Mama?

I love my mother. She is smart, wildly creative, has energy like you wouldn’t believe, is happy with her eccentricity (she attributes it to being left-handed) and has interesting hair. However, as much as I like the old lady, there is one thing that I hope she will never say: “My daughter is my best friend.”

There is something so inherently creepy when people say that. “Oh, hello, I am a grown woman, but this person, who is at least twenty years younger than me is my best friend. You know, we go to the mall together, we get pedicures, we get our hair done….” Guess what you probably don’t do together? Pay your taxes. See a doctor about that varicose vein by your ankle. Take calcium supplements. You know why? Because you’re at least twenty years older than your child. Why don’t you have friends your own age?

For children who claim that their moms are their best friends, I give you this general rule: Do not ever be best friends with someone if you came out of their vagina. It’s probably easy to feel close to your parents. If they’re doing everything right, they are loving, nurturing and supporting you at every turn. They are a rock that you can turn to when you don’t know what to do, or when things hurt you, or when you get into trouble that you don’t know how to extract yourself from. That’s totally okay in a parent/child relationship. But here is a fact: that’s not all there is to a parent child relationship.

With my own teenage child, I am about one-half loving support: telling my son that he’s awesome and letting him wear skinny jeans although his frame is not one which is necessarily flattered by that style, and worrying about him when he’s out at night and yelling “WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO” as loud as I can at his sporting events. I suppose that he could be best friends with that part. But the other part of me, the mother part, is a psycho drill-instructor hateful cow who does nothing more than tell him to clean his room and forbids him from going out to a bar (“It’s not really a bar,” he tries to tell me) and screams at him that if he doesn’t start studying for the ACT that he’s going to end up working at Jiffy Lube, and those people only have about twenty teeth between the whole lot of them (I suspect crystal meth). And, if he gets really really mad back, he tells me I’m crazy and all of his friends think I’m a bitch. Or maybe it’s the other way around….that I’m a bitch, and all of his friends think I’m crazy.

In any event, neither of these conversations would happen among real best friends. I can tell you with complete certainty that I have never said to my best friend, “Jesus Christ, you stink like b.o. and your room is disgusting. You are going to stay in your room until it’s clean, and then you’re taking a shower. And how long has it been since you’ve brushed your teeth?” For that matter, I have never changed my best friend’s diaper, asked her if she needed lunch money, written her an excuse to get out of work early for a doctor’s appointment, forced her to practice parallel parking between cones, or called the doctor to see if there was anything we could do about her dry skin.

I’m not quite sure why parents would want to be best friends with their children, or why kids would want to say that their parents are their best friends. I guess I’d have to go ask Dina and Lindsay Lohan. What I know is that, as a parent, it’s absolutely imperative that I draw the boundaries in which my child is allowed to live. I can’t expect him to draw them because he is a child, and is learning the world. And I have to be the person standing a safe distance when he tests those boundaries, so that I can help him get back on track when he discovers, yep, Mom gave me that curfew/speech about drugs/awesome fashion advice/pepper spray for a reason, and is back to being a child who needs his mother. And then I can secretly laugh my ass off when I tell the stories about what he’s done to my real best friends.

I love my mother. She nagged me when I procrastinated, she made me learn how to play the piano (and the trombone, but that’s still a sore spot), and she tells me that my blog is funny, despite all of the coarse languages and use of the word vagina. I am glad that she was never my best friend, because I love having her as my one and only mother.