As my girls get older, I either forget or choose to forget the troubles that plagued me when they were babies. Some now seem downright trivial. I care much less about things that scared the hell out of me then: germs, personal hygiene, what other people think. Having a bit of perspective and experience, I try not to sweat the small stuff anymore. My biggest fear, now that Ruby is 3 and Isabella 6, is losing them to adulthood. I want my babies to be my babies forever.

Isabella still thinks I'm cool. She still wants to hang with me. She still kisses me in public. We're buds. Ruby is my sweet, sweet baby and if she never, ever grew up I would be so happy. Ruby cuddles and coos and pets my face. She tells me she's never going to grow up, and I say "Okay," and give in when she wants her pacifier. I'm bad. My cubicle neighbor at work has daughters who are 10 and 12. She's sad because they want to hang out with their friends instead of her. I will shrivel up and die when this happens. All I wanted when they were babies was a freakin' second to myself. Now that they are getting more self-sufficient, I'm in a panic.

It's not just losing their sweetness, their baby smells, their unquestioning devotion—it's knowing what's coming. Almost daily, I hear myself say, "I'm dreading their teenage years." This is no lie because I was an absolute lunatic when I was a teen.

When reading Sheri Reed's Mamaphobic column "One Real Thing at a Time," it brought back how lost I was when I hit puberty. At twelve, I escaped my pain and awkwardness and fear of my peers by smoking a boatload of pot and drinking anything I could get my hands on. It was such sweet relief, and my dysfunctional tool of choice for the next 22 years. I'm still torn between bitterness and gratitude that I had to stop drinking and grow up to be a mom. Most nights after they go to bed and I settle down in front of the TV, I get a fleeting sense something is missing. Then I remember I used to take the craving for whatever it was I needed and drown it with beer.

I wish I could say it was peer pressure that started me down the road to substance abuse, but it was mostly my parents. Still kids themselves, I learned by example and made a mean highball and rolled a tight joint by the time I was 10. It's for this reason I stopped partying when the girls came along. If they learn how to do that crap, it's not going to be from me.

After my separation from my husband, a counselor I talked to about my girls said to me, "Protect their childhood"—meaning, protect them from as much of the truth as you can and make them feel safe and loved. Oh my god! Just a little pressure. I did not feel safe or loved, and I was a fucking hellion. Thank god I was about 70 pounds and ugly as sin because no man would touch me until I was well into my teens. Although it pained me at the time, I know now I was lucky men found me repulsive, and my slutty ass made up for it in my 20s anyway.

Being a pre-pubescent girl is probably the most horrible time on earth. When I was 12 and away at summer camp in the middle of nowhere, I got my period for the first time. My counselor was kind enough to borrow a car and make the 20-minute drive to the closest store to buy me pads. In the five or so years that followed, I was on the most psychotic hormonal rollercoaster of my life. I had pimples the size of mountains. I agonized over the unrequited love I had for whomever the most popular boy in school was at the time. If he could just see past the headgear, he would know how special I was!

The hardest part was being bullied by the mean girls who found me repugnant. At age 38, not a day goes by that I'm not still angry with myself for caring what they thought, and I'm still working on rebuilding my self-esteem. Will the pretty girls with boobs torture my daughters? Worse yet, will my daughters be the torturers?

When I went away to college, I finally got a social life. I remember when guys started paying me attention, I thought they were joking. Then it dawned on me…I'm at Chico State and I can drink and screw all I want! Needless to say, if you added up all the blackouts due to intoxication, I've lost about three years of my life I'll never get back.

My intention was to let this time slip away into the past as gracefully as possible, but now I look at Isabella and Ruby and I see trouble. I see Izzy dancing on bars and Ruby sneaking out her window to meet boys. I see a time when we all have our periods at once and fight like wolverines. I want them to pass over the whole part where they give a shit what men think of them and go straight to the part where they don't care, because many men like everything with a hole anyway. Not the kind of lessons you can teach obstinate teenage girls.

What will I tell them about their 30s? Still too fresh to know, but while I hope they marry and give me grandbabies and live in nice neighborhoods like the one we live in now, I also hope there are resources for them if the American dream doesn't work out. I'd tell them that while motherhood brings women together, you still have to watch out for the mean girls with boobs. Being a single mom isn't just a reflection of your marital status. "Single" can be a scary word to a lot of people for a lot of reasons. It should be a word they are comfortable with by the time they are my age, whether they are in a relationship or not.

I see my babies, my sweet little girls, heading down the path to their teenage years and I want to sequester them. They already love Hannah Montana, dollar store makeup and putting on my work shoes. Next, it's going to be sneaking on the makeup after I drop them off at school. Part of me thinks I'll know what they're up to since I was the master. I was the biggest fuck up who ever raided Abby Miller's parents' liquor cabinet, and I'll smell it on them a mile away. But who am I kidding? I can't even take away the damn pacifier. I'm already delusional. All I can do is get a good grip now so I can hold on as tight as possible when the ride starts.