London - My eldest doesn’t want to have children, she tells me earnestly. She says it looks like too much hard work, and there is “little return on investment”, as she puts it.
She is 13 - teenagers don’t do irony. She wants to be a “not mom”, as those who choose to stay child-free are now apparently calling themselves.
Mabel, my youngest, wants many babies. She is nearly five and says she will never leave home so me, her and the babies can “all be together for ever”.
Mabel still includes me in all her plans, from loo breaks to her choice of brekkie. I’m still at the centre of her world.
The eldest (and her 12-year-old sister), however, go out of their way to exclude me from everything.
It’s getting ever more upsetting and I’m glad I wasn’t one of those attachment parents permanently glued to my offspring’s side from birth or these tricky teen times would be even more dispiriting.
At 13, they just don’t want you any more, however many one-to-one mommy hours you have logged up until then. All that effort and absolutely no “return on investment”. It’s a bit of a shock because nothing, I repeat nothing, stops a teenager savagely cutting that invisible umbilical chord.
So to all you exhausted new moms out there, frazzled and fretting over whether to use that Gina Ford method to get your baby into a strict sleep routine or not, know this - it doesn’t matter because they all turn into teenagers anyway.
Just have another cup of tea while resting the biscuits on your baby’s head, because that’s the most useful thing you can do with your offspring right now.
The atmosphere in our house is changing. Doors get shut when I walk past, mobile phones are turned screen-down in case I see any messages that flash up, bathrooms are locked, conversations become hushed if I am within earshot. One minute you’re part of a loving tribe, the next it’s as if you’re the suspected traitor in a spy movie.
And whatever goes wrong in the universe is down to you.
Bad weather, lost homework, late-running buses, non-working pens, Donald Trump: “It’s Mom’s fault,” my girls chorus.
You start to feel like the worst violator of human rights ever, especially if you remove a mobile phone as a form of punishment.
Your days are spent listening to a flood of endless teenage demands as they test the boundaries of parental love with ludicrous decisions even the four-year-old knows warrant a telling-off.
“No pudding for you now,” Mabel interjects firmly when one of her older sisters is an hour late back after curfew.
I escorted my overexcited 12-year-old and her friends on a shopping trip in Central London at the weekend and trailed behind the three of them, feeling like the least popular girl in class as they happily chatted away.
After standing outside the changing room for two hours, I heard the girls hatch a plan to try something called “bubble tea” in the Topshop cafe.
“Sounds fun,” I said, “I have never tried anything like that.”
They looked at me with horror and took a step back. “You can’t come,” they screeched together, as if I’d suggested something as horrific as trying on a swimsuit in front of them.
The 13-year-old was off to a water slide-packed adventure park for a friend’s birthday. I love water slides. The other mom invited me to come along but my daughter violently opposed this on the grounds that it would “ruin her day”.
“You’ll keep telling me to put my coat on,” she said through her hysteria.
A friend of mine who is a psychotherapist tells me this cruel behaviour is a good thing.
She says the fact they can test my love by rejecting me and everything I stand for means they are confident I love them whatever they do.
If they don’t reject you then they may doubt your maternal loyalty, she adds, so it’s more worrying if they treat you like they did when they were four.
I take comfort during this difficult time by plotting the revenge of the underdog. After all, moms are the keeper of the secrets - and the embarrassing childhood photographs.
It’ll soon be payback time.
Daily Mail
* Lorraine Candy is editor- in-chief of Elle magazine.