I want my mommy!

I remember the day I stopped calling my mother “Mommy.”  I was 13, and I announced to her that I would no longer be calling her “Mommy,” and would prefer to call her “Mom” from then on.  It just wasn’t cool to call her “Mommy” anymore.  It would be heard in dressing rooms at the mall while having a mother-daughter day together.  It would be heard among friends when I called her to pick me up.  I would be the laughingstock of the popular kids if they found out I still called my mother “Mommy.”

I had already ditched the now un-cool feathered bangs look of the fifth grade.  The painful ultra-awkward sixth grade was now behind me (as in, bombed out at the talent show with an utterly awful rendition of “Material Girl”--but I’d give anything to have those fingerless neon pink fishnet gloves now!).  I had made myself over to the best of my seventh-grade ability.  I had now adopted a blow-dried bob.  I had gotten a pair of Guess jeans and a training bra.  I had survived a long appendicitis ordeal.  I was almost a woman, and humiliation in the locker room was almost a thing of the past.  I could stand up for myself now, and a girl who stands up for herself calls her mother “Mom,” not “Mommy,” as in, “I want mine right now!”  

I know I caught my mom off guard with the announcement, but she took the news with a stoic “Oh, okay,” and continued making dinner.  She was able to suppress any heartbreak that her little girl was growing up and away from her.  She never wanted to hold me back or keep me from becoming the woman I needed, or at least desperately wanted, to become.  Even though, at 13, I still was a little girl with such a long way to go.  

I know some day the moment will come when my own daughter will say she wants to stop calling me “Mommy,” and I know I won’t take it as well as my mom did.  I’ll probably cry and pull out the home movies of my daughter the way she is today, at only two.  Come to think of it, maybe that’s what my mom did, only she didn’t let me know it.  She wanted me to be strong and independent, and, thanks to her strength, I am.  

Mom, I’ll always need you, and I’ll always love you, and you’ll always be my Mommy.  

3 generations: Me with my mommy and my very wiggly Leilani