My daughter is 12, turning 13 in a few days, and lately I've been getting a preview of what the teenage years might have in store for me.

Sometimes when I talk to her, she looks annoyed. Sometimes I ask her something and get no response at all. Other times, I do get a response, except it comes with the eyes. You know the eyes. The ones that somehow manage to communicate an entire paragraph without the child having to say anything.

It's not all the time. She's still my Bubbles. She's still sweet, funny, and very much the little girl I've known for almost 13 years. But it's happening often enough for me to notice and think, ah. Apparently, we're here now.

Naturally, I've tried remembering what I was like at her age. I know I eventually gave my own mother attitude because, unfortunately, I remember some of it. I just don't think I started quite this early. If memory serves me correctly, I was probably already in college when I really started testing my mother's patience.

And that's something I deeply and sincerely regret now.

It's one of those regrets that comes with getting older and finally understanding the person on the receiving end. Back then, I probably thought my mother was being annoying, unreasonable, too strict, asking too many questions, or whatever version of "you just don't understand me" I was operating on at the time. Now I'm 44, raising a daughter of my own, and suddenly I'm beginning to understand just how much restraint my mother must have possessed not to yeet me out of the house.

Funny how perspective works.

I know this is probably a phase. She's almost 13. There are hormones, growing independence, emotions she may not completely understand yet, and that very normal need to start becoming her own person outside of Mommy. I know all of that intellectually.

Knowing it and being on the receiving end of an eye roll are two entirely different experiences.

And I think this is one of those parts of parenting where we can either make or break something. Not necessarily with one argument or one bad day, but in all the little ways we respond to each other over the next few years. I don't want to excuse disrespect just because she's becoming a teenager, but I also don't want every sigh, annoyed face, or badly delivered “what?” to become World War III.

Somewhere between those two things, I suppose, is parenting.

What's funny is that her older brother was the one I expected to give me trouble. He's 16 now, and before we entered his teenage years, I was mentally preparing myself for everything people warn you about when raising a teenage boy. Instead, we finished junior high surprisingly smoothly, and he's still one of the sweetest kids I know.

Then Child Number Two entered the chat.

I try not to compare them because they're two completely different people, and it wouldn't be fair to expect one to behave like the other. But I'm also human. Of course I notice the difference. When you've raised two children in the same house, with the same parents, under mostly the same rules, you can't help wondering sometimes why Child A responds one way while Child B responds another.

Maybe that's one of the great scams of parenting. You finally figure out how to raise one child, congratulate yourself for approximately five minutes, and then the next one arrives with completely different factory settings.

No parenting book can really prepare you for that. They can tell you about developmental stages and boundaries and communication and all the things we're supposed to do. But no book knows your child. No book knows which battles matter in your house, which eye roll you should address, which one you should probably let go, or when your own irritation is actually making things worse.

And I imagine my mother didn't know either. That's the thought I keep coming back to.

When I was the daughter giving her attitude, I assumed my mother knew what she was doing because she was my mother. That's what children think, isn't it? Parents are adults. Adults know things. Moms especially are somehow expected to come preinstalled with answers.

Now that I'm the mother, I know better. She was figuring me out while I was figuring myself out.

She probably went to bed some nights wondering whether she had handled something correctly. Maybe she worried about me. Maybe she replayed arguments in her head. Maybe there were moments when she wanted to say something and stopped herself because she knew it wouldn't help. I wish I could ask her now.

Mostly, I wish I could tell her I finally get it.

I regret the attitude I gave her, especially because I eventually reached an age when I would have given anything to have her around long enough to annoy me again. But I also don't want that regret to make me parent my daughter from fear. I don't want to look at every eye roll and think, Oh God, is this how it starts? She's not me. I'm not my mother. Our relationship gets to be its own thing.

What I can take from my mother is the way she loved me through the versions of myself that probably weren't particularly easy to love. She corrected me. We fought. I'm sure I drove her crazy. But I never doubted that I could come home to her.

Maybe that's what I want to preserve with my own daughter.

She doesn't have to like everything I say. I'm her mother, not her PR team. There will be rules she hates, questions she doesn't feel like answering, and many occasions when I will apparently commit the unforgivable offense of speaking to her while she is existing. But I want her to know that even when I correct the attitude, the eye rolls, or the occasional tone that makes my left eyebrow develop a life of its own, none of that changes where she stands with me.

And maybe that's the part nobody tells you about raising teenagers. They're learning how to become people separate from you at exactly the same time you're learning how to let them.

Neither side is particularly qualified.

So, mothers of teenagers and mothers who have already survived teenagers, tell me: what worked for you? Which battles did you learn weren't worth fighting? What helped you stay close when your child seemed determined to communicate exclusively through sighing?

Actually, don't tell me yet because my comment section still doesn't work.

I built an entire blog, but apparently allowing people to talk back to me is where I drew the technical line. Which, considering I'm about to have a teenager, may have been subconscious.

I'll work on that.

And when I finally get the comments running, please come back and tell me how you survived this stage. Because my mother somehow got me through mine with enough grace and love that I turned out relatively okay.

Relatively.

Let's not oversell it.