Lorraine Candy - Whats wrong with you? : 101 things only mothers of girls know : how to survive the tweens to the twenties

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2021

Copyright Lorraine Candy

Lorraine Candy asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover design by Ellie Game

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008407216

Ebook Edition 2021 ISBN: 9780008407230

Version: 2021-04-09

For Sky, Grace,

Henry and Mabel Candy

Could I *be* more embarrassing? No, seriously, could I?

Dear mum of teenage girls,

Feeling a bit lonely? Confused, even? Maybe you are wondering what you have done wrong and are fearful of what is going to happen next on this parenting journey? Perhaps, like I was, youre in maternal shock, jolted from one stage of mothering into the next without warning. Or perhaps you are just overwhelmed and perplexed by the wonderful fizzy giddiness of it all, this new, raw aliveness of the special human youve nurtured ricocheting round the house, setting off little fires everywhere.

Wherever you are on the road to parenting a teenage girl, I am here from your future to reassure and comfort you with empathy and humour. To let you know what to expect.

This book is a collection of friendly suggestions to guide and relax you. I hope it helps you feel less alone, especially if youve reached that part of the maternal experience that is as tense as those electric moments before a thunderstorm (probably any age after eleven years). I suspect that before now it was all going fairly well. You may be a bit exhausted, made a few predictable mistakes, celebrated a few triumphs, come to the end of your occasional trips to A & E, but youve survived the heart-stopping anguish of keeping a newborn alive, said goodbye to toddler tantrums, cried a little at the first day of school. Hallelujah and well done. A sigh of relief perhaps? Feet up with a cup of tea and a Hobnob?

Not quite. Lurking on the horizon is something different: female adolescence, a world full of weird and wonderful surprises, which I wish someone had told me about in advance. So here I am telling you. As a mum of four children now aged nine to eighteen (three girls and a boy), I was knocked sideways by the teenage years. Nothing spectacularly dramatic happened, I just felt it was lonelier landscape, a place where I feared one wrong mothering move would result in the detonation of emotional time bombs. At times I felt like a parenting hero and other times I felt rubbish a rubbish mum, a rubbish human (mostly I felt like this because my girls would tell me I was, bless them). It was all so confusing.

I could be both proud and ashamed of my teen daughters simultaneously. Moments when I loved them so much I couldnt bear to leave a room they were in. Other moments I hoped theyd get eaten alive by a passing T-Rex. Some days felt completely out of control and others were flooded with the melancholy sadness of the eventual parting lurking ahead of us.

Often I just didnt know what to do, what to think, how to smooth the edges and not feel quite so rejected, panicked or overwhelmed with self-doubt. And on many occasions, I was just absolutely furious. This rainbow of feelings hitting me during the challenging midlife years was hard to deal with calmly. I noticed that the biology, psychology and fury of female midlife happening at exactly the same time as female adolescence was the perfect storm for domestic unrest. It explained a lot. No one really talks about this aspect of mothering, though. There are no NCT-like support groups for the mums of teen girls; because there are so many private situations and conversations that you cannot share. So I wanted to help women through those more baffling moments. Especially mums who had been telling me that their daughters had suddenly rejected them. One woman summed it up perfectly in a Facebook post I read:

I feel like a stranger, I find myself wistfully hoping for some kind of relationship with my daughter. But over the past months she has changed completely. I see tiny glimmers of who she was, but it is as if someone took my daughter and swapped her. I feel heartbroken, I miss her. Anyone else feeling this way?

I know many of you do, so I thought I would take my personal experience and all the advice I have been given during my years of writing a parenting column in one national newspaper or another and compile it all into one helpful book.

Ive been writing about my family for over a decade, and apart from documenting the humorous minutiae of our daily life, I have also explored parenting dos and donts with many experts. Ive interviewed neuroscientists, family therapists, bestselling parenting gurus, professionals working on the front line of teenage mental health, tech professionals in the digital world, plus Ive quizzed all the young female staff Ive managed during my time editing womens magazines about their relationships with their mums, Ive read parenting books new and classic, and all the weighty newspaper think pieces on adolescence. And of course, I have experienced some of it personally as a mum working full time living in a busy city. I hope my humour comes through in all the information Ive put here in preparation for what is to come, because humour is your secret weapon in the teenage years.

This book is not a mums to-do list and its not about adhering to a set of specific rules. Your child is unique and your childhood is unique (and we all bring our own childhood into the room when we parent). The combination of all this and many other variable factors, not least environment, school, friendship groups and genetics, means I cannot offer a foolproof how to for your daughter. No one can, in my opinion. So this book invites you to try out what could be useful to you, and encourages you to rely on your instinct. I hope it will allow you to take a step back, and to relax more around your brilliant daughter, so that she may blossom in her own way. After all, parenting a teenager is not about fixing a problem, or completing a project.

Maybe my words will save you time and tears, because you could be gazing at your eleven-year-old now, wondering what the hell I am talking about. She is, after all, adorable. You may be looking forward to the Spotify playlists youll create together, and happy days shopping, with breaks for ridiculously named coffees. Oh, the fun youll have. Except it wont always be fun: there may be dark days, perilous moments when you think youve obviously done something terribly wrong as a parent to create such an impolite young woman. One you should not let loose on the world without informing the Guardians of the Galaxy that everyones safety is at risk. This switch from adorable to unpredictable can feel harsh and the rejection brutal, but once you know what is coming you can experiment with a few strategies that will hopefully make life more harmonious for you both.