I asked my friends about the worst thing their mothers ever said to them

and in the interest of fairness, the nicest thing she’s ever done

The last person I posed this question to was Jordy Rosenberg:

DANNY: What’s the worst thing your mother has ever said to you?

JORDY: Too many to list. But the funniest worst thing she ever said was: “No one likes sex with men. Marry one and divorce him for the alimony.”

DANNY: Yes, but Jordy, at least your mother is dead. That’s got to help a little. Mine is still generating a chain of events that turns into a single catastrophe in front of my feet, piling wreckage upon wreckage! And a storm is blowing in from Paradise!

Whenever any of us kids moved into a new apartment, she’d always come over and make sure our cutlery drawers were lined. Said she couldn’t feel comfortable until she’d seen our new places and knew where everything was and that our cutlery drawers had a nice lining in them. She did a lot of other nice things, too.

A few weeks after I had started testosterone without telling her, she looked critically at my neck and said, “You’ve been breaking out a lot lately. Did you start testosterone without telling me?” She said some worse things, too, but I can’t remember any other things as vividly as this one.

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AUDREY

The worst thing my mother ever said to me is “you and your brother are living marginal lives.” I think about it literally every day and am afraid I will never outrun it.

The nicest thing is serial, and it’s that she always sent me a housewarming card in the mail every time i moved.

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SIOBHAN

My mother taught me about the beauty of adventuring outdoors. We didn’t have much money growing up, and our home life was very difficult. Because of this we spent a lot of time camping, backpacking, and riding horses in the wilderness. She planned incredible adventures for me that shaped who I am today.

She put the burden of deciding what to do about her abusive marriage on me, age 11: “I’ll leave him if you want me to.”

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LOREN

Made me a mixtape of songs that reminded her of me. Once she rush shipped a care package overseas with a belt, pants, and a grip of protein bars, because I’d lost so much weight traveling that I was keeping my pants up with a piece of rope.

“You know how I feel about that,” when I finally told her I had a girlfriend in my twenties. Later, “I don’t want to meet her.”

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NATALIE

She gave me an insane amount of self-esteem. Always made me feel like I merit love and care and attention. Specific examples include: bought me a plane ticket home from college at 3am my junior year after I got in a scary fight with my then-boyfriend. She came to all my plays in high school, let me sleep in her room for months when I got my heart broken for the first time at seventeen, and always makes me feel like she loves being my mother.

Also, she did one overnight a week with my very sleep-uninterested baby for the first ten weeks after she was born.

The worst thing: I vividly remember my mother telling me “you are such a fuck-up” in high school. I remember where we were (in my room, she was standing in the doorway). I don’t remember what it was about, but I don’t think it was anything huge — maybe time management. Because she usually held me in high regard and because I really value her opinion I was especially hurt.

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RACHEL

Best thing is a no-brainer. When I was six, my mother took me on an Amtrak from Chicago to Los Angeles to visit my aunt and take me to Disneyland, which was all I wanted as a child. I barely remember Disneyland, funnily enough, but I remember that train trip: three or four nights without a sleeper compartment. We ate snacks and read to each other from Peter Pan and slept in our upright seats covered in a giant old fur coat that my mother called her “mystery mink.” Everything about it was magical. I think it was the one time she was the mom she thought she was, or wanted to be. After she died I inherited a massive photo album just from that trip. I’m so glad both of us had that.

Worst thing she ever said, there’s lots to choose from. Right before I started high school: “You can be anything you want, Rachel. Why not be popular?”

And right before I started college, when I told her I wanted to major in English and theater, “You’ll need to lose a lot of weight if you’re planning to be a trophy wife.”

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LIEM

My mom has taken me all around the world, instilling in me a love of good food and broader horizons.

Probably the worst thing is, “If we can’t find your sister, I will kill you.” But honestly that was fair. I lost my three-year-old sister on my eighth birthday at our apartment complex. We found her. I’m alive.

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CATRINA

“The nicest thing a mother can do is literally everything else while father writes his clever little books. Mine doesn’t come out of her room much these days, though.”

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ANN

She paid off my credit card when I finished grad school. I still had to pay off my student loan, but back in those days student debt was less life-hobbling. She also stopped my high school from holding me back after I got seriously depressed.

But also: She was not a well woman. In addition to the mental and emotional instabilities, and the chronic pain, some of her behavior was probably exacerbated by what we later found out were mini-strokes that ate away at her brain and caused wild mood swings. She’d say horrible things and then forget them.

She once wrote a long letter to me about what a failure I was as a daughter because I didn’t help out around the house enough when she was in pain, even though it had apparently escaped her notice that I took up cooking duties for our family and fed us all until I left for college.

When I was very young, and my father and sister were away, I saw my mother crying, and it scared me so much I left the room. Later she told me I was uncaring and selfish for not asking her what was wrong.

I was able to put it aside at the end. She died of Covid in a nursing home in August 2020. A nurse brought in an iPad and for over two hours, I monologued to her unconscious face, filling her head with every happy memory I could muster and letting her know that I loved her, and I knew she loved me, and that she was going to be pain-free and with her beloved older brother again, who she loved very much. She died a few hours later.

I recently got a tattoo of one of the last things she said to me a few years prior. As Parkinson’s took over, she didn’t always remember my name or who I was. I had flown to see her. She rallied, and I was sitting by her bed spoon-feeding her Jell-O. She looked at me, rallied what seemed to be all of her consciousness, and rasped out, “I want you to know that I think you have turned into a fine young lady.” There is a version of that on my inner upper arm now.

[Images via Wikimedia Commons]