There were 1,290 miles remaining, which meant 21 hours of George Strait slowly twanging my sanity into dust and uninterrupted therapy with my mom. For the sake of my survival, I was motivated to keep asking questions so she would turn down the music. Her 2016 Lexus transformed into a confession booth on wheels.
My mom is the kind of woman who moves through life with what I call “OCD” and what she calls urgency and care. Her hands are never idle. There’s always something to fix, someone to check up on, a playlist to control. Even when she’s still, you can feel her thinking.
We fell into one of those cinematic, heart-to-heart road trip conversations, the kind where you think you’re finally peeling back the mysteries of life, family, and womanhood. She was mid-sentence, her voice low and serious.
“I just don’t want you to inherit the same silence I carried from my mother —”
Ding da ding!
“INCOMING CALL FROM DAD” flashed across the car’s display screen.
Even though my dad had driven up ahead with our German Shepherd in the back seat, it was as if the cars were cups on a string telephone, tethered by the yarn of a fraying Bluetooth connection.
“Is there anything you regret not trying in life?” I asked.
“I’ve done weed, shrooms — never acid, but I don’t think I’m missing much. What I’ve realized is that I’m much happier and freer when I’m —”
Ding da ding!
“Did you see that goat in the back of that guy’s truck?”
Ignoring Dad, I asked, “How similar do you think you are to Grandma?”
“I like to think that I can end the generational trauma — that it starts with me. All I really knew was to get married and have kids. I didn’t realize another path —”
Ding da ding!
“What is that huge plant? Can you get Kayla to look it up?”
“Why do you think we need to hire people for move-in day?”
“I don’t want to throw out my back. I can feel myself getting older. I’m trying so hard to stay on this Earth for as long as I can. I don’t know how much longer I have —”
Ding da ding!
“So, Buc-ee’s or Love’s?”
The rings made me want to ding da — drive off a cliff.
As amusing as they were, the constant interruptions revealed something deeper: how little I actually talk to my mom. We know each other in the most fundamental ways — like how asking if I’m hungry is her version of emotional support and how “I’ll clean my room today” really means “in a week”— yet we remain equally clueless.
She sees the goofy performer in me come out at family dinners where I am more hungry for food than laughs. She sees how I lead with laughter but misses what it hides. To me, humor is armor. The thought of pouring my heart into something without a punchline terrifies me. To let people know that you’re serious is to admit that you care, and caring is the most vulnerable thing of all.
She sees this version of me, but not the cost of it — that humor is the only language I’m fluent in, yet it mistranslates me most. It makes me easy to listen to but hard to know. The laughter feels like proof that I’ve connected, even as it buries what I meant to say.
What I really need isn’t a sharper setup. It’s a way to be heard.
But during that drive, in the stop-and-go rhythm of questions and interruptions, I realized that our relationship was built on a foundation of small, ordinary moments — quiet ones I used to overlook. The early mornings when she braided my hair with one hand and scrolled through her emails with the other. The silent rides to school where the hum of the engine said everything words couldn’t. I felt her empathy on nights she’d wordlessly slide a bowl of sliced strawberries onto my desk when I stayed up late studying. I felt her care when she stayed just long enough to see me take the first bite. There’s beauty in being heard but also in knowing someone so well that silence feels like understanding.
Back then, I never wondered who she was beyond my mother. Her life seemed fully formed, on track, speeding down a highway. I was the asshole who cut her off.
But that drive gave me a glimpse of who she is outside of “Mom.” Her phone buzzed with a text from a work colleague asking how our drive to Michigan was — a simple question that spiraled into our social-engineering project of how to maximize likability and debates over the emotional temperature of various emojis. As we edited and re-edited the reply, I recognized something familiar: the same instinct I have when I polish the humor out of a joke.
When she tells me she’s afraid of aging, I see myself in her — the same fear of time, of not chasing what you love soon enough. The same fear that you’ll blink and find yourself middle-aged, Googling “how to start over” between ads of magical anti-aging creams and supplements.
When she tells me about learned silence, I know exactly what she means. She says she doesn’t want me to inherit it, but I already feel it sometimes: that instinct to keep things light, to dodge sincerity with a well-timed joke. It’s practically a family heirloom.
That drive didn’t bring us to any grand revelation. There was no perfect, tearful resolution between songs. Just miles of highway and the familiar rhythm of her voice getting cut off by another ding da ding. But between those interruptions, something shifted. Our conversations felt less like a parent instructing a child and more like two women trying to make sense of their lives alongside each other. I’ve realized that we’re both still figuring things out, both still trying to become the women we want to be. That both of us are just trying to find a way to be seen.
Somewhere between the goats, the gas stations, and George Strait, I realized that my mom isn’t growing ahead of me, blazing the trail I’m meant to follow. She’s beside me in her own lane, matching pace.
And maybe that’s what love looks like as you grow older — not dependence, not instruction, but parallel motion. Two lives tracing the same road, sometimes drifting apart, sometimes crossing lanes, but always moving toward the same horizon.