One minute you are sniffing the top of your baby’s delicious new born head, lost in a soft velvety world of endless love and the next you are receiving the full force of a self-righteous teenage meltdown.

There are 1001 things you don’t know about teenage girls until you live them. We are all familiar with the hormones, the illogical rage, the awful time keeping, and the daily dramarama. However, you don’t know that they will steal your stuff (and claim you never had it in the first place), bruise your self-esteem just as you hit your melancholy midlife, and love/hate you all day long with exhausting regularity seconds after turning 13.

 

This stage of motherhood is not for the fainthearted.  These are the loneliest of maternal times filled with pockets of shame you cannot share with anyone. You’re going to need help getting through this.

Enter Lorraine Candy, mother of four children, three of whom are teenagers, and a long-term parenting columnist. In this very funny memoir, she also gives down-to earth advice and experts talk. She  lights the way for other mums facing life with teenage girls, other mums caught in the perfect storm of parenting tomorrow’s bright and brilliant women just as they go through their own midlife unravelling. Most importantly, she is the woman who loves and lives with dragons.

About the author

Lorraine Candy, a mother of  four (including two teenage daughters),has been writing about parenting in national newspapers and magazines for more than a decade . She has a weekly family column in the Sunday Times magazine and co-hosts the Postcards from Midlife podcast which also tackles parenting adolescents.