If You Lead, I will Follow: On Befriending Your Mother

Back in 2007, when I thought that TV reflected real life and that I would traipse into high school with a football boyfriend and straight hair, I watched Gilmore Girls religiously. For the most part, I was happy to be taken out of my own acne-ridden life and placed into Stars Hallow, but there was that wistful part of me that saw Rory and Lorelai's friendship and thought oh I want that. Wouldn't it be great to live with your best friend, to be able to have a shoulder to cry on 24/7, to have someone who will not only judge you for eating excessive amounts of Chinese food, but who will join in? 

Seven years later, after binge-watching Gilmore Girls on Netflix, I look at their relationship and realize, oh I have that. 

 Minus the part where we look like movie stars and throw pop-culture references at each other, my mother and I could be the Gilmore Girls. And while the lines got a little blurred when I was a kid and we had to work out the differences between friend and parent, we can focus on the friendship part of our mother/daughter pair. I get weird looks from my friends when I tell them that I literally tell my mother everything, or that we go to each other for advice--it may be a little weird, but it's not that complicated as people may be lead to believe.

There's a certain level of brutal honesty a mother can give that's hard to find anywhere else. I mean, I encourage my friends not to hold back when they think I'm being ridiculous, but my mother has years of perspective on, well, me. If I tell her a stupid thing I did, or a pattern that I've noticed about myself for the past year, my mother will very blatantly go "yeah, you did that thing since you were three years old. You should probably stop."

Okay, maybe that's not how our conversations exactly play out, but you get the idea.

Once I got past the point where my mother had to enforce rules and tell me how to, y'know, be a person, I found it fascinating to learn that she was (gasp!) a person before me. It was a little eerie that much of what happened to my mother also happened to me, but it's a comfortingly bizarre moment when you and your mother learn from your mistakes at the exact same time. Plus, it's just amusing to hear stories of her marrying a French guy and living with a bunch of strangers in France.

Even just a couple years ago, I believed that I was doomed to become my mother--that would've been the worst punishment in the world! But now I'm happy to embrace my Judy-esque qualities, as it gives me 1) hope that one day I'll become as cool as my mother, and 2) a built-in best friend, cheesy as it sounds.

Namaste.