My kid is my bestie?

I made a joke the other day that my daughter is my bestie, which is both sad and accurate.  Not in the sense that I'm Amy Poehler in Mean Girls walking around like "I'm a cool mom!" or anything, but in terms of shared activities, it's sort of not wrong.  We go shopping together, we spend tons of time wandering Target for no reason, we run errands together, she goes with me to get coffee, we get lunch together, she listens to me sing songs badly in the car without judging.  When you lay it out, I do more with her than I've ever done with any individual friend or anything.

On one hand, I'm glad I can spend so much time with her without wanting to kill her.  Mostly because I sort of have to given that whole "She's your kid and you have to keep her alive" thing, but also because it's nice to genuinely enjoy her company.  On the other hand, I sort of hate that it toes the line of becoming one of those moms whose whole world revolves around their kid.  Or becoming one of those people who doesn't know who they are without their kid on their hip.  I don't want to cross that line, so it's something I try to be really aware of.  I try to make sure that when I'm out with just my husband (which, let's be honest, hasn't happened since before Christmas) I don't spend all my time talking about the toddler.  Or if I'm with friends, which also doesn't happen often lately, I'm not solely focused on telling them about my daughter.  Sometimes I actually look up and pre-select topics that I can talk about that have nothing to do with kids.  Just in case I run out of things off the top of my head.  I just don't want to always default to "Look at this photo of my kid!" in those situations.

I think it's a struggle a lot of people have.  You have all of this time and this contact with your kid, and because you love them and enjoy your time with them (usually), it can be hard not to fall into this trap where you define yourselves by your children.  I want to be a great mom, but I also want to be me. I imagine everyone worries about this on some level, and some do a better job of balancing it than others.  I'm hoping to be one of the people who is good at figuring out the balance.