by Rachel Howells

Created on: November 02, 2008   Last Updated: June 03, 2009

My daughter is 20 years old now, which means I have officially survived her teenage years, as well as my own. I had Lisa when I was 15 years old and therefore believed with our relative closeness in age I would somehow be better attuned to the teenage psyche than the average parent. I was wrong.

Evidently, in the interim from birth to teen, I had either forgotten what it was like to be a teenage girl or else things had changed so drastically that I could no longer understand the mind of a teenager. Despite this, one way or another we did survive through those teenage years, and my daughter has blossomed into a beautiful person both inside and out. However, this great metamorphosis did not take place without first observing and dealing with a few idiosyncratic features of my teenager that I am still slightly baffled by.

One of those baffling features had to do with hair and fashion. It was not that I didn't remember how important these things were as a teenager, especially as a teenage girl, but it was the degree of importance my teenager placed on her hair that I found the most mystifying.

Hair appeared to be extremely important to my teen daughter. She clearly thought about her hair a lot because she talked about it a lot and spent a lot of time looking at it in the mirror. In fact, any type of reflective surface would stop her dead in her tracks, mesmerized by the reflection of her own hair. It made it difficult to have a conversation with her in the kitchen, for example, because her attention would constantly be drawn away from the topic at hand to her image in the toaster. If I had something really important to communicate to her I had to make sure her back was turned to her reflection in the glass patio door or talk to her in a closet with no windows or mirrors.

She once rushed through the front door after school, flushed with excitement to tell me her big news. She had been waiting all week to hear what her mark was for her grade 11 English midterm. So I immediately thought she had gotten her grade back and aced the test. Just when I was about to congratulate her for her studious achievement she gushed, "Oh my God, you should have been there. Everyone was talking about it. My friends were so jealous!"

"Your friends were jealous that you did so well on your test? Good for you! What'd you get, an A?" I exclaimed with an excitement that matched her own.

"My test?"

She glared at me uncomprehendingly.

"No, I'm talking about my hair mom. Everyone loved

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