A BEAUTIFUL ESSAY ON GREATNESS

Two cool cats.

Sometimes when Em and i are chatting, i will idly ask her what i should post about. She always answers, "You should do a post about how awesome i am." I tell her that i do that all the time.

Yesterday i was hanging with Em, and i told her that today was the three year anniversary of my blog. She immediately piped up with "You should let me do a post about how awesome you are."

So i did. Behold;

WHY MY MOM IS GREAT
by Em McMenodaughter, age 18

So on this illustrious day I thought that, to make up for all her posts about how spectacularly great I am (all 100% true), I'd make a post about how spectacularly great my mom is for you all.

I think it was during the summer when I did almost nothing but surf channels looking for Roseanne reruns that I heard that the basic mission of a parent is to, if nothing else, make their kids' lives better than their own. If you do that, you succeed, because in theory it means continued progress. If we're using this as a measurement for whether or not a parent is successful, my mom is a rock star. She is the Michael Jordan of moms. Because I can honestly say that my life is great and that, the majority of the time, I'm a pretty happy person.

My mom is basically my best friend. As she can attest, she's the first person I text, call, or instant-message to tell if anything exciting or even remotely interesting happens to me. Even while I was in Ohio most of the time over the last eight months or so, I contacted her probably at least once a day. If I have a problem, I'll go to her, and even if she can't come up with a solution-- which she usually can-- she can make me feel better about it. Hell, she's been willing to mother me over instant message while I've been sick and at school and she's been back in Washington. I know I can talk to her about basically anything and she'll tell me if I'm being an idiot or if I'm totally justified in plotting to kill whoever has most dreadfully wronged me recently. She is also a very talented giver of hugs-- perhaps a function of being tall-- and excellent at back and foot massages.

A lot of women, or so I hear, dread accidentally turning into their mothers when they grow old, but I'd be happy to have someone tell me that I was turning into my mom. What's so bad about being funny and smart and slightly insane (and it'd be nice to be tall like her, too, but I'm guessing that's not gonna happen)? I don't know if we look all that alike, but some people seem to think we do, and I think that's awesome. I can't imagine how I would have turned out without her and I don't want to, but I'm pretty sure I'm a better person than I might have been with a lot of other possible moms.

I feel like I don't tell her how lucky I am to have her enough, especially given how good she is at reminding me how loved I am, so hopefully this post will suffice for a while. Dear Mommy: You are great and I love you. Thanks for not leaving me to freeze to death on a hillside after I was born, even though I was an ugly baby with blue limbs and no hair.

Love, Em.

P.S. (She told me not to make this too embarrassing, so as a less flattering postscript: her taste buds are broken. For years I thought salad was disgusting because of the way she made it, but no! Salad is perfectly acceptable! My mom just doesn't taste things properly or wanted to sabotage my health or something.)