I am so proud to say that my mom is my best friend.

It wasn’t always this way. From about the beginning of middle school to junior year of high school, our relationship was rocky. It was especially tumultuous throughout my middle school years. Why was this? Well, I was an over dramatic and emotional adolescent, that’s why. I remember almost daily screaming fits with my mom while she’d be driving me to school. I would slam my bedroom door so hard and so often that eventually the wooden doorframe just fell off one day. All of my anger and disappointment and jealousy and anxiety and every other negative emotion you can name was always aimed at her, and I hurled it her way with startling force.

Despite this sort of hell I just described, we were still close. We were always close. I knew my mom well, and she has always known me better than even I know myself. Being her only daughter as well as her first born, we held a special bond between us that could never be broken, despite the many times it threatened to snap.

But ever since I grew out of (most) my teenage angst, I’ve been able to maintain such a valuable relationship with my mom.

She is the one I talk to when it comes to… everything. I know that I can share anything with my mom - the good, the bad, and the ugly. Sometimes she doesn’t respond the way I want her to when it comes to some issues. You know how sometimes when you ask for advice, you really just want your own opinion spoken from someone else’s mouth? Well, my mom completely disregards that. She just tells it how it is. Sometimes it annoys or upsets me, but deep down, I know she’s right. She always is.

And we can talk for hours upon hours. My dad just shakes his head at this. Sometimes, at home, we’ll sit at the kitchen table talking for like five hours straight. When I’m at college, our phone calls sometimes span for over two hours. And you know what? As soon as we finally decide to hang up, I immediately think of something else that I really want to tell her. With my mom, it’s impossible to run out of things to say.

We talk about the latest celebrity gossip, books, movies, TV shows, food, news, work, the future, and just what happened to us that given day. We just get along so well. We go shopping together. We see movies together. We go out to new restaurants to have lunch together. Now that I’m in college, I don’t get to spend as much time with my mom as I use to, but that has lead me to cherish our time together even more.

Though we have (thankfully) moved past the nightmare I was as a teenager, we still have our moments where we don’t get along at all. I have a bad habit of just wordlessly hanging up on her on the phone if she strikes a nerve. She yells at me. I yell at her. But the fact that she has miraculously put up with me for nineteen years straight and would do anything for me if it ensured my happiness is something that I try to never forget, no matter what silly thing she did to upset me.

She has just played such a huge role in my life. She has supported me, cared for me, and loved me no matter what, and I know that she’ll always be there for me no matter where life takes me.

My mom is one of the greatest people I know. My admiration for her endless. I don’t know what I would do without such an amazing person in my life. She really is my best friend.