I have two teenage daughters at home. Lately their bedroom doors stay closed, the answers come back in one syllable, and the plans no longer start with me they start with their friends. Something I had to learn is that at this age they’ll tell you what they think and what they want, but almost never what they feel; that part they keep, and you have to earn it. Where I used to be the first to hear about everything, now I find out last, if I’m lucky. And even though it stung at first, I’ve come to understand I didn’t do anything wrong. They’re just growing up.

I understand it, too, because I was once on the other side. My own adolescence, I’ll be honest, was one of the hard ones I didn’t have an easy time of it so when I see one of them shut in her room or in a bad mood, I don’t judge her, I remember. I remember wanting to be left alone, wanting to decide for myself even when I had no idea about anything, feeling like my friends understood me better than anyone, having stopped being a child without yet knowing what I was. I see that same confusion in them now. Because that’s what happens: their reference point stops being their parents and becomes their friends, and you slowly move off center stage. It isn’t a failing on your part. It’s the stage.

What’s been hardest, honestly, is accepting that I’ve been knocked off the pedestal. One day you’re your daughter’s favorite person, the one with all the answers, and the next she takes a friend’s word over yours. And the most baffling part: they’re charming with everyone else and save their worst for home. It took me a while to understand it isn’t aimed at me—just the opposite: home is the one place they feel safe enough to fall apart, and getting that side of them is, deep down, a form of trust. And no, it doesn’t mean I’m doing it wrong. It means what’s supposed to happen is happening.

That’s when I started to see my role was changing that I was going from the one who provides and fixes to something more like a companion. That I wasn’t going to win them over the way I used to they think differently, there are a lot of years between us and that my job now was to give my point of view and my reasons, once and not a thousand times, because I learned to pick my battles instead of repeating myself to exhaustion. To set limits with love and follow through, and to let them stumble within reason, because solving everything for them doesn’t prepare them, it leaves them more fragile. And something I repeat to myself when the worry takes over: what calms a teenager most is having a steady adult nearby. From a place of anguish, you lose.

Here’s something I learned the hard way: my daughters pick eleven at night, right when I’m falling asleep, to tell me what’s really going on. And no matter how tired I am, I don’t say “let’s talk tomorrow,” because that window doesn’t open twice. I also learned to just listen: if I question them, they shut down; if I correct them right then, they stop talking to me. My opinion, if any, I save for the next day. I even discovered they open up more if I bring up a show or a song than if I ask them straight about their lives. So I stay up, I listen, I bite my tongue, and it’s worth it every time.

And then there are first loves, lived with an intensity we forget as grown-ups. Infatuation is a fog that lasts a few months and leaves you without your headI had relationships of every kind, some of them a little toxic, and I’ll be honest, sometimes the toxic one was me and I remember exactly that feeling that the world is ending when you break up at fifteen. The thing is, you almost never end up with your first boyfriend; what stays is what you learned. These days, when I see one of them heartbroken over someone she won’t even remember in three months, I bite back the urge to play it down, because I remember that at that age, to me, it was as real as anything.

There’s something that drove me crazy as a teenager and that I now do myself: always wanting to know where they are and who they’re with. Back when I was on the other side, it felt like distrust. Now that I’m the one texting “are you home yet?” I understand it has nothing to do with not trusting them: it’s that they are, hands down, the most precious thing I have, and the world out there is more complicated than you can see at that age. I’m not keeping tabs on them; I need to know they’re okay so I can sleep. I hope one day they understand it the way I did too late, once I became the mom.

So now I try to live this stage as present as I can, slammed doors and all. It’s hard, because you tend to fixate on what’s going wrong, but I try to train my eye on what’s going right: the way they laugh, what they’re discovering, who they’re becoming. I have only a few years left of having them this close, under the same roof; after that I’ll be more like the person they call when they want advice, and I’ll have to learn to give it without walking beside them. In the end, raising them is exactly that moving from a vertical relationship, the mom in charge, to a horizontal one, two women who love each other. One day, without my ever catching the exact line, I’ll have two grown women in front of me, and I know I’ll miss even the closed door. So I’d rather enjoy it now.