Samantha Higdon - When Mom Got Real

 

I've always been really close with my mom, but we don't really have deep conversations. I'm the type of person who will corner someone in a bar and ask them about their deepest wound, [audience chuckles] and my mom likes to keep it a little bit lighter than that. [audience laughter] I remember when I was in fifth grade, the nurse came to our class to teach us about our changing bodies, and I got sent home with a bag. All the girls got sent home with a bag that had a little travel-size deodorant and a giant, single, diaper-sized Tampax pad [audience laughter] in a cardboard box, because you just need the one. [audience laughter] 

 

When I got home, my mom said, "Do we need to have a conversation?" And I said, "I don't know, do we?" She shrugged and I shrugged, and that was our birds-and-the-bees conversation. [audience laughter] And this theme of not talking about important things carried on into adulthood. When I was 30, I found out that my dad wasn't my biological father, because my parents had used a sperm donor to conceive me. But 23andMe told me that. [audience chuckles] 

 

But even though we didn't talk about really important things, my mom has always been a tremendous source of support and love for me. She is my home and my safety and my comfort, and she's really quirky. I love that she knows the name of every Real Housewife in the Bravo Real Housewives franchise. [audience chuckles] I love that the way she cleans the bathroom is by taking Pine-Sol, that lemon–lime cleaner, and just dumping it into the toilet, and that's how we clean the bathroom. That's how we know the bathroom is clean. [audience laughter] 

 

A couple of years ago, I really needed the love and support of my mom. I was living in Austin, and my boyfriend woke up one morning and said he was leaving, and he moved out of our apartment. It was very unexpected, and I was reeling. And so, I called her to ask if she would come stay with me for a while. She was living in Dallas, and she said she would. And the three-and-a-half-hour drive usually took her about five and a half hours. She took the right lane the whole way on the highway. [audience chuckles] She made it. I was so relieved when she got there. 

 

I was spinning and I was asking myself all the questions that one normally asks themselves when a relationship ends. I said, "Mom, do you think he met someone else? Do you think he was planning to leave for a long time? And in my darkest moments, ‘Do you think he left because I gained weight during COVID?’" I never knew if my mom could really relate to my spinning in this way, because she had been married to my dad since she was 18, and they were married for 36 years before he died. But she listened. 

 

I went on like this for a couple of weeks. I cried a lot, I asked a lot of questions, until one morning she came into my room and said, "Sam, I need to tell you something." And this was unusual. [chuckles] She went on to say, "I thought about ending my marriage with your dad every day, and I didn't have a lot of choices in my life. I regret not living my life more for me, and I'm so proud of you for living your life for you." 

 

And something in me shifted that day. I stopped thinking about their marriage as a perfect fairy tale that I might never attain. And for the first time, in my apartment, with the Real Housewives playing in the background, [audience laughter] I really saw my mother. I stopped thinking about people in two categories: the happy married people with families and the sad, single, lonely people. [audience chuckles] Because life is far more complicated than that, and there's so much beauty in that complication.

 

I started to hold gratitude for my life just exactly as it was and for myself exactly as I am. Now, a 36-year-old woman who's managed to travel all over the world, single, who is vice president of a tech company,- [audience cheers and applause] -a woman who has many choices, a woman who cleans the bathroom by pouring half of the Pine-Sol [audience laughter] in the toilet bowl. Thank you.