Collegiate Times

Jamie Martyn/Collegiate Times

SHE SAID:

My current friends wouldn’t recognize the person I was in high school. I was a saint: a girl who never broke curfew, avoided classmates’ parties and always went to bed at 11 p.m. I rarely fought with my parents, and if I did, Dad always reduced me to blubbering, shameful tears.

But when I started college five hours away from my parents, I went crazy. I cut off all my beautiful hair and started dressing like a British pop-punk groupie, could sniff out a party every night of the weekend and I began to — gasp — stay out late with guys. The freedom was exhilarating. I wasn’t the “good girl” my parents had always known. I didn’t want to disappoint them, so I stopped communicating — and started rebelling.

My rocky relationship with my mom changed drastically in one moment. While at home, in the dumps about some dumb boy, Mother took one look at me.

“You look depressed,” she said. “Have a cigarette and a beer.”

In that instant, the “mom” image that I’d always known had shattered.

Don’t get me wrong. Throughout my childhood, Mother was always a great mom to my brother and me. She’d supported even my short-lived cheerleading stint, invented games for us to play on road trips, taught us the magic of The Beatles and made the best Philly cheesesteaks on the planet. But she was always strict, and I was afraid to cross her for fear of my life.

With the aforementioned “cigarette and beer” episode, Mother was no longer the stern “parental unit” I’d known. She was still my mom, but she’d transformed into my friend. She’d accepted that I was an adult and made my own decisions, even if I might be tarring up my lungs and decimating my liver.

Mother understood me as an adult and no longer a child, and since then we’ve become extremely close. If you want to get “Anne of Green Gables” about it, we’re “kindred spirits.”

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