This is the almost verbatim Facebook conversation between my mom (Mrs. G.) and a friend of mine (Lily^*) after my friend posted that she was in a relationship.

For some reason, this conversation really upset me, and I’m not the type of person who gets worked up easily about these types of things. It was more than just embarrassment. Sure, it’s embarrassing for your mother to publicly seek a boyfriend for you, but it was more than that.

What bothered me so much was the fact that my mother acts like she’s happy with my current life choices, but in reality, she’s not comfortable with me being single. It’s like I got a glimpse of how she really feels. Plus, it’s one thing if she’s having these conversations in private amongst her friends, but Facebook is much more public. It’s as if I was very overweight and my mother was always telling me that I’m beautiful the way I am, but, upon seeing a friend who has lost a bunch of weight, she yells, for all to hear, “How did you lose all that weight? My fat daughter could sure use some help!”

I wanted to post my own comment in response, publicly telling her off or send her a long, angry email. In the end, I did neither of those things, but I didn’t ignore it either. A while later, after the steam had blown off, I mentioned it to her on the phone. She admitted to being embarrassed that she’d made those comments and apologized. It was good to hear that from her and it was better than how I usually deal with problems (which is by ignoring the problem and hoping it will just disappear). We still haven’t dealt with the main issue: that my mom is not really okay with me being single, but maybe that’s the next step.

^{*names and pictures have been changed}