My Mom is NOT My Best Friend, She's My Mentor!

About four years back, I had a very flawed impression of what a teenage girl and her relationship with her mom should be like. Taking a lot of inspiration from the relationship between champion figure skater Ekaterina Gordeeva and daughter, Daria, this concept of "best friends" really shaped my image of what "should be"--a laughing, happy, inseparable bond between a mother and a daughter.

Now, of course, my mother is NOT Ekaterina Gordeeva! She is quiet, reserved and not one to enjoy the spotlight. Talking to my mom is not always easy, presumably because she is a heavy and much longer book to read, while I am a thin paperback, blowing in the breeze for all to skim. When I was younger, I began to think my mom was hiding a big secret from me that she did not want to talk about, and that was why we weren't communicating smoothly. As I grew older, I learned that there was in fact no secret at all--she was merely keeping the correct amount of distance from me, her teenage daughter, not her tell-all best friend.

For some abnormal reason, perhaps this does work for Ekaterina and Daria, but personally, I see many flaws in the functionality of "best friend" mother-daughter duos, such as too close of a bond to the point of the daughter feeling overly free to express herself, with a lack of discipline on the mother's part. I know one young woman who can openly share alcoholic drinks with her mother until they're drunk-and yes, she is underage. Perhaps some of it has to do with the fact that these mothers and daughters are a very slight age difference apart, and my mom and I share an over 40-year age difference. Would it have been different with my birth mother? Probably, and it is these days.

I'm not here to criticize others' parenting choices, per se, but merely share the tips that worked best for me to develop a healthy self image in today's society and what I aspire to do for my children someday. Having my mom there to share secrets with and confide in was great, but having a boundary when situations were too personal for sharing was even better. Now, my mom and I pursue our own lives away from each other, hold individual passions, but still bond over our root pleasures such as figure skating (and Ekaterina Gordeeva), The Beatles, scrapbooking and other arts and crafts, baking, Tom Hanks and Steve Martin movies, and a heck of a lot more.

My mom isn't the best friend that I talked about sex, kissing, boys, drugs, reality TV shows, and Facebook with, she is the mentor that I asked, and still do ask questions regarding advice with sex, kissing, boys, drugs, reality TV shows, and even Facebook to. I learn from my mom, and am O.K. with saying: "I am not my mom, nor her generation."