My mom turns fifty this year. On Monday, April 13th, to be exact.
Which sounds huge, but honestly, she’s always felt bigger than numbers. Because in my head, she exists outside of time. She’s just… my mom. The constant. The one person I somehow both fight with like it’s a competitive sport, and need like oxygen.
If you know either of us, you know we argue. Not cute, movie-argument-arguing either. Like real, loud, stubborn, neither-of-us-backing-down kind of arguing. We recently got into it over a plane ticket.
A plane ticket.
It turned into a full scream battle about how I’m getting to my study abroad trip this summer. On the surface, it was about directions and planning.
In reality, it was about the fact that I’m leaving for five weeks, and neither of us knows how to say, “Hey, I’m going to miss you so much it kind of scares me.”
That’s our thing, though. We feel everything. Deeply. But we’re not always great at showing it in soft, pretty ways.
But here’s the part people don’t see: she always comes back, or I do. And somehow, it always ends the same way – understanding each other without having to spell it out.
She calls me “mouse.” It’s not just a nickname either; it’s a lens she’s always had for me. Small, yes, but mighty. She says I’m fierce even when the world tries to make me quiet. Powerful in ways I sometimes forget I have.
The nickname carries this unspoken promise that she sees me fully, exactly as I am, and she believes in me without ever asking me to be anyone else. That belief shaped me more than I ever realized.
Some of my favorite memories with her are quiet in their own ways. Like the night she came in ready to yell at me (for something I definitely deserved), but ended up just rubbing my back while I cried about a boy that, at the time, felt catastrophic. Looking back, it was one hundred percent not. But she didn’t laugh at me or make me feel dramatic. She just sat there, letting me talk. No judgment, no competing stories, and no “you’ll get over it.” Just listening.
And then, in the most her way possible, she goes, “Sometimes, men are just men.”
That was it. No big speech. Just honesty. And weirdly, it made me feel a hundred times better.
And there are bigger moments, too. Like right before Christmas break this past year, when college was chaos—friends, love, classes— and I felt like everything was collapsing. I couldn’t keep up with my own life, and all I remember thinking, very clearly, was that I just needed my mom. Two hours on the phone later, I was five years old again, feeling safe and grounded.
We ended the phone call that night with the phrase we’ve been repeating back and forth together for as long as I can remember: Goodnight, sweet dreams, don’t let the bed bugs bite, and I love you.
She’s my rock. And I know that sounds cliché, but I don’t have a better way to describe her.
I don’t tell her that I appreciate her enough. If anything, I probably make it seem like I take her for granted sometimes, which couldn’t be further from the truth. She gives so much of herself and never asks for anything back. And somehow, she makes it all look effortless.
So, this is me saying it, plainly, no argument attached:
I see you, I appreciate you, and I am the way I am because you never asked me to be anything else.
And yeah, we’re still going to argue. Probably forever, to be honest. But if that’s the price of loving someone this much, I think we’re both okay with it.
Happy 50th, Momma.
I love you, even when I’m yelling.