Amid the weeknight din of Ruby Foo’s,
the hostess bore complimentary cocktails—a peace offering, for making
Julie and Samantha wait twenty minutes for their reserved table. She
offered one drink to Julie and one to … Wait a minute. Peering at
Samantha, she said, “I want to give this to you, but …”
Samantha, who had just been listening to her mother describe what an “awful, awful slob” she was as a teenager, nodded toward Julie and said, “You should give it to her.”
At one point at Ruby Foo’s, it occurred to me that the hostess had made an honest calculation when settling on her genre of olive branch. The gift of pretty drinks assumed a friendship. The cocktails said, “Enjoy your girls’ night out!”
And from a distance anyone might’ve figured mother and daughter for pals. Samantha refrained from the typical teenage indicators of mother-induced misery. No mortified slumping, no glassy stare, no snapping, no sighing, no episodic glaring, no thumbing out one cell-phone SOS after another. And Julie? When Samantha spoke, Julie listened until her daughter had completed her thought. Which I assumed happened only in dreams and completely unrealistic movies.
Seriously, was there no discord? They assured me that there was. Sometimes they fought “all day long.”
Over what?
Hmm. “Clean up your room?” “Don’t make me clean my room? I like my stuffed animals on the floor. I’m comfortable with my stuffed animals on the floor. Let me be me!”
I watched them closely. Humans are only so good at hiding jealousies and tensions, even for short periods of time. We all come with our little tells, and mothers and daughters are human control panels of buttons waiting to be pushed. There’s not a teenager alive who hasn’t considered her mom intolerable and embarrassing, or pretended not to know her in public, but based on what I was seeing, it was possible to achieve the opposite.
Watching Julie and Samantha felt a little like seeing a fantasy come to life. My mom hasn’t let me finish a sentence since 1975. We have never shared clothes. We do not text. She often e-mails me, hilariously, in all-caps, because it’s easier than finding the uncap key. Neither she nor I have ever uttered the word sex in the other’s presence. In fact, I’m positive my mom has never spoken the word at all. I now understand all of that; her parenting approach was a generational mandate. But sometimes, as a pre-Gilmore Girls teenager, I had this idea that mothers and daughters should walk arm-in-arm down leafy autumn roads wearing artfully knotted scarves, exchange gentle information on mean-girl management and boyfriends, and race home through the dappled sunlight to make cocoa. Once, in college, I tried to achieve this scenario with an aunt. It just felt weird.
Now mother-daughter BFFdom is a thing, having morphed its way onto the radar of sociologists, psychologists, authors, designers, marketers, and reality-show creators. The willingness to exploit one’s pubescent daughter for adult dating and fashion advice must be a Real Housewives casting prerequisite, and there’s no telling what the upcoming VH1 reality show Mama Drama will bring as it focuses on the turbo version of bestie mothers: “the partying parent who shares drinks, wardrobe, and social life with her daughter, and occasionally needs to be reminded that she’s the parent.”
Now that the phenomenon is here, it’s a little like watching the genie leave the bottle. You hope you’ve made the right wish.
by Paige Williams, New York Magazine | Read more:
Photo: Gillian Laub
Samantha, who had just been listening to her mother describe what an “awful, awful slob” she was as a teenager, nodded toward Julie and said, “You should give it to her.”At one point at Ruby Foo’s, it occurred to me that the hostess had made an honest calculation when settling on her genre of olive branch. The gift of pretty drinks assumed a friendship. The cocktails said, “Enjoy your girls’ night out!”
And from a distance anyone might’ve figured mother and daughter for pals. Samantha refrained from the typical teenage indicators of mother-induced misery. No mortified slumping, no glassy stare, no snapping, no sighing, no episodic glaring, no thumbing out one cell-phone SOS after another. And Julie? When Samantha spoke, Julie listened until her daughter had completed her thought. Which I assumed happened only in dreams and completely unrealistic movies.
Seriously, was there no discord? They assured me that there was. Sometimes they fought “all day long.”
Over what?
Hmm. “Clean up your room?” “Don’t make me clean my room? I like my stuffed animals on the floor. I’m comfortable with my stuffed animals on the floor. Let me be me!”
I watched them closely. Humans are only so good at hiding jealousies and tensions, even for short periods of time. We all come with our little tells, and mothers and daughters are human control panels of buttons waiting to be pushed. There’s not a teenager alive who hasn’t considered her mom intolerable and embarrassing, or pretended not to know her in public, but based on what I was seeing, it was possible to achieve the opposite.
Watching Julie and Samantha felt a little like seeing a fantasy come to life. My mom hasn’t let me finish a sentence since 1975. We have never shared clothes. We do not text. She often e-mails me, hilariously, in all-caps, because it’s easier than finding the uncap key. Neither she nor I have ever uttered the word sex in the other’s presence. In fact, I’m positive my mom has never spoken the word at all. I now understand all of that; her parenting approach was a generational mandate. But sometimes, as a pre-Gilmore Girls teenager, I had this idea that mothers and daughters should walk arm-in-arm down leafy autumn roads wearing artfully knotted scarves, exchange gentle information on mean-girl management and boyfriends, and race home through the dappled sunlight to make cocoa. Once, in college, I tried to achieve this scenario with an aunt. It just felt weird.
Now mother-daughter BFFdom is a thing, having morphed its way onto the radar of sociologists, psychologists, authors, designers, marketers, and reality-show creators. The willingness to exploit one’s pubescent daughter for adult dating and fashion advice must be a Real Housewives casting prerequisite, and there’s no telling what the upcoming VH1 reality show Mama Drama will bring as it focuses on the turbo version of bestie mothers: “the partying parent who shares drinks, wardrobe, and social life with her daughter, and occasionally needs to be reminded that she’s the parent.”
Now that the phenomenon is here, it’s a little like watching the genie leave the bottle. You hope you’ve made the right wish.
by Paige Williams, New York Magazine | Read more:
Photo: Gillian Laub
