Let me go ahead and say the thing that makes a certain kind of mom clutch her pearls:
My son is my best friend.
Not in the “I let him do whatever he wants and we’re more like roommates” way. Not in the “I never set a boundary in my life” way. In the realest, truest, most hard-earned way — the way that only happens when two people go through something together and come out the other side still choosing each other.
His name is Joshua. He goes by Josh, to most. To me though? Joshua — most of the time, except when I’m mad, or he’s done something exceptionally fantastic, then Joshua Tyrone. Funny how both extremes earn his mouthful of a name from me. He’s 21 years old, an Eagle Scout, runs his own vending machine business, and has been with the same girl since they were twelve years old.
He refers to me as Madre.
And if you have a problem with any of that, this post is for you.
I was nineteen when Joshua was born.
Before his first birthday, I was divorced. I was in college. We went through two divorces in his first two years — two — and we were broke in the specific, grinding way that only a teenage single mom in school knows how to be broke. No buffer. No margin. Just us, figuring it out one day at a time.
He doesn’t remember any of the hard parts quite the way I do. A few years ago I asked him about his favorite memories of growing up, bracing myself for something complicated, and this is what he said:
I want you to sit with that for a second.
The years I spent feeling like I was failing him — the years I was scraping together tuition and rocking a toddler and trying to hold my whole life in two hands — those are his fondest memories. Not the chaos. Not the instability. Us. Just us. Together.
That’s not an accident. That’s a bond.
Here’s a story I think about more than I probably should.
Josh was around four years old. I collapsed on the floor with a migraine — the kind that takes you completely out, lights off, world gone. And this tiny four-year-old found my phone, figured out how to call my dad, and got me help.
Four years old.
I didn’t teach him that. I didn’t have a plan for it. He just knew, in the way that kids know things when they feel safe and loved and like they are somebody’s person — he knew that his Madre needed help and he was going to get it.
Tell me again how our closeness equals disrespect. I’ll wait.
Here’s what I think happens when older moms — and I say this with love, I promise — push back on mothers who are close to their kids. They confuse familiarity with permissiveness. They confuse friendship with a lack of structure. They hear “my son talks to me like his best bud” and they think that means he doesn’t respect me.
What it actually means is that he’s comfortable with me. That he’s not performing for me. That he knows he doesn’t have to.
Respect isn’t distance. Respect isn’t formality.
Respect is a 21-year-old Eagle Scout who built a business from the ground up — with the help of his grandfather, who believed in him — and who shows up as a loyal, grounded, loving human being every single day of his life.
Respect is being with the same girl since you were twelve years old.
Respect is who Joshua is. And I will not pretend that has nothing to do with us, or with the years we spent in crappy apartments eating chicken nuggets and building something out of nothing.
This past Mother’s Day, Josh took me to Perry’s Steakhouse.
If you know, you know.
He made the reservation. He picked me up. He sat across from me at that table and we talked and laughed the way we always do — like two people who genuinely like each other, because we genuinely like each other — and at the end of the night he paid the check himself. Proudly. The kid who grew up on Dr. Pepper and nuggets, treating his Madre to the perfect medium-rare ribeye.
I almost cried in the parking lot. I did not, because I have a reputation to maintain.
But I wanted to.
It happened because of it.
So here’s what I want to say to the moms who think I should have kept more distance, enforced more formality, been less his friend and more just his mother:
Look at him.
Look at who he is. Look at what he built. Look at the way he loves people — his girl, his family, his grandfather who handed him his first vending machine and believed in him before the world had a chance to. Look at a young man who, at four years old, knew how to show up for someone he loved when they needed him.
And to my Joshua — my Joshua Tyrone when you’ve flabbergasted me, your Madre’s favorite human —
You are every good decision I ever made wrapped up in one person. The years when it was just us are the years that made me who I am too. You didn’t just need me.
I would do every hard thing again, ten times over, to end up right here — sitting across from you at a nice dinner, watching you pick up the check, so ridiculously proud of who you’ve become that I can barely stand it.
Best friends don’t always start out that way. Sometimes you grow into it, through the chaos and the rivers of Dr. Pepper and the years that nearly broke you, until one day you look up and realize — this person is my person. Fully and completely and without apology.
And I am so, so his.
— Moe
