Thirteen.

My daughter, Alex, is thirteen. Disconcerting. My little girl has suddenly developed breasts and other accoutrements of womanhood. Her speech has changed as well; she can be dismissive and sarcastic, emotional and unfair, angry and resentful, all within the space of a few minutes conversation. Advice, never very willingly listened to, is now completely unwelcome and, indeed, is something that I rarely offer these days. Hormones, something of which she was, I believe, completely free just months ago, now appear to control her completely. These creatures, hormones, are irreversible; I know, I asked a fellow-suffering doctor friend with two teen-aged girls of his own if there was anything that might stop this maturing process and restore to me my little girl and he shook his head sadly and simply offered me another glass of wine. Once in a while my daughter will permit me to listen to her. Mostly this is when she or, more correctly, her hormones have concocted some fairly ditzy theory about unpopularity (hers) or the long-planned tortures of the educational system which she is being forced to endure at the hands of evil teachers who took up the profession decades before in the sole hope that one day they would have the opportunity to inflict misery upon my daughter.

In those cases where I am permitted to listen, the sheer verbal volume of which my daughter is capable is awesome. She delivers soliloquies that can last thirty minutes and during which she must suck air in via her ears because I swear that she doesn’t stop to take breath.

Mostly I make sympathetic noises about the various injustices that appear to characterise every aspect of her life. This past summer these have ranged from a broken nail – I kid you not – to some rather insightful comments on ‘Animal Farm’. At times it is clear that certain of her teachers redeemed themselves when they saw fit to grant her grades that were unexpectedly good. When the grades were not as good, it was a result of the conspiracy of anti-Alex ‘sleeper’ agent-teachers who had been waiting these past decades for her to be conceived, raised and, almost providentially sent to the very school at which the individual tool-of-evil awaited her arrival.

This past year my daughter attended a uniform-school and was extremely happy when, after incessant lobbying on her part for at least two years, we agreed to move her to a new school whose only policy on dress seems to be that casual (shorts, tee-shirts and those space-aged sport shoe things) is good but sloppy (holey jeans, torn tee-shirts and those footwear things – I don’t mean the slingshots that they wear instead of panties – that we used to call thongs) is better (thankfully sexy seems to be forbidden). Her cousins all excitedly provided advice on her new wardrobe but sometime during the process her hormones intervened and announced, rather insightfully but unhelpfully, that she had merely changed one uniform for another. Her individuality was under severe threat from the need to conform to be cool.

The scope of Alex’s conversation is three-dimensional: she can speak long and she packs a lot of words into small, tight spaces; even more impressive, though, is the scope. She can discuss books, nail polish, John Kerry (‘he’s in what band?’), popular culture and her need for a larger budget at length and without the annoying need for any real feedback. Mostly I just listen, fascinated at the way her mind flits from place to place. The world for her is a great plain over which are scattered opportunities, experiences and things-to-be-discovered without end. I’m jealous and happy for her.