Author’s Note: The title of this post is in reference to a playlist I made about my mom a little over a year ago. This playlist can be found on Spotify with the link below. This post directly references the last song in that playlist, “The Best Day” by Taylor Swift, throughout with several lyrics from the song written in italics.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/71uZlQnOoBtHAruOwXvzkp?si=ZzL-cqoxTomAOS4MGigLqA
There are some details you don’t remember - I think I was in eighth grade, and I think I didn’t have braces yet – but there are others that are seared onto your heart. I know that when I called my best friend Alex a few days before Halloween to finalize the plans we’d made weeks before, the extent of which I’ll admit was that we would at least spend the night together, she told me she couldn’t do Halloween with me, because she was going to hang out with Madison Tucker.
Alex and I had been best friends since we were five years old and met three days before kindergarten when my kitty corner neighbor was babysitting her. In many ways we were inseparable; we hung out nearly every day, we had sleepovers every other weekend, and at school during recess we would always be found together.
Until Madison Tucker.
I hated Madison Tucker. If I’m being honest I still kind of hate Madison Tucker. She was short, and cute, with big eyes and freckles and a brilliant smile. She lived in the neighborhood right next to ours that was somehow exponentially nicer, and she wore Aeropostale and Hollister. And the second she and Alex were put in the same class it was like I didn’t exist anymore.
And Madison wasn’t nice to me either. She made fun of me – the things I said, and the clothes I wore. She drew attention to the fact that I was obnoxious, and weird. Which I was plenty aware of but that didn’t mean she had to go telling everyone else!
It got so bad at one point that I actually stopped hanging out with my friends because I couldn’t stand to be around them when Madison was there. And they didn’t seem to miss me.
Well when we got to Junior High Madison and Alex had grown apart, and that first year of seventh grade was great. We made new friends and sure I had to share but I liked these people so sharing was easier. Then Legacy Junior High’s construction was finished, and Alex flitted away to a new school while I stayed behind.
We were seeing a lot less of each other now that we didn’t go to the same school anymore. We were 13 and juggling more homework and extracurriculars than we ever had before. So I asked Alex if we could have Halloween, because in all our years as friends we’d only had a couple Halloweens, and she’d said yes.
And then she changed her mind.
“I’m sorry, we just didn’t have any real plans ya know? I figured it wasn’t gonna happen.”
I tried not to start crying while we were on the phone, and whether I did or not is another one of those details I can’t remember.
After I hung up, I curled up on the floor next to my bed, pulling my knees to my chest, and I sobbed. My hands shook and my throat hurt. And I just kept crying.
I don’t know if I was loud, if my mom heard me from the other room, or she was just looking for me to ask me a question or something. Hell, maybe it was just mother’s intuition. All I know is that I hadn’t been crying for more than twenty minutes when there was a quiet knock on my door.
“Mylles? Can I come in?”
I wiped at my eyes, trying to get rid of all the evidence that I’d been crying. I took a deep breath then I told her to come in.
She looked at me on the floor for maybe half a second and she saw right through me.
“Whatcha doin’?”
It’s funny she asked me that. She didn’t ask me what was wrong or if I was okay. She knew not to ask me head on. She knew to let me lead.
“Um, I was just on the phone with Alex.”
“What’d you talk about?”
That’s when I bit my lip to keep it from trembling. “We aren’t going trick-or-treating together anymore.”
And then I burst into tears.
I never told my mom about things like this – I never told her about Madison Tucker, or the people who called me names, told me they didn’t like me, or that they didn’t want to be my friend anymore. I kept it all in, and we could go on a psychological excavation to figure out all the reasons why, but all that’s important now is that I did.
While my tears fell, and words poured from my mouth I remember anxiety started to bud in my chest. My mom already had her problems with Alex. My mom already thought I deserved better. But I didn’t want better, I wanted Alex. I just didn’t want my mother to hate her.
But I couldn’t shut my damn mouth!
Eventually though my story was out, and my feelings had run dry. My mom had come to sit next to me, back pressed up against my bed, shoulder pressed up against mine, and I waited in the moment of silence for her to tell me what I was certain she was thinking.
“Alex sucks. Get a better best friend.”
But that’s not what she said.
“You know,” she clasped her hands out in front of her, and I realized for the first time that there were tears on her cheeks and running down her long nose. “I didn’t have a best friend until I was a Senior in high school.”
She told me about growing up, about being made fun of at school and in Primary. She told me about being lonely and the girls who treated her like crap. And I wondered how the hell this was supposed to make me feel better.
“But when I was a Senior, I met Susan and we just… clicked. It was great! Suddenly I had someone to do stuff with. We hung out all the time, and I finally had a best friend. It was exactly like I’d always wanted.”
“And then Susan and I went off to different colleges.”
What kind of motivational speech—
“But every time I see Susan, to this day, twenty years later, it’s the same. We just click. We’re still best friends. No matter how much time passes we’re still us.
“I think you and Alex are like that too. No matter how much time passes, you’re still gonna be best friends deep down. You’ll still click.”
Then I started crying again, and my mom put her arm around me.
I ended up spending Halloween with my friend Katie. I was a vampire and in true 2010 (2011?) fashion she was a nerd. We walked through all the rich neighborhoods to get the good candy, and when it got dark, she played Taylor Swift’s Speak Now on her phone, and we sang along to songs we barely knew.
While we sang along to “Mine” for the sixth or seventh time I remember thinking about what my mom said, about clicking, and wondered if maybe you could click with a few people, and if maybe Katie was my Susan.
Later Alex would apologize. She’d call me and tell me she was not only sorry, but that it hadn’t even been worth it. “I didn’t even have a good time. I would’ve had a lot more fun with you.”
But I couldn’t come to feel the same way. I spent the night with a friend who really liked me, who would later ask me to be in her wedding and who I still count amongst my best friends.
And I shared a very special moment with my mom.
Don’t know how long it’s gonna take to feel okay, but I know I had the best day with you today
My ninth grade English teacher’s name was Killingbeck, and if that wasn’t an omen, I don’t know jack about omens.
She taught Honors English and she took that responsibility very seriously. Her projects were ridiculous, time consuming, and didn’t help me learn a damn thing about English literature. I was also suffering from undiagnosed Bipolar Disorder, ADHD, and a pretty hefty anxiety disorder. It was the perfect storm.
I was struggling in all my classes by the time Winter Semester was reaching its midpoint, but English was looking particularly bad. So, at my mother’s needling, I finally went in to talk to my teacher.
Which was a feat in and of itself. The woman may’ve been 4’11 but she scared the shit out of me.
After some discussion Killingbeck agreed that I could turn in three assignments that I never finished, and she would give me 60% of the credit. But they had to be perfect, and I had to turn them in the next day. I was so desperate that even Ds would bring me up, so I thanked her profusely and went home to bust my butt on some dumb project where I legitimately had to look up airfare and hotel room prices. For English.
The next day when I brought in my projects, smile on my face, grade saved, Killingbeck took them, face pinched. And this part I remember perfectly:
“I was looking over the syllabus yesterday and with how late these are I can only give you thirty percent on these projects. I’m so sorry.”
“Oh.” I didn’t deflate. I think some people, kinder people perhaps, would’ve deflated. Instead, I stiffened. My entire body was taught with a burning desire to scream and punt this absurdly tiny woman across the room. I had to silently pretend I was running my own hands through my hair and sing a little song in my head. I had to talk myself down.
About an hour into my next class my blood finally stopped boiling and all I was left with was dread and resignation. There was nothing I could do. I was going to fail English. I was going to summer school.
Despite that feeling, and despite my general rule of keeping things from my mom, when my friend Kaylene and I clambered into the back of my family’s minivan and my mom asked how it went with Killingbeck I told her the truth.
“Wait.” My mother turned in her seat. “But she told you yesterday she would give you 60%, right?”
Something about her posture made me feel very small. “Yes.”
My mother is not quick to anger, but something about the jut of her chin and the tightness in her eyes made me anxious. “Will this help your grade at all? Would you have even bothered to do these projects for this little credit?”
I swallowed and glanced at Kaylene out of the corner of me eye. “No.”
That’s when my mom opened her door and said, “I’ll be right back.”
She was not “right back”.
After about five minutes Kaylene and I got restless and walked into the school. We walked down the ninth-grade hall and found our friends Lisa and Inez standing outside Killingbeck’s door, staring inside through the tiny glass window, and trying to listen to whatever was going on.
I wanted to die.
Lisa looked up and saw us and immediately waved us over.
“Dude,” she said to me, “your mom is such a badass.”
“What did she do?”
Lisa and Inez proceeded to tell Kaylene and I how they were in Killinbeck’s classroom, talking to her about extra credit work or upcoming assignments or something when my mom walked through the door and said she needed to speak with her. Then before Lisa and Inez could even vacate the room, she, apparently, started “tearing into Killingbeck”.
“It was amazing!” Lisa said, in genuine awe.
Kaylene was even smiling now. “Seriously?”
I was borderline mortified.
Not more than five minutes later, which was spent clustered by the lockers outside Killingbeck’s classroom talking in whispers, my mom came out.
She smiled at me and my friends, took a breath and said “Okay, let’s go guys.”
“What did you do?”
“I talked to her.”
“You yelled at her.”
“Mylles, I didn’t yell at her. I talked to her.”
Killingbeck never bothered me again.
I know you were on my side even when I was wrong.
When I was twenty my family went to a Fall Out Boy concert. Together. As a family. Now I’m talking me, my sister, both my brothers, my mom and my dad. A Fall Out Boy concert.
Okay so maybe that’s not as unbelievable as I think it sounds but do your parents listen to Fall Out Boy?
I digress. The concert was being held in one of those venues that is actually a basketball arena – is arena the right word? I think it’s the right word – most of the year so rather than standing around in some sort of mass that throbs with the music and paying the same price all around for tickets, the crowd was neatly organized into classes and seats where they planted their butts for the entirety of the two opening acts.
Well, except my family.
AWOLNATION (you may remember “Sail”) was one of the openers and my family was almost as excited for them as we were the Boy(s). My mom had already purchased both their albums, my dad loved to scream sing their singles in the car with us, and I’d seen them live at the local music festival a couple years before. So as soon as they took the stage the Jefferys took to their feet.
We cheered and sang, swaying and pumping our fists.
But not my mom. No, my mom danced.
Forty-five minutes later when Fall Out Boy took to the stage and the entire arena stood up, my inhibitions flew out the window. I cheered louder, sang with my whole soul, and let the music move my body how it would. But I didn’t dance. I couldn’t bring myself to dance.
But my mother never stopped. I watched as other people watched her and laughed. After a few minutes and some serious thoughts about facial expressions and body language I realized the laughter wasn’t malicious but more of a… reveling in someone else’s joy kinda situation. And maybe my mom knew that. Maybe she didn’t even notice. Maybe she didn’t even care. But she wasn’t afraid to dance.
Then she did her yodel scream.
If you’ve never heard a yodel scream, which you probably haven’t because my mom will tell you with pride it is something only she can do, the name I gave it is apt.
It was in that moment, as my mom’s voice carried over all of those around her, that exact moment that I was hit with the epiphany that had been chasing me my entire life.
Chasing me since the Halloween when I was eight and my mom put on a muumuu, matching headscarf, picked up a pumpkin bucket and at the age of 33 went trick or treating with me.
Chasing me every week after my eighth birthday that my mom dragged me to choir practice after church, asserting time and time again to anyone that questioned it that I was more than skilled enough to be there.
Chasing me through every volunteer opportunity I watched her take on. The ones that took up her time, her energy, and forced her to give so much of herself only to be shot down time and time again by people who didn’t care about her. The playgrounds she built that got ripped down, and the fights she fought that someone else ended up losing.
At that moment it caught up with me, crashed into me – my mother is brave.
But I know you’re not scared of anything at all
My nose is always cold. Always. It’s the first part of me to get cold whenever I’m in a chilly room. So is my mom’s. I have my mom’s nose. And her chin. It’s this little round thing that refuses the confines of a jaw. And I have my mother’s eyes.
I didn’t get her heart though.
I knew very little about astrology growing up, but I did know that Leo meant lion and Leos were born in August. So, subsequently, I always assumed my mom was a Leo.
She’s not. Her birthday’s today, August 28th, which is several days after the cut off, making her a Virgo. But, she has a Leo moon.
For those of you who, like young me, don’t know anything about astrology I’ll give you a quick lesson. Everyone has a sun sign that can easily be determined by the day they were born. This means that the sun was inhabiting that section of the sky when you were born. The sky is divided up into twelve pieces – the twelve different signs of the zodiac. Depending on where each planet can be found in the night sky when you’re born you have different traits in different aspects of your personality. The moon changes spots in the sky with the greatest frequency, moving into a new sign every two or three days, and is arguably your second most important sign.
I say arguably because some astrologers think it’s your most important. Some call your moon sign your “shadow self”, others just say it rules over your emotional processes. I like to think of it as your heart.
My mom has a lion heart.
This last June my grandma died of ALS. She’d had it for over five years and in many ways, it was a miracle she’d made it this long. That doesn’t mean I was ready for it. That doesn’t mean it didn’t break my heart.
None of my family got to be with my grandma when she passed, but she was not afraid of death. In her final minutes, surrounded by doctors and nurses she’d only just met who were scrambling to determine what they could do, she said simply, “Just let me go.”
My grandma had a lion heart and she passed that on to her daughter. That wasn’t something they passed on to me.
Perhaps it’s harsh to call myself a coward, but I’ve never been brave. I’m afraid to dance where people can see me. I’m afraid of confrontation. I’m afraid of admitting I’m wrong. I’m afraid of asking for help. I’m afraid of loving people. I’m afraid of being honest and vulnerable. And for a long time, I was afraid of being seen with my mom, because my mom wasn’t afraid of being seen.
I’m afraid of so many things and I’ve let it paralyze me. But I don’t want to be afraid anymore.
And I love you for giving me your eyes, for staying back and watching me shine
When I started this blog learning to be brave was my entire mission statement, but I didn’t know how to talk about the root of that. I didn’t know how to say, “I want to be my mom when I grow up.” Probably because I was scared to talk about these things. I don’t like admitting I’m flawed in this way. Worse, I don’t like calling my mom my hero.
I always made fun of the kids who did that. “What did your dad do that was so special?” I’d think. I always thought heroes needed to be better, infallible, and my parents certainly weren’t that. But I think I get it now. I don’t think those kids did, I’m still convinced they were just kissing ass, but I think they may’ve been right anyway.
My mom is my hero because she’s real, not in spite of it. I know the juxtaposition of her strengths and weaknesses. It’s because I’ve seen her commit the atrocity that is pouring orange juice into chocolate milk and had her squeeze my hands while tears ran down my cheeks that I can appreciate all she is and all that she can bring to a life. And she is great, and mighty, and has brought so much joy and magic.
I wrote a novel this last year, and it’s because of my mother’s confidence in me and encouragement of my skills that I think it’s good. I wrote a novel this last year and it’s because I want to make my mother proud that I wrote a query letter and sent it off to a high-profile agent. I wrote a novel this year and it is because of my mother’s lion heart that I am eagerly awaiting the rejection letter I’m certain I’ll get so that I may wear it as a badge of courage.
I did it. I shot my shot. I didn’t let fear stop me, because my mother taught me to be brave.
Who knows, maybe she passed on that lion heart after all.
And I didn’t know if you knew so I’m taking this chance to say that I had the best day with you today
Happy Birthday Mom! I love you.