Cool mom

This picture has nothing to do with the post. I just thought it was cute. You gonna fight me on that?

One of my favorite things to do in high school was watching Buffy reruns on FX with my mom. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but high school is a difficult period for teenagers and parents. My mom and I also didn’t have much of the same taste in television—which probably isn’t even true but was important to believe when I was 16. So at a time when I started to realize that Buffy was the center of my universe (haters to the left), my mom took a pointed interest and began watching with me.

Even back then, I thought that was pretty cool. I mean, it’s not much of a stretch—my mom has always been interested in the fantasy genre. But she wasn’t watching solely out of a need to find out what happens next. It was something we could do together. I remember marveling at the way she became invested about it, suggesting her own theories for the series finale. (Incidentally, she was totally right.) It takes a lot of commitment to not only watch a show with your kid, but to give a crap about it. I don’t know if I could do the same with my child, especially if he/she were super into Glee.

My mom has never referred to herself as a “cool mom,” I assume because she knows what a terrible expression that is. In a broader sense, I appreicate that she’s never tried to relate to me in a way that didn’t feel organic to our relationship. That’s why things like watching Buffy together continue to mean the world to me. I wasn’t always the happiest kid in high school, and I often didn’t feel like I had many people to turn to. If you’d told 16-year-old me that my mom could be a big help with that, he probably would have rolled his eyes like the little shit he was. But she was a help. I had someone to count on. I had someone to watch Buffy with—and that remains, along with food and water, one of my basic needs.

If you’re wondering about the photo, I unfortunately don’t remember the context. I do remember my brief fascination with Frankenstein, inspired by a book report I did in elementary school. My mom helped me cut out the different monsters for my collage. I don’t know where we got all the Frankenstein stuff when it wasn’t Halloween, but I guess I can chalk that up to mom magic. I mean, she successfully predicted the lsat episode of Buffy. She’s obviously got some sort of powers.