Love bites

It's only recently that I've felt that parenting requires significant self-sacrifice. As she gets into the teens, the DQ disputes pretty much everything.

Apparently, in spite of the pizzas and taquitos crammed into our freezer, the chocolate milk and cookies and candy and covered raisins, our food is way too "healthy."

I guess she can't forgive me for buying tofu pot pies and hiding the goat cheese in the feta in her salad last week.

All of her new friends have relationships. Just because you didn't have one when YOU were 14 doesn't mean I shouldn't, she said. In the same breath, however, she told me she never wanted to have sex.

So I think we're alright for now.

She doesn't read for kicks. When she does, it isn't Regency romances, but vampire novels.

She doesn't exercise away stress. She doesn't seem to be turned on by ideas, as I was at her age.

Sometimes negotiating our differences is painful, exhausting, tearful. And sometimes we just agree to disagree, and move on, knowing how much under all of this we still need each other.