My Best Friend Has Been with Me Since Day One and I Didn't Even Know It

This article has been a long time coming. You've been begging for this article ever since I decided I was a writer. I never told you this, but the reason I hadn’t written this before now is because you deserve so much more than a simple 700-word post on the Internet. I have sat down to write this article countless times and, every time, the words refused to come out.

This will never be enough, and it will never truly capture everything. But, here it is.

I’ve always been the girl who wanted to find her other half. I wanted to be one half of the pair that no one could imagine separated. Maybe it’s all the Disney movies I watched as a kid, or the books that I read growing up, but I always had this dream that I would find a person who I could truly call my best friend forever. The person who would become a permanent fixture in my family, who would have sleepovers with me and go on crazy adventures with me and do absolutely nothing with me. The person who would know every single thing about me.

I wanted the fairytale romance that I saw in all the movies, but, more than that, I wanted the fairytale friendship.

Except I’ve never been good with friendships. I am super quiet around new people and I moved around a lot as a kid, so making friends has never come easily. And when it did seem like I had finally made a friend at school, they usually ended up betraying me or leaving me for someone better. I seemed to latch onto the people who never needed me as much as I needed them. I would force myself into believing that every “best friend” was going to be the best friend, even when I knew something wasn’t right.

When I came to university and my dorm roommate didn’t instantly become my best friend, I kind of gave up on the notion of ever finding a true best friend. After all, books and movies only ever gave me this scenario to go off of. I did eventually make friends—by far the best friends that I’ve ever had—but they aren’t exactly my fairytale come true either, no matter how much we love each other. And I’m just now starting to realize why.

Mum, you are my fairytale. You are my other half.

This may seem silly; lots of mothers and daughters say they are each other’s best friend. But I’d like to think that it’s only ever been true with us.

There is no one in the entire world that I would trust more with my deepest secrets and my darkest thoughts. There is no one that I have ever laughed harder with, or cried harder with. There is no one that understands our intuitive form of communication better. There is no one else that I would want to travel with to New Jersey and back in less than 36 hours, and no one else that I would want to almost get arrested in IKEA with. There is no one else that stars more frequently in all of my best memories. There is no one that knows me better, and no one else that I would want to share all my weird inside jokes with.

You are the first person that I want to tell when something amazing happens to me, and the only person that I want to call when something not-so-amazing happens. And I think that’s all a best friend really is. Someone that is with you, even when you live five hundred miles apart.

I’ve always tried to deny this, or been embarrassed by it, because “only losers say their mom is their best friend.” But it is true. And I think I am the luckiest person alive to not only get you as a mother but as a lifelong friend too.

I get to love you twice as much. And goof off with you twice as much. And hug you twice as hard when one of us is sad. I get to have a best friend who not only knows everything about me, but who has been there from the start, who knows every version of myself that I’ve ever been, and still loves me unconditionally.

And that’s a pretty remarkable feeling.