Our Mothers Were Once Superheroes
No matter what language we grow up speaking, “Mamma” is probably one of the first and most important words in our vocabulary. For most of us, our mothers are our first superheroes. They know everything, solve everything and somehow always have an answer.
Mine certainly did.
Mamma has always been a central theme of my life. Not because I’m highly sentimental, but because Mamma has the solution to every problem. Coincidentally, she also has the problem for every solution.
As a child, I looked at my mum in complete awe. She was fierce, strong and I genuinely didn’t think there was anything she couldn’t do. If you’d asked me then who Wonder Woman was, I would probably have pointed at her. I’m still waiting for an answer to my very important childhood question: “Mamma, why is red, red and not blue?”
Like many mothers, she never dismissed my curiosity. She encouraged it. Every rule came with an explanation and every permission denied came with the logic behind it. My mum believed in practical training, so when five-year-old me rebelled over not being allowed to eat chocolate for lunch, she simply let me eat chocolate for lunch until I threw up. That lesson stayed with me far longer than any lecture could have.
Then We Start Seeing The Person Behind “Mamma”
Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, our conversations with our mothers quietly begin to change. They stop sounding like instructions and slowly become discussions. We still go to them because they’re our mothers, but we also start going to them because they’ve simply lived longer than we have.
Perhaps that’s why the teenage me found it so easy to go to mine with almost everything. Gossip sessions never came with judgement, they came with enthusiastic support. Having said that, my mum also held an incredibly high standard on what counted as being a good human being and never failed to hold up the mirror when I was wrong. Sometimes harshly. The younger me didn’t always appreciate it. The adult me knows it shaped the person I’ve become.
The biggest shift, however, happened once I started working. I stopped idolising my mum by putting her on a pedestal and started seeing the human being behind the title. Like so many of us eventually do, I realised that while I was busy growing up, she was quietly growing older. She had changing hormones, bad days, disappointments and worries of her own. She could fail, feel hurt and sometimes need a friend who wasn’t one of her friends.
Even our superheroes, it turns out, are just people trying to figure life out.
Friendship Doesn’t Replace Motherhood
I think that’s the strange joy nobody really prepares us for. Our mothers never stop being our mothers, but somewhere along the way, friendship quietly joins the relationship.
Don’t get me wrong, I still shit bricks if I’ve done something I know she won’t approve of. These days, though, it’s less out of fear and more out of respect for the standards she spent a lifetime instilling in me.
The real joy isn’t that I now have a friend in my mum.
It’s that she now has a grown-up mini me who she can also open her heart to.
Some relationships fade as we grow older. This one quietly deepens. And I think that’s one of the most unexpected gifts of adulthood.
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