My Daughter Turned 13 – This is What I See When I Look at Her

My daughter turned 13 this weekend. She spent Saturday with her friends at the movies and then I dropped them off in front of Bath & Body Works to shop by themselves while I roamed the aisles at the nearby Barnes and Noble. More than once, I caught myself checking my phone for a missed text asking me to meet them at Claire’s or Ulta. There were no texts.

It’s a weird thing, being a parent to a teenager. I was a teenager once. I was such a teenager. I had a poster of Michael Jackson on my clo...