As a little girl, being like your mom is the greatest, because when you are 3 your parents are the coolest people ever, and your mom is your window to who you could become. As you get up in the single digits and enter adolescence then your teens and trying to differentiate yourself from your mom becomes much more imperative. Suddenly being like your mom in not only not cool, it's embarrassing.
Then you reach your twenties and you notice small and subtle ways you are like your mom, they way you laugh at certain jokes or the way you put salad dressing on other peoples salad and it fills you with a sense of inevitable dread that you are doomed to become your mom. Not because your mom isn't awesome, but because it suddenly makes you realize that your mom is a real person who did and does have a life outside of yours. You realize that your mom was once young like you, and that someday you too will be older and perhaps have children who have no awareness of your person-hood. You realize that you were a really big jerk to your mom for a long time and still are sometimes - you just can't help it - but now that you realize your mom has feelings, you feel really really bad about it.
Eventually you accept that becoming an adult in inevitable, and actually not so bad. I, myself, feel like I am doing adulthood so much better than I did childhood. For me, this is the point when I can really start embracing my mom-ness. The way I too can not remember the proper name for stores and will in all likelihood start calling every ice cream stand "the Tasty Twirl", or the way I jokingly pronounce words ending in "er" as "ah" like "Here, have a some chowd-ah".
There are so many ways that I am very much my mother, and really, that's okay, because my mom is a great lady. But recently, there is a way in which it feels like my mom is becoming more like me, which is a fun twist. Maybe not like me, but It's a journey that we both went on separately and at different times, but ended up at the same place, because recently my mother discovered Queen.
Queen has been near and dear to my heart for about 10 years. I don't remember the exact moment when I realized that Queen, who as a teen I had thought was silly, was actually one of the best bands ever. It was definitely around the time I checked out A Night at the Opera from the library when I was living in Buffalo. Since then there is usually a point about once a year where I listen to nothing but Queen for a few weeks.
For my mother, the moment was much more recent. I'm sure she had heard of Queen before because she was alive and aware during the 80's. And even if she had somehow missed it then, she must have picked something up during the many times my siblings or I had watched Wayne's World during the 90's. Even so, she didn't really take notice until about a year ago. She was watching a youtube video and on the side of the page where they offer other video suggestions there was Queen Live Aid. Their full concert from 1985. She clicked the link and from that moment she was hooked.
My mother, who's other favorite artists include Elvis and Micheal Buble, never seemed like someone who would embrace the guitar driven rock stylings of Queen. But as my brother pointed out, one thing Elvis, Micheal Buble, and Freddie Mercury all share are good voices and theatrical stage presence. So perhaps it's not so surprising.
In any case, as I am currently reveling in my annual appreciation of Queen, and my annual appreciation of my mother, I thought I would commemorate it with one thing we can both appreciate: Freddie Mercury.