I Am Not Your Friend. I Am Your Mother.

It happened when my oldest son, Jack, was five years old. I knew it was coming and already knew what I was going to say. I had just given him a consequence (which means I took his iPad away from him) for some bad behavior (not listening to me, not doing what I asked him to do a dozen times, hitting his brother, really take your pick) and he says to me, “Mom, you are not my friend anymore.” To which I replied, “You’re right, Jack. I am not your friend. And I will never be your friend. You are going to have a lot of different friends in your life. But I am your mother and you will only have one of me. And I have one job to do: raise you right.” To which he just groaned. The next day the same scenario repeated itself except when I started into my “I am not your friend speech” he quickly cut me off and said “I know, I know!” He never uttered those words again. He had received my message.

I am not my son’s friend.

Never may be a long time. Maybe when he’s forty we can talk about friendship. I’m serious. But for most of his life he is going to need me to be his mom. And that is the most important point here – our kids NEED us to be their voice of reason, their fully developed frontal cortex, their angel sitting on their right shoulder (because you know the devil is sitting on their left shoulder screaming at the top of his lungs – and by devil I mean the troubled friends, drugs, alcohol, the internet, peer pressure, all the temptations we faced as kids times one hundred).

Now don’t mistake friendship for love. My boys will always know that I am insanely, madly, deeply in love with them. I’m crazy about everything about them – even their stinky boy feet. But it’s not blind love. It’s the clear-eyed kind of love that keeps them safe, that doesn’t turn a blind-eye to their destructive behavior, that speaks the truth to them, that gives them the strength to be the best they can possibly be, that does all these really hard things even when they hate me for it. Because I have one job. I am their mom.

So when Toya Graham, physically pulled her son out of what could have become a violent demonstration, smacked him upside his head, and screamed obscenities at him until he retreated back to their home I applauded her. Lets be clear she was not being a friend to her son. His friends were marching in protest and possibly looking for trouble. She knew he was going to hate her for humiliating him. The kind of hate that can only be felt by an angsty teenager. But she didn’t care. She had one job to do: be his mom.

And you know as much as I was proud of Toya for her instinctual act to save her son. I was more impressed by the way her son must have known she loved him. Because though he was taller than her and had the strength of a young man, he submitted to his mom. Toya had done the work in the years leading up to what we all saw on the evening news or social media. Because her son, though he could have fought back, he didn’t. He knew she was doing what she did out of love and that she was keeping him out of harm’s way and, oh yeah, she was probably right.

And that is the difference between a friend and a mom.