Raven Smith: ‘I’m A 6ft 4in Gay Black Man… So How Come I’m Turning Into My Mum?’

As a 6ft 4in homosexual black man, it’s startling to find myself morphing into a 5ft 8in straight woman in her sixties. And yet here I am, noticing it more and more each day. I first realised it when buying conditioner on the high street and the misery guts behind the counter didn’t speak to me out loud. Not once. I found it genuinely infuriating to be silently waited on. Where was the service of the server?

I emerged on to Oxford Street in London annoyed at the erosion of service niceties. My blood was irrationally boiling. What’s this country coming to? And that’s when it struck me. I am turning into my mother. She is a woman who was so outraged recently by the long queue in Sainsbury’s she asked to see the manager and ended up leaving with a £10 voucher. That’s the power of a good complaint and a woman I want to emulate.

There are other traits I’ve absorbed from her like a good nicotine patch, too: we weren’t rich during my childhood, so we moved about a lot. We lived in numerous houses that were so cramped and filled with hand-me-down furniture that they were like Aladdin’s cave. From this, my mum developed a frantic ambition to better herself. A true grit. It’s fragments of this grit I see in myself when I’m hustling on a new contract. I’m quite a binary negotiator and she helps me navigate the terrain between my suggested fee and pulling out of the project completely.

Despite the numerous dead houseplants and constant upheaval, she managed to keep me alive. More than that, she single-handedly forged the robust and confident little creature who eventually emerged from a backdrop of packing crates and bubble wrap. We have both survived the ravages of single-parenthood. She facilitated my growth like yeast. I was infantile dough, kneaded by her until I was ready for adult life.

Mum has always been a juggernaut of emotion and I learned from her anxiety, rather than just absorbing it. It was something I inherited, like a faulty gene, but for me it was diluted. She’s fun too, but not in a forced way. We both have a naughty streak (see my legendary rendition of Que Sera Sera in a quiet pub in north London versus the time she cut the end of a glow stick and swung it round her head, the liquid dissolving the enamel on the fridge). One Boxing Day, I got high in the garage before driving across the West Country with my mum and stepdad. I threw up a lukewarm flume of bubble and squeak on the way home, a Christmassy soup of regret. My mum patiently cooked me a turkey curry and put me to bed.

The summer after I came out to her, she took me to San Francisco in an act of pure gay allegiance. The most memorable part of the trip was when we said yes to an overzealous make-up counter assistant who did Mum’s face up like a baby prostitute. Agreeing to bin the prints was an act of mutual appreciation.

I moved out at 19 but I still visit regularly, predominantly for long bank holidays. Now, I live with my husband in London – 50 miles away – but mum’s temporarily adopted my cat while we renovate. She’s grandmother to my feline child. Christmas at home is largely a book gifting festival – I’ve inherited her insatiable love of books. She’s still the only person who can shop outside of my Amazon wish list and hit the nail on the head. We frequently bond over great reads. Now I gift her great podcasts, too: Caliphate, obviously.

She has seen me through my worst, worst break-ups (all my exes are bald now, which eases the pain) but, more monumentally, she has seen me through the flu. Great relationships are all about vulnerability and it’s hard to keep anything to yourself when both ends are screaming down the toilet.

However busy we both are, I call her all the time, with no agenda, just to check in. Our chats highlight our similarities – we’re both prone to immediate freak-outs, which give way to a calmer response. The trick is keeping the freak-out to yourself. She keeps me grounded – the Oprah to my celebrity sense of self, lifting me up but somehow not buying into all my bullshit. She coaches me through existential crises on a weekly basis: what if I never get my shit together? What if I never get the things I want? What if I’m not the voice of my generation? What if the voice of a generation has already been assigned to someone wittier without a kamikaze personality, nor a backlog of problematic tweets? What if I’m not Zadie Smith with a dick? Or the black AA Gill? Or the only-child version of David Sedaris?

At first, I resisted the inevitable transition into my mum. ‘I’m a different generation,’ I’d reassure myself, ‘I’m too cool to care about boring things’. But secretly I’m brimming with pride that I’m infected with her good traits and she’s incrementally influenced who I am.

I want to say we all become our mothers, but my husband is not following suit with the mummification. I guess some resist. Now, I’m at an age where Gen Z suddenly feels like a new species to observe. Maybe, just maybe, what I’m facing is not the ebbing transition into my mother... but the universal slide into being a grown-up, rather than a cool kid.

Raven Smith's Trivial Pursuits is out 2 April