
It was an argument about the length of her shower that did it.
It started off politely enough: I requested she get out of the shower (after all, she’d been in there for 45 minutes). She responded with derision and the accusation that I wasn’t allowing her to “live her life”. I countered with the fact that I’m happy to let her live her life as long as she wants to help pay the excess water bill.
This “conversation” with my teenage daughter isn’t unusual. I can factor it into almost every day lately. Excuse me while I paraphrase Britney and say that, at 16 years of age, “she’s not a girl but not yet a woman”. What she is, however, is less my daughter and more a freeloading housemate. I predicted a lot of things as a parent, but living alongside her in this capacity was not one of them.
But it's not a 'housemate' situation - and that's the problem. With housemates, you have rules about cohabiting.
I'm completely unsure how this is supposed to work. There's no map for me to work my way around our new and, if I'm honest, uneasy relationship.
As a young child, there was only one relationship – I was the parent and she was the child. And while I am, and will always be, her mum, I’ve also (somewhere along the way) morphed into her friend, her confidante and occasional mentor. Well, for about 50 per cent of the time.
The other 50 per cent, I am considered grossly unfair, the enemy and often, it seems, her least favourite person. On any given day, I am all of these things at once. If they weren’t our offspring, it's around this stage of our lives that we'd cut them loose and not look back.