the psychological scars of childhood. Or just age, according to therapist Janet Rampton Warburton, the daughter of Utah's former first couple, Cal and Lucybeth Rampton. She listens to her clients' discoveries, moments when they realize that what they considered to be a parent's controlling nature was really meant as loving direction. "It's almost a gift to find the similarities later in life," the therapist says.

"Some mothers weren't well-meaning, and if they weren't, if there was cruelty or jealousy or meanness, people do need to come to terms with it," Warburton says. "Parents do the best they can, and there needs to be recognition of that. Forgiveness is one of the major steps toward contentedness and happiness as an adult."

Warburton recalls her journey to appreciate her well-known parents, and she remembers the strengths and passions of her mother, who died in 2004, whenever she finds herself talking with her hands. "I'm emphatic like she was," Warburton says. "She would have a way of, not pounding on the desk, but putting her fist on the table."

A mother's hands: Talk to women about becoming their mothers, and if you're talking to Dixon Pignanelli, you'll hear about what she sees in her family's hands. As a child, she remembers watching her mother working in the garden or cooking on "casserole Saturdays," laying out lasagna noodles or rolling out sweet rolls, cooking enough meals to last through the week.

When her daughter, Christiana Katherine, now 10, was born, she received names that nod back through generations of the women in her family. One of the baby's first family photographs was a four-generation photo, taken during a photography session that included a shot of four sets of women's hands.

"My mother has weed-puller hands," says Dixon Pignanelli of a feature she inherited, hands that, like her mother's, are more likely to be immersed in dirt - or stacks of government reports - than carefully polished and manicured.

For years, as a teenager, Dixon Pignanelli wanted beautiful long nails, and she questioned why her mother called attention to her sturdy hands by wearing dramatic rings on every finger. For a time, she tried to follow her mother's example in that, too, but instead forged her own path.

In a close-up photograph, you'll see that Dixon Pignanelli wears just two rings: on her left hand, her own platinum-and-diamond wedding ring, and on her right, her parents' thin silver wedding band, now 50 years old, another gift from her mother.

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Contact Ellen Fagg at ellenf@sltrib.com or 801-257-8621. Send comments about this article to livingeditor@sltrib.com.

On the Bookshelf: Mothers and Daughters

Every year, the Hallmark-inspired holiday of Mother's Day brings forth a blossoming of books about the relationships between adults and their mothers. This year's crop includes:

You're Wearing THAT? Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation, by Deborah Tannen (Random House, $24.95)

Tannen, who rocketed linguistics onto the New York Times' best-seller list in 1990 with You Just Don't Understand, a classic in marking the differing communication styles of men and women, now focuses her attention on the divide between mothers and daughters. Her straightforward prose style might be wooden, but her insights - and review of popular and academic literature - are sparkling.

I Am My Mother's Daughter: Making Peace with Mom Before It's Too Late, by Iris Krasnow (Basic Books, $25)

Krasnow glosses her relationship with her 85-year-old mother - termed "irrepressible" in self-helpy speak - while offering a journalist's survey of a generation of baby boomer women seeking to reconcile with their mothers.

Every Mother is a Daughter: The Neverending Quest for Success, Inner Peace, and a Really Clean Kitchen (Recipes and Knitting Patterns Included), by Perri Klass and Sheila Solomon Klass (Ballantine Books, $23.95)

A conversational memoir with alternating bits from Perri Klass, an author and pediatrician, and her mother, a novelist who has written 17 books, questioning how each was shaped by their relationship. The book reflects its mixed-and-matched narrators, separated by different generational opportunities for women, and their mirrored experiences, as wives of academics who each worked while raising three children.