During my senior year of high school, a couple of things happened that made me and my mom ridiculously close. I had spent my junior year at boarding school over 3000 miles away from home and while I was away, my parents split up and my mom and brother moved into a tiny apartment. When I moved back, I was homeschooled, which meant that not only was I sharing a bedroom with my mom (It was a simple choice between her and my brother) but I spent huge part of my time with her.
Sure, I hung out with my friends, went to parties and overall had a normal social life, but I also tagged along to work meetings and studied, or I would go to the pub she and her students went to after class when I got off work so she could take me home, and we ended most nights watching Netflix together in our room. We still have that kind of relationship. She’ll call me to complain about someone at work or I’ll text her continuously through a particularly boring class, and we never go more than a day without speaking. This is all to say that my mom and I were, and still are, really close. But, as you may have guessed from the title, I do not consider my mom my best friend.
To me, a mom and a best friend are two completely different relationships. I already have a best friend and so does she. My mom and my best friend are probably the two most important people to me and the people whose opinions I value most, but I value them in different ways. I’m sure they feel the same about me. Sometimes I need honest mom advice and she’s always there for me, whether I want it or not. While she’s usually right, when it’s unasked for and it comes from my mom those “you need to get your life together” talks seem a lot less like the support she’s trying to give and a lot more like micromanaging me and attacking my choices.
My best friend though, knows the best time to give me those talks and, because she’s not my mom, when she steps in to tell me I’m acting crazy, I know I probably am. On my mom’s end, I’m sure she doesn’t want that kind of life advice from her college aged daughter, and even if she did I have no ideas how to deal with her issues (especially the ones concerning my dad) and I would give awful advice. She needs her best friend and I need mine.
When it comes to emotional support my mom and I need completely different things out of our best friends then we do each other. My mom’s always there for me with an encouraging word and I can always count on her to believe in me, which is really great. However, sometimes when something is scary and hard and I think I might fail I need to hear “Yeah that is really scary and hard and you might fail and that fear is valid” and not “I believe in you! You can do it!”
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate how much my mom cheers me on and how she thinks I can do anything but sometimes I just need someone to recognize my emotions. I also honestly don’t know how I would react if my mom leaned on my for emotional support the way my friends and I do each other. I have answered many panicked calls from a friend dealing with an emotional crises, and while I’m 100 percent there for my mom if she called me crying at 1 a.m., I’d probably just start crying harder because she’s my mom and moms crying are probably the scariest thing ever.
I love my mom, and I’m so grateful we have such an amazing relationship but she’s not my best friend and I’m not hers. We both have amazing best friends (I consider hers a second mom and she considers mine a second daughter) but the relationship we share is completely different and unique. She’s the only mom I’ll ever have and I would never trade for another best friend.
