You realize your parenting role of a teenage girl must evolve when you are the one noticing the boys checking her out. I admit it freaked me out. I mean this is my baby. My beautiful baby. My beautiful baby who turns the head of everyone she walks by. Ever since she was born people would stop me and tell me how gorgeous she was, even as a very small infant. But my baby is now going to be fourteen years old.
We were out bowling and I don’t know if she noticed or not, but the boy bowling a couple of lanes over from us could really not take his eyes off her. He was probably about her same age and I guess if she did notice and played it off that would probably bother me more than if she were to notice and say something to me about it. But that is what I realized. Our communication over the coming years is going to be more essential than ever.
I am sure like most parents it seems like just yesterday that she was born. How could thirteen and a half years have passed so quickly? I hope that I have built a solid enough foundation that she feels that she is able to come to me with the many questions and situations that will undoubtedly face her if not already, in the very near future. I constantly doubt myself. We have had so many challenges over the years. In her short life she has been through so much. She has seen the death of the person that she was always closest to, her grandmother. She has been through the divorce of her parents, and an abusive situation at her dad’s house. We now have a new family unit and have moved, which have been great things for her life, but have I prepared her for the really big things that she will face as she goes into young adulthood?
I hope with every fiber of my being that I have given her the love, guidance and a whole network of people that she can turn to if for some reason she does not feel that she can come to me. I hope that she knows right from wrong and makes the choices that as her parents we hope she will make. We love our children so much and I want the very best of everything for her.
