Normally, it takes a few weeks of summer before I am looking for places to farm my kids off to. Normally, it’s a much slower build.
Normally, we have at least already gone swimming, and to the park, and have had a few barbeques before a kid starts to show signs of wilt, but today is June 16th, 2025, and – Let the record state – I am looking for places to farm them now.
The reason for this is that my youngest has never been 13 years old in the summer before.
I could sense this train coming without even touching the track with my ear.
Realization is setting in that months stretch out before us with no real structure, and I’m getting nervous.
There is a lot of empty time to fill.
This child is my most dramatic, and neediest one. Her older sisters say it’s obvious she is the baby of the family based on how often she asks for a foot rub.
When it’s over 80 degrees, she wants fanning, and ice water, and all-hands-on-deck, because, “OH MY GOSH, CAN A PERSON DIE FROM THIS?!”
By the literal first evening of summer, as I picked her up from her vacation kick-off swim party, and she groaned, “Nooooo! Not my MOM already here,” I knew where this was headed.
Thirteen is a whole separate type of summer.
I have been through this three times before. Trust me. I know.
Where there once was a sweet little sun-kissed child, there is a moon-howling, snarling creature now who hates every single activity they once loved.
I took a slow, deep breath on the edge of that pool that day, and reminded myself that,
as a mother of four daughters, I have been through this and survived it before.
To be fair, we did plan to begin our summer straight out of the gate on a week-long, family road-trip, with her crammed in the back like a sardine, almost as if we were testing her.
As we began, she climbed into the back and warned us, “I’m going to have my headphones on the whole way, so maybe don’t try talking to me. I won’t hear you, you know?”
Amazingly, it went better than expected.
We only had minor cat-fights between the sisters, no one sobbed, and no one threw-down inner-city style. All our hoop earrings stayed in our ears. No one got a tear-drop tattoo.
So, maybe it was a good thing to just rip off the bandaid of summer togetherness by getting right into it, get the tightness out of the way, but now we are back home, and we have scattered to our separate corners to face the heat that is coming in the later months.
The girls are 18, 16, and 13.
1 like = 1 prayer. We have no air conditioning, and one bathroom.
The 13 year old’s mood took a nosedive the moment we walked back into the house.
Gone are the days of no chores, and $18 ice creams on the beach.
At home, only torture exists for her.
Here, she is forced to endure people who ask her to turn the sound down on her video games.
We don’t even let her leave her dinner plate out.
If a statue was built of her, she would be standing a foot from the TV, playing video games, and tilting her head back as a response to our ignorance.
She breaks her FaceTimes with friends and games only to share facts and information to enlighten us on things.
I mean, It’s so annoying we all don’t already know!
She cannot believe she has to live in a place so void of basic knowledge!
Her shoulders stay slouched from having to carry the weight of this uninformed house.
When she wasn’t sharing her facts today, and pressing controller buttons, she was kicking around her indoor soccer ball, until one rogue kick sent her 18 year old sister’s phone flying from her hand, and broke the screen that she had just paid $120 to fix 8 days before.
If you do not know the way to ruin a teen girl it is to send broken screen streaks right through her boyfriend’s picture on her lock-screen photo.
It was a scene that required that I take a Pepcid.
That is all you really need to know.
Yes, we are only a week and a half into summer, and I have already sent an S.O.S. message to her best friend’s dad asking how he feels about an overnight visitor.
“Pay no mind if she shows up with a can of beans and a knapsack holding at least a week’s worth of clean clothes. I promise I will come back SOMETIME.”
Related: I get why families actually used to MAIL their kids to other states now.
As her friend’s dad is the parent of a nearly 13 year old, as well, he responded as someone who knows by simply saying, “I’ve got you.”
I read in that response solidarity, understanding, the unspoken knowledge of 13-Year-Old Summers.
It was like we were speaking to each other in the trenches.
Just two 13 Year-Old-Summer P.O.W.s.
Bless.
We rush them too quickly through the years of 7:00 bedtimes, you guys.
You just don’t know what you have until it’s gone.
Mine all stay up and hunt with the werewolves now or something.
It is still early June, and my house is already an absolute disaster.
There are Frappuccino cups places no Frappucino cup should go.
I found a Kit-Kat wrapper in my Monstera.
My laundry hamper will no longer close.
While we were on our vacation my mom, who was caring for our pets, texted to ask if we had any ant traps.
I came home to them stacked on top of eachother like actual ant condos.
I can only assume they came because they heard we only eat blue things, and sugar, and chips here.
The word on the street has gotten out.
I used to watch Hoarders and judge those people whose heads were sticking out of piles of tin cans and rotting pumpkins covered in mold, but that was before I was a mom of teenagers in the summer with them constantly in the house.
Now I see those people and feel compassion in my heart for the road that brought them.
Maybe they didn’t get there by any means of their own.
Maybe they, too, started off with a real nice place, vacuumed carpets, and scented candles,
But, before they knew it, they had a 13 year old in the summer that seemed like their only purposes in life were to crumble things in the couch crevices, make rude comments about their appearance, and to eat them out of house and home.
I saw a woman post the other day that her kids had “already eaten the house down to the seasonings,” and I felt an automatic kinship with her.
Where there was just a $400 Costco haul in our pantry,
there is only tumbleweed now.
But do not bring this all up to a 13 year old.
Especially not a DAUGHTER, who is churning out an overwhelming amount of feelings and hormones.
Do not bring up food, or chores, or ask if they’ve taken a shower today,
unless you like questions like, “WHY?! Oh my gosh! WHY ARE YOU ALWAYS SO RUDE TO ME?! Are you SAYING I SMELL?!”
Don’t bring up these things unless you want to live like the scene of Jurassic Park where they’re trying to stay and breathe still so the T-Rex won’t see them crouched behind the bus.
We breathe shallow.
It’s what we do now.
This summer, we will be tiptoeing, and playing soft music.
I bought teen vitamins off the internet that advertised mood stabilization after treating “hidden hunger,” and, you know, I’m not all too certain “Hidden Hunger” in a 13 year old is not for human blood.
Any mother of a 13 year old daughter is nodding right now.
They know exactly what I’m talking about.
They smell strongly, but you must not mention it.
They lay draped over furniture, but don’t ask if they’re bored and they’d like to go do something because OH MY GOSH! STOP ASKING! THEY DON’T KNOW!
Do not suggest things, because, whatever it is, they’ve already done it, and you just weren’t looking. You never look.
They have done it all and know it all and so PLEASE GO.
Yes, Summer with young teenagers is a phase no one talks about,
because it works like Bloody Mary does:
If you mention it, a 13 year old will come out of your mirror, will ask for cash, and a Starbucks drink, and then they will roll their glowing eyes while they roast everything about you.
Pray for the mothers of 13 year olds this summer.
It is moody here,
and moody does not pair well with hot.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
