Rumor has it that when I was two years old I asked my Mom if we could be best friends.

“I can’t remember what we were doing,” she says now, “We were either having a tea party or I was reading you a book or, you know, maybe you were in the bathtub.” There’s a chance it was all three; I was raised a multi-tasker.

Apparently I looked up at her with my black/brown eyes and nose too big for my face and said, “Mommy, let’s be best friends?”

She said okay, which was nice because I couldn’t offer much by the way of traditional best friendship. My clothes were too small for her to borrow and I didn’t have any nail polish colors she didn’t already have. I guess in theory she could have talked to me about boy troubles, but I wouldn’t have understood and they would have been about my Dad. She said yes anyway, and then I closed the book, finished my tea, inspected my wrinklage and got out of the tub.

It dawned on me yesterday, two hours into a discussion about her most recent full body skin scan, that she’d taken me seriously. I’d asked if we could be best friends, she’d agreed, and now we were – in her eyes – best friends for life. Names as good as written in Sharpie on the bathroom wall.

Do not get me wrong. Being so close to my mother is one of the things I’m most grateful for in my life (it goes Mom, rent-controlled apartment, skin that tans, and Downy Wrinkle Releaser – but sometimes Apartment, Mom, Downy, Skin depending on how much I’ve seen her lately and how quickly I need to change outfits). But if I’d known she’d hold me to the request I might have laid some best friendship ground rules – rules specific to the fact that she is my Mom. Like – mention of any and all thoughts regarding your marriage are off limits. I realize this is an important part of girl-talk but you’re married to my Dad. Sorry. I’ll promise not to share things I’ve done between 3 and 7am for the past five years in exchange. Also conversations about how you want your funeral handled should be reserved for your lawyer and/or Dad. While I appreciate you wanting to work through the details with a listening ear, I generally try to avoid conversation about the saddest things that will ever happen to me. Things specific to your female aging body parts should also be kept to yourself. It’s not that I’m unsympathetic or skeeved out – it’s that I have ½ your genes and don’t want a preview of what’s to come.

Whether or not you and your parents exchanged neon friendship bracelets and BFF badges in Brownies – the fact is that sometime over the past five years our parents became like this weird version of our peers. Long gone are the days of Mrs. Cunningham staying out of everyone’s business and the stoic, one-beer-at-dinner dad from the Wonder Years. Our parents want to be involved in our lives and therefore, they assume, we should be involved in theirs – everything from the day-to-day ‘Jim got the promotion I’d been gunning for so I’m having a rough day,” to the more broadly themed, “You just cannot imagine the devastation of caring for your grandmother like she is a child.”

Apparently parents are people too. People who now view us as capable of hearing their issues and providing the kind of comfort and support they’ve provided us for the past 20-some years. Unfortunately, I can’t handle it.

It’s somewhat like seeing the middle school teacher you adore buying hemorrhoid crème at the CVS. You get that they don’t live at the school and are probably married, but in your eyes the universe simply protects them from hemorrhoids and all other things negative because they are your favorite teacher.

Same applies to parents. You don’t want to deny them a real life filled with real feelings – pain included. But you need to go on believing they are invincible heroes with emotions of steel and no financial issues. Their regular sharing of their feelings is really inconvenient to your plan of never having to acknowledge they exist.

It’s funny. I can sit with a friend who’s just been dumped for hours as she sobs about how torn apart she is. I’ve even been there for a friend who’s experienced the death of a parent and provided support without completely losing it. But the minute my Mom launches into a “your Father really hurt my feelings the other day” I want to curl up into a ball and die. Instead I usually yell, “AAHHH GOD STOP!” before she can get to whatever it is that she needs to get off her chest. Mature – I know.

It happened again this past weekend. She was going on comparing her marriage to that of her friends and blah blah. I was singing Rhianna’s “Disturbia” over and over in my head because I know all the words and like to keep segments of time as well-themed as possible.

“Are you listening to me?” she said 10 to 15 minutes in. We were alone on the beach. Now was my chance. I’d planned this speech a thousand times in my head.

“Mom. I love you very much. And I can never thank you enough for the years of support and counsel you’ve given me. You have made me the person I am today. That said I find it unbearable to hear you talk about issues involving your deepest feelings because it affects my deepest feelings and thus I find myself sad/stressed/worried about/for you. I would prefer to go on believing you are unaffected by the troubles of the world. This is not fair or mature or at all in keeping with my former request to be your best friend. Therefore I’m afraid I have to retract that request and ask that we, instead, move to becoming really good friends who talk endlessly about a to-be-determined list of items. How does that sound?”

Instead I say this, “Sorry, I was just distracted by that guy over there. What were you saying?”

The woman once took three, back-to-back, incoherent 2am calls from me after someone went home with someone who was not me. She then stayed up for an additional hour to write me a loving email about the maturity level of most guys and the simple facts about binge drinking. Also when I was broken in Florence she wired me $500 and handled telling my Dad.

If anything – she should retract the best friendship. Instead – I’ll just grow a set.