parenting pre-teens

My ten year old daughter is a funny, beautiful, talented and intelligent girl. She is also utterly and completely exhausting. But not in the physical sense that my son is; he wears me out, yes, but nothing that a hot bath, a bottle of Shiraz, and a good cry can’t cure. Pre-teen girls, I am discovering, are exhausting on an entirely different level. It’s like comparing the pain of a toe stubbed through steel-toe safety shoes to a leg fractured in a fall down seven flights of wet, …