Mother

People who see me with my mom now usually think we have the perfect mother-daughter relationship. We do, in fact, have a great relationship nowadays. We are very close, and very loving towards each other. When we're together, I can't go a day without kissing her cheek, pressing my nose against her face, squeezing her hand, or cuddling next to her on the couch. She is incredibly supportive of my career and my life-style, taking on tasks like helping me find the right belt for a character I am playing or finding 10 lamps for a play I'm directing as though they were of life-and-death importance- because, to me, they are, and she recognizes that. When I started grad school she came to live with me, under the disguise that she was taking English lessons, because she knew that in order for me to fully take advantage of that first year, I wouldn't be able to have a job or worry about house-hold chores, so she lived with me- cleaned my apartment, cooked my meals, packed me a lunch every day, did my laundry, and stayed up with me at night as I discussed all the breakthroughs and breakdowns I was experiencing during that year. I was 21 years old, but I needed my mommy, and she was there for me. As a result, I excelled as a student, benefited fully from my education, and grew incredibly as an artist. Recently, I took on directing and producing a play, and without hesitation she stepped up to help me with costumes and props, running around cities looking for the most impossible things, spending days sewing, and putting together collages of every image I gave her. Let me just add to that- my mother had never been involved in any theatrical production before in her life, she knew what to do simply by watching me do what I do all my life.

But it wasn't always like this. Unfortunately, like most teenage girls, I hated my mother. I mean, I thought she was the devil. If I trace it back, I think it started when I was 13. I came home from my first experience "going out at night with friends" and had a hickey on my neck. Well, my mother had not raised a daughter to come home with hickeys on her neck. I wasn't really allowed to go out again for about three years. If I was, it was an exception, and I was thoroughly checked when I got home. Naturally, I thought she was overreacting and overprotective and did not understand me at all. I blamed her entirely and solely for my parent's disastrous marriage and the consequent war-zone that was our house-hold. I did not understand her fearful and explosive behavior. She did not understand my obsession with acting and did not know how to be supportive. She wanted me to be a journalist, and when people asked her what I was good at, she'd say, "Writing. She's going to go to school for journalism." Needless to say, that pissed me off and hurt me immeasurably. She was always telling me to go on a diet or fix my hair differently, since she placed an abnormal amount of importance on looks. I always thought she felt I was ugly, and it made me shut down from her completely. We simply didn't understand each other, and our communication throughout my entire adolescence was pretty much limited to fighting. If we weren't arguing, we weren't talking. And with my mother, arguments turn to fire. She once broke the mirror behind my bedroom door because she slammed the door so hard while we were fighting. The mirror, by the way, is still broken. She also sneaked into my room, read my diaries, went through my things, and prohibited me of keeping anything in locked compartments. I actually used to dread coming home from school, and got involved in as many after-school activities as I could find, sometimes spending up to 13 hours at school a day. I didn't want to be home, I didn't want to be near her, I did not understand her, and I was absolutely certain that would never change.

At 17, I graduated from high-school, left home, and moved to a different country for college. It was the time in my life I had been looking forward to for years, and the relief I felt in being out of my house, away from my mother, was instant.

And it was then that we started getting along.

I got sick a lot that first year in college, and, guess what, I started missing my mother. Although I had friends who took care of me, and started to grow my own feet to walk on in the world, I missed her. We started writing each other letters. I started to share things about my life in college, and suddenly I felt like an adult talking to another adult, and that relationship of equality turned out to be what we needed from each other. She came to visit me after I'd been gone for three months, and things were already very different. I had grown up. She made more sense to me. And she started getting more comfortable talking to me about herself, about her life, about her marriage, about her relationship to me. And so I started to understand my mother a little bit at a time.

A real shift happened when I came home for the first time after being away, for christmas break. With some distance from the home I'd been raised in, I was able to see the love and care that resided there. And one night, I don't remember why, I found the college essay that had gotten me accepted to Sarah Lawrence and read it to my mom. It was about my journey through theatre and what it meant to me. When I finished it, both my mother and I had tears in our eyes. She had never understood how much theatre meant to me because I had never told her. She may not have known what theatre and acting were about, but she knew what love and passion were about, and she was able to piece together how much I need and love what I do. She became my number one fan that night, and never turned back.

As a teenager I had envied my friends who had great relationships with their moms, who could tell them everything, who called their moms their best friends. But now I'm grateful for everything I had with my mom. The rough years showed us both that we could love each other through anything, even our opinions and judgements of each other as people. The friendship we have now was something we had to work for and build slowly, and we are therefore able to appreciate it.

There are still bumps. We disagree on trivial things like what "cleanliness" is, and then heavier things like what "beauty" is. She is not the type of person who sugarcoats or hides what she's feeling. If she thinks I need to lose weight, she says so, even if I tell her I don't need to be stick-thin to be happy. If she doesn't approve of how I keep my apartment, she won't leave me alone until I make it look like what she thinks is presentable (impossible standards). I can't tell her everything about my romantic life, she's still very protective of her children's hearts. She's still married to my father and it's still pretty much a disaster, but I have learned that people choose their lives for their own reasons, and there isn't much other people can do about it once they've made up their minds.

But we know each other now. We appreciate and understand each other. Our love and friendship rises above those bumps, and we learn something new about one another every day.

I do see my mother as a queen, because all mothers are queens, but even more importantly, I also see her as a human being, because all mothers are human beings, and if we learn to love them for it, they are honored.