Mom Safe Gossip
When I was 20, my mom and I sat around the fire pit in her backyard with glasses of wine and had our first heart-to-heart. It was summer, and I was back home after a few years of living in Canada and doing a lot of things that I didn’t tell my mom about. At that point, my mom and I did not have the type of relationship that was filled with telling each other everything. It wasn’t bad, I was just extremely private and honestly, scared to tell her too much about my hijinks and get judged or grounded or whatever. But that night, things started to shift.
We covered a lot of ground. I was transferring universities to be closer to home, so we talked about what I would miss and what I was afraid of in the future. We talked about my new boyfriend and what I loved about him. We talked about her ex-boyfriend and what he was up to now. We gossiped about family. We gossiped about our friends. We tried to figure out what I should do with my life. We didn’t come to any conclusions, but it was a good brainstorm.
There’s an Instagram reel that talks about MSG - that’s Mom-Safe Gossip. The creator extolls the types of gossip you’re most likely to share with your mom. Things like petty dramas between your friends and their boyfriends, something that bitch at work said, or a lame date you had are all fair game in the arena of MSG. When you start telling your mom this type of drama, chances are she’s going to share the emotional highs and lows with you, and you won’t be worrying her too much. She might counter with some crazy news about a distant family member. Gossiping with your mom can be enlivening and comforting. Your life is a whole shared knowledge base, but you live different enough lives that no one else is going to find out what you’ve said to each other.
Like the creator of the reel says: “Like my mom doesn’t need to know when I get drunk on a Thursday night and smoke a cigarette outside a dive bar, or like, go to some random person’s penthouse just to further the plot for the night. She would be concerned, she doesn’t need to know all that. But I get so excited when I find out something scandalous about one of our cousins on social media or find out that one of our neighbors is getting a divorce.”
I agree to a point. Sure, there’s a line of what I’ll share with my mom. It’s been great to grow up and be less moody and chaotic, and I want my mom to think that I mostly have it together. But I think it ultimately doesn’t matter. I think she sees right through me, and I think she already knows how messy things can get.
In my twenties, my mom and I started talking more often and more transparently than we ever had before. Now, living in another state, we talk on the phone multiple times a week, and the gossip comes fast. Much like the creator of the reel, my mom is always asking for updates on my friends’ love lives and offering her own opinion about it. She’s also asking about my love life, but thankfully, she doesn’t voice that much judgment. We talk about her work drama, compare notes on family members, reminisce, and laugh a lot. Growing into a phase of my life where I can talk to my mom about anything has been one of the greatest joys of growing up. Perhaps there is a line between what I should share with my mom and what would worry her. I certainly don’t give her every detail of some stories.
But the thing is, even when I was being more secretive, my mom already knew everything. She always knew when I was sneaking out, she knew when I had lost my virginity, she knew when I was getting intensely depressed, and she knew when it was time for me to come home. Even now, when I call her, she knows if I’m having a good or bad day before I even say anything. Sometimes, she knows I’m about to call her before I ring.
I wonder if this is true for all moms. My mom says that my grandmother was similar to her, and I even remember moments when my grandmother would look at me, and I had this feeling that she knew everything going on in my life. I wonder, if I get to be a mom someday, will I be like that too?
My mom at least acts like she doesn’t want to know everything. When there’s a particularly spicy twist in my life, she has been known to laugh and say, “I don’t even want to know how that happened!” My mom just knows that I’m a mess, that life’s a mess, that I’ll get through it somehow, and that things will turn out in ways that neither of us can predict. The best we can do is laugh about it and throw some caution to the wind.
Recently, one of my friends told me about a change in her relationship with her mother. She’s struggled to talk about her life with her mom without fearing being judged. She told me, though, that during a recent tough stretch of time, she decided to call her mom. She rolled her eyes and laughed, recalling that she realized that her mom can’t ground her anymore. She asked her mother, “When you were 27, did you feel this unbelievably lost?”, and instead of getting a lecture, her mom replied, “Oh my god, yes.”
I think being able to gossip with our moms is more than just shit-talking. It gives some more dimension to your mom, yourself, and growing up and into adulthood. If you can hear all the challenges your mom faced when she was younger and the challenges she’s facing now, it might make you feel less alone and contextualizes whatever your life looks like now. Hearing about my mom’s past and present has helped me take the long view of life. My mom has a favorite refrain when we gossip, and I love it so much I’ve started telling all my friends. She’ll tell me a story about old friends or neighbors that started back in some time like 2003 but got a recent spicy update and laugh and say, “That’s one of my favorite things about getting older; you see where everyone’s story ends up and the way all the threads tie together, and you see as everything makes sense in the end.”
For my friend who recently started talking more openly with her mother, it’s been liberating to realize that she can more or less tell her mom the truth. There won’t be consequences or judgments. It’s a step into a more equal relationship with her mother, one that’s more fulfilling because it’s more open, and her and her mother have the chance to know each other better. Her mom has been in a similar position in life before, and she knows exactly what it’s like. To know that you were born because someone survived their own confusion and chaos and that that person is still here, walking with you through your own, is an affirmation you can’t find anywhere other than from your mother. And for me, to find out that my mom is still willing to laugh, believe in love, and to still be warm and open to people, despite all the drama in her own life, gives me faith that maybe I’ll be okay too.
That night by the fire pit things got quiet for a minute. We had been talking for hours, and I felt more understood by my mother than I ever had before. I was basking in the surprise of discovering that I could tell my mother about my friends and my feelings and my fears and my ambitions and that she could meet me there. In the lull, she asked, “what made you want to do molly?”
Up until that point, I hadn’t told her anything about my partying. I had been living in another country and not telling her or anyone from back home much about what I was up to. To this day, I still don’t know how she found out. So I told her what it was like. I told her how often. It didn’t matter; she wasn’t judging, she was just curious. It felt good to talk about. I realized that I could tell her things about my life, and not only would she not judge me, she welcomed it. I think she always just wanted to know. Or rather, I think she always knew, she just wanted me to trust her enough to be transparent.
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Kate Miano is a writer based in New York. She has poetry published in Overheard Lit, Goat's Milk Magazine, and Fish Barrel Review, among others. She has work forthcoming in Fauxmoir Literary Journal, december magazine, and Schuylkill Valley Journal. She can be found on Instagram: @kate.c0m, Twitter: @_katemiano and by the water.
