My mom, Maureen, is the best. I think everyone should have a Maureen in their life. She’ll make you laugh, make you feel loved, and hardly ever get mad at you. I have been fortunate to be able to have my mom as a roommate for the past 24 years. I think she thought she could get rid of me when she dropped me off at college but lucky for her I moved right back in once my four years were up. You’re welcomed Mom. I’m preventing you and Dad from becoming empty nesters. Within the last year we have been spending a lot more time together. With my other siblings married, moved out or away at college and my Dad traveling a lot during the week on business we have had a lot of “Kathleen and Mo” time.

Unfortunately I had resting bitch face in our first few years of rooming together. Mo still stuck it out with me though thank goodness.

Mo can rock a turtle neck better than anyone.

Little Mo and I like to do a lot of different activities together, a lot of which center around TV. Each day we record Inside Edition and watch it when I get home from work. This is where we both get all of our important news for the week. Sometimes we have to pause the show to comment on how the host, Debrah Norville, is so full of herself, always showing old clips of her glory days out in the field reporting or promoting her new book which I will not buy or read. We get it Debrah, you’ve been on TV for a long time. That reporter Lisa Guerrero is no better though, always making the simplest stories more dramatic. I think she’s out to get Debrah’s job. Deb does have a pretty good gig, it would be easy to become jealous of her. And Deb is getting up there in age, she’s no spring chicken anymore, I’m sure they will be looking for a younger Deb to replace her in the not so distant future. We also don’t like when they reference anything from The View. No one should be giving that show any credit, it really needs to die. Inside Edition needs to stop boosting The View’s ego. While these things annoy us about Inside Edition we are very loyal to the show and can’t stop watching.

Another thing we like to do is watch movies. If I don’t go out on a Friday night we usually like to lounge on the couch with a good movie. Unfortunately I had to take away my mom’s movie picking privileges after a few terrible choices. I just could not trust her anymore. Her first strike was a couple of months ago when she suggested we rent the movie Still Alice, she said she had read the book and wanted to watch the movie. Obviously I had not read the book since we all know I would rather do anything else but read, so I trusted her and settled on the couch to watch the movie. Well, let me tell you, if you are in a happy mood and want to feel extremely depressed, then watch the movie Still Alice. It was probably the saddest movie I had ever seen. I really felt angry and betrayed by my mother, not because the movie was depressing, I could handle that, I was upset with her because she didn’t even warn me that Kristen Stewart was in the movie. And she had a leading role as Alice’s daughter! She knows I hate Kristen Stewart ever since she did those vampire movies. The girl always looks like she just woke up from a nap and she moves at a snail’s pace. She is super pale too, I am seriously concerned about her vitamin D levels. It’s not healthy to be that white. Sit out in the sun and have some caffeine every once in a while Kristen.

The second strike was when she suggested we rent the movie Foxcatcher which turned out to be the most boring movie ever. No, it was not about a man trying to catch a fox,  although that would have been a lot more entertaining. This was about a wrestling team. It was painful watching some of the out-of-shape men in the movie wear those wrestling leotards. The movie really dragged on, watching water boil is more action packed than the movie Foxcatcher. After that I gently had to explain to my mom that I could no longer trust her to pick out good movies and that I was revoking her rights to do so. She took it pretty well, although I don’t think we have watched many movies since then.

One time we decided to get up off the couch and go cross country skiing. That’s a mistake we will never make again.

When you have a roommate for so long you also get to know the person’s pet peeves. My mom has two major pet peeves. The first is when I forget to turn on the night light in our kid’s bathroom. I know she’s annoyed when the next day she casually mentions “You know, I turned the night light on in your bathroom last night, I noticed you hadn’t turned it on yet”. That’s when I know I’m in the dog house. My mom believes it is important to have the night light on in case someone gets up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom they can see where they are going. I always forget this because I am not usually concerned about the safety of others because I’m too busy thinking of myself. Sorry mom! The second is when you use metal utensils on her nonstick pans. Don’t you ever, EVER, use anything but plastic or rubber utensils on her nonstick pans or you will be written out of the will. If you scratch up her pans you scratch up her heart as well.

Although we hardly ever argue, we do disagree on some things, but only really important things like when we run the dishwasher. I like to keep the dishwasher on a schedule, running it every night so that we know the dishes are clean in the morning. My Mom likes to wait until the dishwasher is jam packed, which leads to running the dishwasher at any old time. If there was room for one shot glass she would wait to run the dishwasher until the next day. This in turn leads to complete chaos. Frantic group texts will go out asking, “Does anyone know if the dishes in the dishwasher are clean or dirty?!” We are a family that rinses our dishes before we put them in the dishwasher (we’re not animals) so it’s hard to tell. There have been more times than I would like to admit that I have used dishes only to realize they were dirty. There is no worse feeling than that.

I think there is a point in everyone’s life where your parents become not just your parents anymore but your friends. They stop yelling at you and actually seem to enjoy your company, it’s a great feeling. I believe my siblings can agree with me when I say we were blessed with a wonderful Mom. She is sweet but will become feisty if anyone messes with one of her kids. She is our mom, protector and most importantly our friend. Thanks for being a great roommate for the past 24 years Mom! Hey just think, if you’re lucky I could be living with you and Dad for another 24 years! Let the good times roll!

The whole family plus a bag of apples.