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Raising a daughter? Handle with care — especially when she’s 14

When my first baby was born, the doctor handed her to me and said, “Meet your future teenage daughter.” Then she got on the phone with her own teenage daughter, and the two of them got into a loud argument about what to eat for dinner. I still remember the daughter’s aggrieved voice, audible through her mother’s flip phone: “That is REVOLTING and I would rather eat DOG FOOD.”

My husband and I raised our eyebrows at each other over our own daughter’s downy head. Surely this sweet, elfin, cashew-shaped bundle would never pick a fight with us about veal scallopini. We’d be there for her and hear her; if she became a vegetarian, we would develop a taste for seitan. When this baby reached adolescence, our groovy brand of friend-parenthood and open lines of communication would upend the traditional I-hate-you-don’t-leave-me dynamic.

(Are you laughing? I am.)

Fourteen years later, here’s what I’d tell my new mom self about my current teenage daughter — who, despite occasional tiffs, really is well worth the wait.

1. You never know who will come downstairs in the morning. One morning, she’ll be all smiles and cheer — she loves your new sweater. The next day, she’ll be mute and scowling. She’ll gesture with her chin at the sweater you’re now wearing for the second day in a row because she said she liked it, and this time she’ll say, “Are you really wearing that?”

2. Most of the time, she doesn’t want a hug. But when she does, she’ll wrap her arms around your waist and rest her head on your shoulder, and the effect is reminiscent of happening upon a warm spot in a freezing cold lake. You don’t know why it’s there — maybe you don’t want to know — but you float there for a while, enjoying the view. Fifty percent of the time, as she’s extracting herself from your arms, she’ll say, “Can I have money to buy Julia a birthday present?”

READ MORE: Salvaging some summer fun when your kid is: So. Totally. Over. It.

3. You know you need to keep your opinions to yourself. The problem is, sometimes she wants your opinion: on clothes, on a sticky situation with a friend, on whom she should write about for her project for Women’s History Month. You will share a rewarding dialogue, but the next day, when you say, “Did you learn anything interesting about Susan B. Anthony?” she’ll look at you as if she has no idea what you’re talking about. In fact, she’ll look at you as if she has no idea who you are. #coldspot

4. After a decade of making late-night small talk with baby sitters, nothing beats having your own teenager meet you and your spouse at the front door in her pajamas. She says her little sister was scared, “so I put her to bed in my room.” She wants to know if the two of you had fun, if you liked the movie, what you had for dessert. #warmspot

5. You think she’s wasting her money on cheap black booties from Forever21.com. When they arrive in the mail, you’re pleasantly surprised that they look chic and stylish on her. When she goes to bed, you try them on. Guess what? You look like a 41-year-old mom wearing cheap shoes.

6. Her school has a mock trial, model UN, dance team, chorus and science Olympiad. You ask if she has considered signing up for any of these activities. No way, she says, nobody does these things. What about the chorus? You heard they take a year-end trip to Dorney Park & Wildwater Kingdom. She rolls her eyes: “Trust me, Mom, nobody joins the chorus.” You wonder who was on those buses outside the school last spring.

7. For years, she couldn’t wait to ride in the front seat. Now that she’s finally eligible, she’ll opt for the third row of the minivan instead. You tell her you weren’t born yesterday; she needs to put away her phone while you’re driving. You are not her personal chauffeur.

8. She’ll encourage you to join Instagram, and she’ll remind you to like her pictures. If you write, “I love this face” beneath one, the comment will quickly vanish. She wants your vote, not your adoration.

9. She spends a lot of time on her bed, texting, and she isn’t interested in volunteering at a soup kitchen or learning how to knit. Your mom helpfully points out that she is an excellent student: “When you were her age, you were failing math and Spanish and you lost four wallets in three months.” This is strangely reassuring.

10. Her friends are adorable, chatty, charming, funny, polite, responsible and kind. Their mothers promise they aren’t like this at home. The mothers who tell you that they’re best friends with their 14-year-old daughters are not your people. Just be happy to have friends your own age, especially a few who have known you since you were her age.

11. She knows she can tell you anything (doesn’t she?), but you’ve noticed she saves big revelations for when your friends come over. When you ask her why, she says you’re nicer when your friends are around. Who isn’t?

12. Her texts are full of heart emojis and kisses blown across the miles. Unfortunately, this spirit of goodwill does not translate to in-person encounters. If you need her to unload the dishwasher/fold the laundry/take the meat out of the freezer, you send a text, even if the two of you are in the same room.

13. You feel proud when you observe her with grandparents and very young children. Unfortunately, her goodwill doesn’t always extend to the middle-aged.

14. Your husband used to be the center of her world. Now she thinks he’s very funny, and she still loves his pancakes. But when she has something she wants to talk to you about, she whispers, “Can you ask daddy to leave the room?”

15. When your husband is snoring, you seek refuge in her bed, and your foot brushes up against the pink teddy bear she’s slept with since she was born. You’re charmed that this bear is still in the mix until you see all the laundry that’s piled up in a corner of her room where you can’t see it from the door. Then you become enraged.

16. When you peek inside her closet, you worry she might be a hoarder. Solution: Don’t peek inside her closet.

17. You wonder if she has a crush on anyone. When you ask, she says, “Mom, people don’t say ‘crush.'”

18. You wonder about smoking, drinking, drugs, raves, parties where the parents aren’t home. She rolls her eyes and says, “Mom, I’m still a kid.”

19. She’s mildly interested in your life: what you were like when you were her age, how old you were the first time you kissed a boy, why you chose your particular career path. It’s fun telling her these things.

20. You start to realize that who she is has less to do with who you are than you originally thought. She is who she is and always has been from the minute you first held her and promised you’d teach her how to dive, read, roller-skate and bake the world’s best chocolate chip cookies. You’ve held up your end of the bargain with everything but the roller skating, which is so 1983.

21. You can tell her what to say — thank you, I’m sorry, I wish we could put this behind us — but that doesn’t mean she’ll follow the script or that she’ll mean it when she does, which is the whole point. You know it’s time to throw away the cue cards, but sometimes you hold them up anyway. You can’t help yourself.

22. When you say, “Are you wearing mascara?” she bursts into tears and sulks in her bedroom for the rest of the afternoon. No matter how many times you rewind the encounter in your head, you can’t figure out where you went wrong.

23. She has no idea how pretty she is.

24. She thinks she knows everything.

25. “Don’t talk to me in that tone” is the new “I’m counting to three.”

26. She hates FNL (“Friday Night Lights”) and you hate PLL (“Pretty Little Liars”). Guess who wins?

27. Remember that body you used to know as well as your own — better, even? That body is gone. When she catches you staring at her new body, she says, “Why are you looking at me?” If you’re lucky, she’s a swimmer so you can admire her graceful curves and strong legs from your spot in the back row of the bleachers. Some moms cheer till they’re hoarse; you just sit there and smile at her on the diving block. She’s on her mark, ready to go, and you are her biggest fan. You hope she knows that.

Elisabeth Egan is the books editor at Glamour magazine. She has just published her first novel, “A Window Opens” (Simon & Schuster).

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