At the end of the month, Chloe will celebrate her 14th birthday. She remains relatively amiable and hasn’t yet entirely forsaken the family unit in search of greener pastures with her friends. I count myself lucky that she still wants to spend time with us, even if she has taken to spending more solitary hours in her girl-woman cave, aka her bedroom.
I’ve started to notice other subtle changes in our interactions, too. We still talk, but not as often as we used to. She’ll arrive home from school and spend five minutes answering my questions and ingesting a second lunch before retiring to her lair until her stomach tells her it’s almost dinner time and she yells, “Mom, when are we eating? What are we having?”