What was your Mom like when you were a child?

Note: my mom recently gifted me a subscription to a writing service called Storyworth. The company sends you a writing prompt about your life weekly, and after a year, you collect your stories into a book they send you. Figured I'd share these stories as blog posts. Why not. This is the first.*

A coworker of mine used to regularly proclaim that her mother always told her they were not friends. “I’m your mother, not your friend,” she was apparently told on the regular.

I never got why she was so proud of that. 

Because my mother and I were, and still are, close friends. And I love that aspect of our relationship. 

This is not to say my mother was a weak parent when I was a child. Or that she cared so much about keeping our relationship positive that there was no discipline. Or, for that matter, that I needed a huge amount of discipline. (Honestly, I remember being sent to my room once, and once having a total meltdown in a store that resulted in my not getting the thing I was melting down about. That was it.)

I understood that my mom was my mom. She was just also someone I hung out with. And talked to. And did fun things with. 

My parents struggled to have me - I was an early IUI fertility baby. And there was a struggle after me to have a second baby, which didn’t come to fruition. So my existence came with an extra layer of appreciation. 

That was one of the reasons my parents doted on me as much as they did. 

I spent a huge amount of time with my parents as a child, but especially with my mom. Mom took a few years off from work to care for me. She thought for awhile that she’d be a stay at home mom, but as the family legend goes, one day, while watching Mr. Rogers “make peanut butter” by rolling a stick of butter in crushed peanuts, she couldn’t take it anymore. She needed slightly more intelligent content in her life, so back to work as an English teacher it was. 

But we still had nights, which I spent doing homework at the dining table while my mom cooked in the kitchen next door. The open doorway allowed for free flowing conversation and homework help if necessary. My family of three always ate dinner together at said table, except for Tuesday nights in the winter, when Dad had bowling, and Wednesday nights in the spring when he had golf. Mom and I still shared meals, often buying foods my dad wouldn’t eat, like stuffed salmon pinwheels from ShopRite. 

We were a family of family growing up. Saturday mornings were a time of tradition I remember well. We’d drive into Highland Park, the town where my mom grew up and my grandfather’s name still holds some clout, and have breakfast at Penny’s, a little diner where they knew us well. Oftentimes, my grandmother would join us. (Thelma is worthy of her own reminiscence later!) 

When my grandfather died, in January of 1991 when I was just 5, we became Thelma’s keeper. After breakfast, three generations would venture to small town main streets, like Princeton or New Hope, and malls like Menlo Park and Woodbridge. Shopping abounded. My heart holds these memories fondly as they taught me the value of quiet days out with family. 

(Quiet is not meant literally here. My grandmother's voice was shrill and constant. When we dropped her off at her house at the end of an outing, my mom would shush me and not let me talk until we crossed town borders back to Edison. She needed quiet time to recover from the incessant chatter of Thelma.)

In elementary and middle school, my parents watched TV in our family room at night, shows like ER, Homicide, and Law and Order that certainly weren’t suitable for young eyes. I watched “I Love Lucy” and “I Dream of Jeannie” on Nick and Night in our upstairs living room. But as I got older, we watched more together, like “Friends,” “Seinfeld,” and “Angel.” I always enjoyed that we were close enough to even watch TV together. I didn’t have any friends I knew who did that!

My sophomore year of high school, my mom shared her passion for another television event with me - soap operas. Namely “All My Children.” She insisted I watch a story they featured in which Bianca, daughter of the socialite Erica Kane (portrayed by Soap Opera royalty Susan Lucci), discovered she was gay and came out to her mother. Young Eden Riegel’s acting was riveting, as was the plot, since Erica had to do a lot of coming to terms with her daughter's sexuality if she was going to continue to have a relationship with her. 

I don’t think my mom was trying to send me a subtle message that I could share things with her; I already mostly did. I think she really was just sharing another thing she loved with me. 

We shared our love of pens, whether collected from hotel bedsides or the fancy Paradise Pen Company in upscale Short Hills Mall. We both loved jewelry. As a toddler, I “sold” my mom rings out of a metal box, a game we still creatively refer to as Ring Store. (I’ve tried to recreate it with my daughter at the age of 3; it is as of yet unsuccessful.) Later we visited Tiffany and the Sugarloaf Craft Fair for fine jewelry purchases. One day, after a mommy/daughter date to see The Devil Wears Prada, we swooned over Anne Hathaway’s Smokey eye makeup and rushed to the Macy’s MAC counter to have the look recreated for us. So yeah. We loved make-up together, too. 

My mom was definitely the “cool” mom out of my friends. Maybe it was because she almost never said no, but then again, we never did anything awful or outlandish. My friends were always allowed over, whether for play dates, dinners out with our family, sleep overs, and even the occasional family vacation. 

I had a mixed bag of friends, too. For awhile in elementary school, one of my best friends was Susan Smith, a “cool” kid who was way too cool to be hanging out with me. I saw quite a lot of Susan outside of school. She called my house constantly and was a frequent dinner companion on weekends. I never understood why she liked me so much, though there was always the suspicion that it was my uncomplicated family dynamic (I believe she was one of five children) and adoring, doting mother.

There was one thing my mom was ALWAYS up for. Something I am eternally grateful to have memories of. Because she enabled the gateway to be opened to the thing that brings me one of my highest highs in life. 

Concerts. 

Specifically Backstreet Boys concerts. 

I was invited to my first in August of 1998, and that in itself is a story. But to tie this back to the topic at hand, my mom volunteered to be the parent who took four 12-13 year old girls to a stadium so they could scream their heads off and come close to fainting because they were breathing the same air as the Boys even though they were four rows from the top of the place in verified nosebleed seats. And despite that, and the incident that followed afterwards, in which we were almost car jacked (again, a story for another time), my mom kept going to Backstreet Boys concerts. All told, she must have attended eight or so with me, including outdoor shows for which we only had lawn seating, a show we had to take a day off from school and drive two hours to Long Island for, and shows where it was just the two of us and we had some great bonding time. 

(We didn’t see only the Backstreet Boys. We saw ‘N Sync, Britney Spears, drove to North Carolina with my friend Casey to see a very special Clay Aiken concert. But the Backstreet Boys concerts were most frequent and most important.)

This trip down a wide memory lane (what did this prompt mean by “as a child”? I took quite a vague definition of that) has so far left me less talking about what my mom was like and more about things I did with my mom. But a lot of those things are perhaps needed to illustrate the traits I’m trying to name. 

My mom was/is:

• Brave. Brave enough to try new fertility treatments to conceive me in the first place. Brave enough to take years off of work to spend with me. Brave enough to withstand drives out of state for concerts. My mom doesn’t say no to a challenge often. 

• Family oriented. No matter how crazy her own mother drove her, we carved out time for her. Anything I wanted to do, we did. We spent every possible dinner time and weekend together as a clan of three. Nothing was more important. We still have mother-daughter outings, and now she also carves out plenty of time with my daughter. 

• Caring. This is probably the #1 word I’d use to describe Beth. She listens to all and tries to problem solve. She makes time for friends she hasn’t seen in years, and for friends she sees regularly. She talks. She listens. She buys. She creates. She values everyone she meets and isn’t afraid to let people know it. Countless people who know my mom don’t hesitate to tell me what a special person she is. 

Yes. I know.