Congratulations, It’s a Girl!

So I love having daughters.  I do not hide that fact at all.  When I was pregnant with my daughter fourteen years ago a midwife at my OB practice “thought” she was a boy, and I made my doctor do multiple ultrasounds to prove otherwise.  The thought of raising a boy seemed so foreign to me, as would a lifetime of sporting events and ball-throwing.  I am a girly-girl, who doesn’t like sports, camping, the Three Stooges or any of the other masculine things that are so often attributed to the male gender.  Also, my husband is a sports-crazed fool and I figured that with a boy in the house I had no chance of ever seeing the inside of a day spa or bookstore again.  Having girls was my only hope.

And I got two!!  I love it because I have two awesome daughters who love to help me do stuff and make crafty things and love clothes and shopping.  And because they both have different hobbies and interests that mirror my own I have my own special bond with both. And my husband is happy because he’s off the hook for having to coach little league, engage in Boy Scouts or do any of those general “father son” activities.  He is free to sit in his man cave alone and watch baseball or the O’Reilly Factor or a Hitler documentary and not feel that pang of guilt that he really should be teaching his son how to throw a curve ball or whatever fathers and sons do.  AND he has three women who treat him like he’s a rock star.  It’s a good life for him. 

But I don’t think my husband expected what he’s gotten, and that is two adolescent girls.  You see, there are things that we women omit from our description of having girls, and puberty is one of them.  It’s out of a desire to protect the species, really.  If we tell men the truth about adolescent daughters they would find a way to never have them—look at China.  Some woman over there must have spilled the beans to Chairman Mao, which is how they got those archaic restrictions on the birth of girls. Someone ratted us out. 

I’ve learned a few things along the way that will help you, your adolescent daughter/s and your husband navigate through adolescence, that moms are free to adopt if they so choose.  Listen up, mom of baby girls because you’ll want to save this or bookmark it or whatever:

1.  Get that girl a cell phone, STAT.  I can’t stress this enough.  My daughter and I will have entire conversations about “lady things” with my husband in the same room without even having to speak.  How do we do this?  Texting.  Gone are the days of embarrassing your daughters with asking them if they need any supplies from “that area” of Target.  Thanks to Tommy Motorola, we can now text those kinds of requests.

2. While you’re at it, invest in some ear plugs.  No, this isn’t for that crazy rock-n-roll music they are playing, it’s for your kids.  Because they can hear EVERYTHING…and before your mind goes to the gutter, it’s for those conversations you will have that have the occasional four letter word in them...or maybe that’s just my family.  We do work in the political world so we talk like sailors.  My children are scandalized.

3.  If you want some time away from your family, ladies, just kick off a conversation by saying “maybe we need to have a talk about your changing body. . .”  I find that this will clear a room faster than my geriatric dog’s gas.  I now have at least an hour to ponder life, read a book or watch episodes of Intervention on my tablet.  Ahhh serenity.

4.  Remember when you were in denial?  Go back there.  Sometimes denial is okay, it’s to be embraced.  If you don’t want to think of your daughter as being moody because she has PMS pretend it’s something else.  I hear that John Lennon’s song “whatever gets you through the night” was actually a song written about how he coped with Yoko’s hormonal mood swings.  See, now you’re going to be singing that and also pretending that your daughter is moody because that guy from One Direction left the band.  Problem solved.

5. It takes a village.  That means that this is not the time for helicoptering or making frenemies.  Let go of your desire to be Queen Bee of the yoga pant-wearing set and welcome the friendship of other moms.  We all need each other.  It also makes it so much easier to keep an eye on them.  Drones are still quite expensive. 

6. This is a tip from my husband: learn to like their music.  My husband stopped listening to music around the time “Born in the USA” came out.  We are both classic rock aficionados, and I’m proud to say that my girls know the difference between a song from “The Wall” and “The Dark Side of the Moon.”  However, there comes a time when they will grimace when you turn on the classic rock station, and it will suddenly become very uncool to hang out with mom and dad.  Turn on Hits 1 or whatever they’re listening to in your town, learn who Taylor Swift is dating this week and just go with it.  I will never forget the moment when my husband asked another couple at dinner “did you all realize that Taylor Swift and Katie Perry are really not on good terms??” 

We all nodded, of course, because we knew.  We knew the way into the heart of your teen daughter.