In which someone else’s loss and someone else’s needs are at odds with your actual boundaries!

Q

I love my mom and think she’s great – we get along for the most part and nothing terrible has ever happened between us. We talk on the phone every couple of weeks and I reply to her texts when she reaches out, even if sometimes it’s just an emoji. I think our relationship is totally fine, but she wants us to be so much closer. She finds ways to bring up the fact that her friends consider their daughters their best friends and how wonderful those relationships are, and I always resist the urge to tell her that I don’t want to be her best friend! But it’s very clear she wishes we were. I feel guilty about this on one level, but then again I think it’s totally normal to keep some distance between us.

My actual best friend recently lost her own mother to cancer and she was devastated. She’s talked a lot about the regrets she has over not being closer to her when she had the chance, and I don’t want to feel the same way one day, but I still don’t feel like I want to be any more reliant on or open with my mom right now.  I don’t want to be her best friend, I want her to have best friends that are her peers. I don’t want it to feel like I’m still a child, or that I’m her peer because I don’t feel like I am.

Am I being selfish or shortsighted, or am I being healthy? Should I try to foster a closer relationship with her to avoid the regrets my friend has to contend with? How could I do that while still maintaining some boundaries that made me feel more independent and self-sufficient, or is that not possible?

A

Summer: I don’t think it’s shortsighted or selfish to set boundaries with parents. But I came from an abusive childhood and my perspective might be tilted. I definitely think that it speaks to the degree of care your mother shows to you that she wants this with you. I hope you know that you’re lucky to have such care in your life. But that does not equate to an obligation to do something you’re not willing to do.

Is your mother feeling lonesome? Does she have friends and socialization in her life? I believe she’s reaching for you because she feels a gap in her life. On the surface, that gap might seem like a missing best friend-daughter, but it might be a different thing she’s missing and you’re a convenient way to localize her feelings. We all have reasons.

When it comes to the possibility of regrets once she dies, I don’t think there’s a right answer. Grief is emotionally devastating. Regret is just one of grief’s shapes. If you make one decision here, you might regret not spending enough time with her. But if you make the other, you might regret overstepping your comfort zones for her and suffering in the process anyway. You can’t form perfect plans for things as inevitable and intense as grief. You can only plan for now. What matters now is that your mother is reaching out with a need in her life but you’re not emotionally positioned to meet that need. How can you compromise while being empathetic to your own needs?

Sa’iyda: Oh, this is too real. I have a very similar situation. My mom fully believes we are best friends, and I fully believe that she needs her own friends and I’m her daughter. Our relationship is pretty complicated as a result, but I can understand your need to keep a healthy amount of distance between the two of you. Sometimes when you don’t have those boundaries, it’s easy for your mom to put you in positions that you may not feel comfortable with, especially with other family members.

Do you live near your mom? If you don’t, and her friends who claim to be best friends with their daughters do, she could be missing having you close by and is looking for connection that way. But also, what does she mean by wanting that kind of relationship with you? Does she just want to talk more often, or does she want you to be more open with her about your life? I mean, there are things about my life I don’t even tell my best friends! Boundaries are normal, and they’re different with every single person in your life. Only you know what feels right for you.

As for your fears of regret once she dies, you don’t know what you’re going to feel when that actually happens. Like Summer said, you might regret not sticking to your boundaries more than you regret not spending more time with her. Right now, the only thing you can do is really take stock in how making tweaks to your relationship could serve you both. There are ways to be closer without being reliant on your mom in any way. Maybe you set aside a nice long time to talk on the phone once a month. Or if you do live close by, maybe you can have lunch once a month and take turns paying the bill. Ultimately, only you can make the choice for yourself.

Nico: I think there is a balance you can achieve between being close enough that the relationship feels good to you and being “best friends” — and it sounds like you’ve achieved this, more or less, and are happy with your relationship. The issue here is that your mom is not, and you’re feeling some guilt about this. It’s also so hard to navigate this from a place of your mom having this idealized vision of what she wishes your relationship was like — one she’s gotten from unreliable sources because she’s talking with other moms her age, and not, say, those moms AND their daughters. It’s hard to live up to an ideal that your mom’s worked herself up to wanting.

That said, if you want to foster more closeness, again, there is a huge range between where you are now and “best friends” that you can play with. You don’t immediately have to give up all autonomy and independence and privacy. For example, I am sure there are boundaries you have now about what you will or won’t discuss with your mother, and you can maintain those pretty easily I think by simply not bringing things up or disclosing things that you don’t want to talk about. Easy ways to both feel like you’re putting more into the relationship and maybe to make her feel better are to increase the frequency with which you’re talking on the phone, for example. If you talk every few weeks, you could potentially establish a weekly time where you two, except for extenuating circumstances, talk on the phone. This could make her feel more secure in knowing when she’ll get to talk with you, and it’s a situation with clear parameters that allow you to set and keep boundaries around how much time you want to spend talking with her. As for relying on her, similarly, you don’t have to accept or ask for help that you don’t feel comfortable with or need. And if your mom makes suggestions around things that don’t necessarily feel right, you can always counter suggestions and asks with something that is more of a compromise. Maybe she asks to come visit you for 10 days, and that’s way too much for you right now, so you counter and say that you’d actually like to come visit her for a long weekend coming up.

As others have said, there’s no way to know how you’ll feel when she dies, but if you want to test the waters and see how it feels to work on being a little bit more close, there are ways to gradually do that and keep your boundaries.

Ok so the real plot twist here is shame disguised as literary standards, babe.

Q

I am a very voracious reader, and I have noticed that lately, most of the books I’ve read are queer to some extent, with quite a few being romcoms. I also keep a list of all the books I’ve read in a year, and I feel a lot of satisfaction from reading past a certain number. However, recently, as I see my list being filled with books centered, or prominently featuring queer romances, I feel as if I’m cheating, and that these books shouldn’t really count on my book list. My twisted logic is that because I seek out those books and only read them because there is some sort of queerness to them, it undermines the legitimacy of the book in some way. I also feel ashamed that I should feel this shame because I know on some level that there is nothing wrong at all with what I am doing, but every time I see my book list and see it grow with queer books, it just feels wrong to me. Also I feel even worse when it’s a romcom because it feels too fluffy to consider as an actual book to include, like it’s just an easy way for me to boost the number on my list. I know this is a trivial matter about a book list, but I also feel like it’s a reflection of how I feel about how I engage with my queerness? How do I make this feeling go away?

A

Nico: I’m called first to how you feel satisfied about reading past a certain number of books in a year. Do you often have standards for yourself, set by yourself, which you feel you must try to meet, or else you’re disappointed in yourself? I think this is about more than just feeling guilty about focusing on queer books, it’s also about tying your reading to a goal that ultimately doesn’t mean that much because — as you point out — some books are a quicker read than others. The “ease” with which you read a book does not necessarily correlate with its value. For you, it seems like the value in these books is the emotional and validating experience you gain from reading queer romances — and you are an emotional being and not just a cold, intellectual one, so that is valuable and important!

You are allowed to want to steep yourself in queerness and for that to be something you seek out and that feels good to you. Also, maybe books that center a more cishet perspective feel like more work to engage with because they’re requiring you to stretch out of your lived queer experience and to engage with a cishet perspective. So, all that is to say, yes? This does say something about how you’re valuing and engaging with your queerness. Engaging with your queerness by reading queer romances is valid. Now, you mention feeling shame when you see your list fill with queer books in general, so if I have tangible advice for you regarding making this “feeling go away,” it’s to actually lean more into that and to continue to widely and deeply engage with books by queer authors and on queer subject matter — fiction, nonfiction, more. Queer people are really fucking good at shit! At writing! At researching! At journalism and reporting! At brewing up romances that make you feel all gooey inside! Plus, when you get books by queer authors out of the library or purchase them, you’re supporting queer authors and showing that there’s demand for queer books, so that’s a net good, too. If you want to participate even more deeply, you can leave reviews on websites for the books you read and enjoy by queer authors. I wonder if intentionally leaning in, instead of skirting around it, will help you to truly accept in your body that nothing is less valuable by nature of being queer, and that it’s okay for books that center queerness to be preferable to you because they reflect who you are and have more points of commonality for you.

Sa’iyda: As a reader of predominantly queer romance, let me first just say that these are legitimate books! Who is telling you that they’re not? A book is a book, whether it’s an e-book, a graphic novel, or an audiobook. If you are reading them, they count! Just because they’re easy to read doesn’t make them less valid, and doesn’t make you less of a reader. Is the real issue with them being “fluffy” and therefore seemingly less legit in some circles, or is it that you feel some type of way about your own queerness because you read queer romance?

There is no one way to be queer either. Just because you don’t perform or engage with queerness the way other people do, doesn’t make you any less queer. I think social media has made us feel like there’s only one way to do things, when in fact, everything is a spectrum.

Why don’t you see if there’s a queer book club in your area? They often read a spectrum of books, and you may meet people with similar interests. It’s a good way to engage both with your book lover side and your queerness.

Riese: I am also insane about tracking what I read and sometimes if my number of books read per year isn’t where I want it to be I will read a graphic novel to get back on track because the number of books read per year is literally something that only matters to me, it’s my own silly obsessive problem so I can cheat at the game I created if I want to! But I cannot imagine considering a queer romance to be cheating on this (again, self-created) challenge! And neither should you.

Summer: One starting point is to tell yourself that everyone seeks out the media that interests them. The media we consume or enjoy shouldn’t solely be for a productive purpose. Seeking productivity or properness in engaging with entertainment is often detrimental to our enjoyment, not supportive of it.

On the topic of wanting to read fluffy romance and similar, this is a long-running feeling that exists alongside the infantilization of women’s interests. Women’s interests like romance fiction, makeup, and home crafts are characterized as frivolous by a deeply misogynistic world. Just as women’s labor like homemaking and parenting are also characterized as less valuable. This is the indelible mark left by past societies that (more ruthlessly) repressed women’s participation in enjoyable activities. Romantic fiction has a long history of being an outlet for women in a men’s world. In a time when education and even literacy were barred from women, romance in theater or ‘low-grade’ literature might be the only literature they could access. Literature offered a fantastical outlet for women weighed down by their lack of freedoms in the real world, whether that outlet involved fictional tales of freedom or simply romantic partners who weren’t terrible.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to indulge in the media of your choice. There’s no reason to consider it frivolous or unimportant when all media and storytelling has a rich history. Enjoyment alone should be an adequate reason to take in art, but if it’s not, just remember that fluffy queer media is appropriate in a world that represses both queerness and joy alike.

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