My mom and I.

I have the coolest mom. Sorry, I don’t care what stories you share, my mom is the awesomest mom that ever was!

Every group of friends has that mom. The one who’s a bit younger than the rest of the moms, who can pull off the crazy hair cut or style, and just isn’t afraid to be herself. When I was in grade school, my mom had shoulder length curly hair wore the most stunning jewelry that she got from the artsy store in town and wore black. Okay, it was the 90s. Most people wore black. But boy, she did it with style. Then one day, she got most of it chopped off and went for a short cut. Not even a remotely matronly cut. It was spiky and her hair color? It was black with a purplish hue. Often, she’d complain that it just wasn’t purple enough.

In our tract house, she was one of the first people to repaint the trim. The rest were beige, brick red, or two shades of blue. Ours is a light green. Then, she painted the house. A beautiful pinky terracotta… okay, I can’t really describe the shade. But this is what the house looks like. And it suits her.

We have the same sort of humor. Puns and word play, often making up song parodies on the fly. We tend to go off on tangents (passing Tom Cruise* several times) and find that life is just more entertaining that way.

People love Lady Gaga because she shows people that they can let their freak flag fly. My mom taught me to do that years earlier. And I do, I fly my freak flag proudly. I wear band tees, cut my hair however I like it, wear way too much eye makeup for daytime and rock my gray hair even though I’m only 30. I sing in public, dance while I grocery shop, and encourage my kids to sing Queen along with me. I have fun. We have fun, really.

So what prompted this post? My daily phone conversation with my mom was definitely sillier than usual and it occurred to me that I’ve never publicly mentioned just how awesome my mom is because of this.

*passing Tom Cruise: When the 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon became a popular game, we were playing a variant of the game that had no set degrees. You could simply just keep connecting through celebrities to get where you needed to go. I was a little tired, and used Tom Cruise several times. So now when I go off on a tangent and can’t seem to get back to my original point, my family calls it “passing Tom Cruise.” Sorry, no real Tom Cruise stories here.