Mum is on speakerphone as I get ready for the gym. I scrape my hair back into the tightest bun I can manage. There are so many other reasons why he might have changed his mind about bringing me. And yet now I feel there are all these secret possibilities shifting around behind my back, morphing into monstrous shapes. I open up WhatsApp and send a long voice note to my group chat explaining the situation. She cares about all the little details everyone else would find boring, like what the lighting was like and whether he waited with me until my bus came.
But, you tell her a bit and then she wants a follow-up and another one. I know my friend is rightβthe only way around this is to put some sort of boundary in place. Mums tend to love us more than we love ourselves. They worry about us being happy, because often they want that for us even more than we do. The issue is that, in worrying, they often make us feel even worse. She might think I need a nice man with a short back and sides who will take me to dinner, but other things are much more important to me , like how I get to wake up and write every day with my feet in cozy Ugg slippers that make me smile.
Or that the air is so crisp at the moment that it stings in my nose and the sky turns pinky-blue every evening when I walk back from the gym.
What matters to her might not matter to me. Bennett in all mothers, I think. Listen to The Run-Through with Vogue , a weekly podcast featuring the most exciting stories and hot takes from the worlds of culture, politics, sports andβof courseβfashion. The Vogue Runway app has expanded!
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