Look, I get it. Your relationship with your mom is difficult. Or maybe you don’t have a mom, you were raised by your dad. Or your grandparents. Or you have two moms or two dads (which is very cool) or just a really cool teacher who loves you. None of this matters at all, and I don’t really care. Go call your mom right now. And by mom, I mean the person who mothered you. Whoever gave you a bath when you were a kid or drove you to your really dumb theater practices or has ever made your birthday special: call that person.
And I’m not talking about Mother’s Day. Whether you’re going home for the whole summer or gone from now till next August running an auroch awareness campaign in Bosnia, there is a person out there who is either going to miss you each day you’re gone or is unwittingly about to put up with your bad sleeping habits and music taste for the next three months. That person deserves a call, completely out of the blue, 100 percent authentically. And you deserve to call them! This doesn’t have to be mandated by a socially fabricated holiday convention to sell Hallmark cards. It can be just because you love them; that’s plenty good enough. Later on, for ‘real’ Mother’s Day, you still can send a card or a text or some flowers or visit and that will be fine too.
What should you two talk about? Sure you don’t feel like telling this person you care about that you don’t drink enough water when you party so now your head hurts every Sunday. And maybe you don’t really feel like hearing about all the yard work they plan on getting done this weekend. So talk and ask about things that make you happy. What are their memories of you when you were younger? What are you most enjoying about spring? What’s new with that really annoying person working the check-out at the grocery store you both used to go to? It doesn’t need to be the best conversational discourse of your whole entire life. That’s not the point, after all.
Guess what? It works. I’m tired and didn’t know what to write about this week so I called my mom and asked. She said I should do something that “moves people” and that’s exactly what I did because I love her, and because she gestated me for nine months, and because she’s going to watch my intro to tap dance performance even though I suck, and that’s all worth something in my book. So quit reading and studying and being angsty like me. Go call your mom.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely the author’s and do not reflect the views of The Phoenix Editorial Board.
