My mother was no Tiger Mom during my childhood; she never came down hard on me about my grades (a good thing, too, given my series of academic flops) and was pretty lax about household chores (to this day, I don’t own a vacuum…red flag, I know). But the way I comported myself was extremely important to her, and she let me know it. She wasn’t an Emily Gilmore clone obsessed with cotillion-perfect manners, but for as long as I can remember, she emphasized the importance of listening and drawing other people out, telling me: “Always talk to the person who’s standing alone at the party.”
When I was a teenager, I grumbled about my mom’s weird habits and rules, unclear on why my friends’ mothers doled out empty praise and Oreos while my own was more likely to cock an eyebrow at my outfit and say something mildly devastating (but very funny) as I walked out the door, a glass of white wine in her hand. I would get annoyed about her insistence on politesse, wanting desperately to participate in the age-old adolescent ritual of social exclusion, yet always hearing my mom’s voice in my head, asking me who I was to leave anyone else out.
Now, as an adult, I couldn’t value my mom’s unorthodox parenting style more. Because of her, I’ve been able to hold my own at a dinner party since the sixth grade—very Whit Stillman, I know—and more importantly, I know the importance of shutting the hell up and asking other people questions, whether I’m reporting a story or on a first date or just riding the bus in LA. “Everybody is interesting about something, you just have to figure out what,” my mom once told me, and really, isn’t that a lesson more kids should be learning?
Did my mom make mistakes? Of course. As I’ve gleaned from a decade and a half of making guest appearances in other families’ care dynamics, pretty much the only constant of parenthood is that you will fuck up in some way or another, and probably not in the ways you’d expect. Now that I’m 32 and living across the country from her, though, my mom and I talk on the phone every day for as long as she’ll let me pump her for story ideas and dating advice and recollections of what it was like to party at Dan Tana’s in 1983.
I don’t know if I’ll have kids, or even what my life might look like in a few months. But if I do become a mother, I know I’ll want to skip the imperative to soften the world for my children and instead try to make them as prepared as possible to actually face it with humor and empathy. That, after all, is what my mother has always done for me.
