Do you consider your kids your friends?

 

One morning when I was about twenty-one, my mother called me up to say she’d been doing some thinking about the women she was close to and had realized that, of all of them, I was her best friend.  I remember feeling flattered to have confirmation of my adult status, and very pleased that she considered me a sort of peer-equivalent. My own best friend, when I told her about this, was sceptical. Although she had a good relationship with her mother, she didn’t believe it was really possible to be friends- let alone a best one - with your mom, no matter how well you got along. I didn’t want her to be right, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I suspected that she was.

As the years unfolded and we got older, we became a little different, too.  For various reasons and in unrelated ways, both friendships changed.  My mother went back to just being my mother, my best friend and I drifted apart, and I had children – two sons and a daughter in the middle.

In broad terms, my generation – the boomers – has taken a very different attitude towards parenting than the one our parents had. We are more involved in our children’s lives, less authoritarian, more approachable, and often opt to avoid top-down parenting in favour of nourishing what could be construed as a friendship with our children. I fall squarely into this category.

My twenty-one year old son, the youngest, believes that our relationship is unique among his friends and their parents. We’re so tight, he says, and sometimes wonders why this is so. My daughter would say that we get along well and are quite close, but wouldn’t go as far as her brother in defining the relationship as unusual. Their older brother, at twenty six, is a stand-alone guy insulated in his own world where I am not a frequent visitor. He freely acknowledges his love for his family, including me, but there is not quite the same degree of sharing – of experiences or confidences – that there is with the other two. I delight in the compatibility we all seem to have and I appreciate, no, I’m grateful that we have been spared, for the most part, the misunderstandings and resentment that can estrange children from their parents. 

But as my children matured into adulthood, I often thought about what my mother had said and have come to the conclusion that my once-best friend was right. My youngest son has entrusted me with some of his deepest feelings and loves the fact that we can talk cars and jam Radiohead together. My daughter and I laugh at the same ridiculous things, share a love of music, traveling and story-telling, and she is honest and authentic with me. My biggest son knows I’m his biggest fan and is mutually supportive of my efforts, and when he needs an ear, he trusts me to listen. But am I their friend?

Once a parent, always a figure of some kind of authority, the way I see it. Our parent-child relationships get more egalitarian all the time, certainly, but I could not stop taking a mother’s perspective any more than I could change my personality. Nor can my children ever completely get past the history of our first decade or so together, when I was the go-to person for nearly everything, the sun around which their world revolved, the final arbiter, and sometimes, the wicked witch. The essential difference between the relationship I have with friends of my own choosing, and the one I have with the beings I cherish most in the world is that my children and I did not come into our relationship as equals.

You might agree with the definition of friendship so gracefully phrased by Dinah Mulock Craik almost a century and a half ago, which says,

‘Friendship is the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring all right out just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful friendly hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping and, with a breath of comfort, blow the rest away.’

It’s an idealistic vision, in that ‘having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words’ has sunk more than a few friendships, but in principle this kind of trust and openness are what the strongest relationships have in common. For a child to feel this way about a parent means that the nuances of friendship are overlaid on the bedrock of parental love, but does it work the other way around?

Is it unrealistic to believe that the elemental role of a parent can be replaced with genuine friendship once children reach adulthood? For a while when I was a daughter, I had thought maybe it could.  Now that I’m a mother I’m sure it can’t.