When my daughter turned 13, it honestly felt like somebody had swapped my child overnight.
The girl who used to sit on the kitchen bench chatting while I cooked dinner would now only eat in her room. The child who used to crawl into my bed for cuddles now barely tolerated me touching her shoulder. I went from being the centre of her little universe to someone who was basically just irritating.
I took it incredibly personally.
I wish I could say I handled her “developmentally appropriate” quest for independence with grace, but the truth is I felt rejected. It absolutely hurt and I was struck by a massive realisation of just how much I needed her to need me.
I think what shocked me most was how physical it all felt for me. Like a kind of grief in a way. There were days I’d walk past her closed bedroom door and feel this heavy ache in my chest. I missed her while she was literally in the house.
Read this too: “Help! My teen never comes out of her room!”
Every eye roll and “Mum, stop” felt like a personal attack. And every time she chose her friends over us, I quietly added it to the growing pile of evidence that I was somehow unworthy. I couldn’t get past the feeling that I was losing my daughter, no matter how many times the rational side of my brain told me it was “normal” for a child of her age to start to pull away.
What I couldn’t see then was that she wasn’t rejecting me, she was separating from me. And those are two very different things.
Why I think I took it so personally
I’ve thought about this a lot and I’m sure many other mums can relate.
I know now that part of it was definitely fear of losing my life’s purpose. My daughter is everything to me, everything. If she didn’t need me the same way anymore, then who even was I?
Suddenly she wanted privacy, independence and opinions that had absolutely nothing to do with mine and after carrying her around in my pocket for so long, I admit that came as a shock.
I also realise now that I had tied a lot of my worth to our closeness. I saw our bond as proof I was a “good mum”. And being a “good mum” meant everything to me. So when she pulled away, I interpreted it as failure, not successfully raising my daughter into her next stage of being.
It sounds dramatic now, but at the time it honestly felt like a personal affront. Like she was actively choosing not to love me the same way anymore.
Why doesn’t anybody talk about the grief of no longer being your child’s favourite person? Its the absolute worst feeling.
People talk about babies growing up too fast, but they don’t really talk about the emotional dagger of your child growing away from you.
The turning point for me
One night, after another argument about absolutely nothing, my daughter yelled, “Why are you making everything such a big deal?”
And I remember sitting on my bed afterwards thinking: because I am making this about me.
That was the humiliating truth. I’d made parenting all about me, not all about her.
Meanwhile, she was just trying to become her own person. And isn’t that the whole point?
That realisation didn’t magically fix the way I felt, but it stopped me in my tracks and helped me start responding differently.
Five things that helped me stop feeling rejected
1. I stopped chasing closeness all the time
This was probably the hardest one for me. I prided myself on being best friends with my daughter and suddenly she didn’t want to be my bestie anymore.
I kept trying to recreate the relationship we used to have when she clearly didn’t want it. So naturally, the more I pushed, the more she retreated.
I eventually realised that trying to force this kind of connection was actually making her pull away harder. So I backed off and stopped demanding time together and long conversations and tried to tap into appreciating smaller moments instead.
Things like having a laugh together about something silly. Sending her a cute meme about dogs (we both adore dogs). Getting a quick chat in the car about her day. That kind of thing.
2. I rebuilt my own life
This sounds obvious now, but I knew I’d let motherhood become too much of my entire identity. I’m a single mum of an only child and it was a bit too easy to lose myself in the parenting role after my messy divorce.
I had to learn who I was again when I wasn’t being a mum. So I started seeing friends more. I turned to reading and sewing projects again instead of hovering around waiting for my daughter to want to interact with me.
The less emotionally dependent I became on my daughter, the healthier our relationship actually got.
3. I reminded myself that independence is the goal
I literally had to repeat this to myself some days: she’s not pulling away because I’ve failed, she’s pulling away because I’ve done a good job.
More on this: Raising independent humans who can actually do stuff
We know this, of course, but emotionally we often forget that our job isn’t to raise children who stay little forever. It’s to raise independent people who can function without us. That’s the whole goal and reading Bron’s recent article about this is actually what inspired me to write this article for Mumlyfe.
4. I stopped interpreting every mood personally
Every mum knows that teenagers are emotional creatures, to put it mildly. Their brains are changing, their friendships are intense, school is overwhelming and hormones are on whatever rollercoaster teenage hormones are.
Which was basically a reminder that not every sigh was about me. Not every withdrawn mood meant I’d done something wrong. And she probably wasn’t even noticing my distress when she had so much going on herself.
Learning to just pause before catastrophising every scenario helped me cope so much better.
5. I allowed myself to grieve
I kept telling myself I was ridiculous for feeling sad. She was healthy, growing up and 13 – basically she was normal.
But I know now that “normal” can still hurt.
You can love the child your teenager is becoming and still mourn the little person they used to be. You’re allowed to feel sad.
What our relationship looks like now
My daughter is older now (she’s in year 10 this year), and interestingly, some of our closeness has now returned.
She still values her privacy and I’ve grown to realise that she is fundamentally a much more private person than I am. I need to respect that.
My every move doesn’t seem to embarrass her anymore. Sometimes she’ll seek me out for advice or even just company. She’ll flop onto my bed to show me a funny video or gossip about the kids at school. There was a period there where that never happened and I thought it never would again. But she’s grown through it and we’re friends again.
That said, I’ve learned to not lose myself if being a mum so much – to keep an eye on my own self and what I want from life outside of parenting. I think that’s made me generally happier, and that was part of us growing closer again. I stopped hovering over her and started to make my own life.
I still miss the little girl version of her sometimes, but I love getting to know the young woman she’s becoming. She’s pretty amazing too.
Feature image by Sergey Makashin – stockshot, not the author and her daughter
