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"Last night was Peter&amp;#039;s mid-week night with the kids, and a few hours after they headed out, he emailed me to ask what was going on with Anna and her friends. Anna is a pre-teen now, and her three best friends are the same age. In other words, they&amp;#039;re all being slammed by hormones at around the same time. And in middle school. And really, really noticing boys. And liking and hating and ohmygod loving things with blinding speed on a daily basis. And around all of this, of course, they&amp;#039;re best friends and they&amp;#039;re not friends. And you don&amp;#039;t know which it is from day to day until Anna either shows up with one or more in tow or complains loudly about their absence. Welcome to parenting a girl through puberty. It&amp;#039;s crazy-making. These last couple of weeks, Anna has had a real falling out with the group - from what she describes, it&amp;#039;s all petty drama but she&amp;#039;s been bored out of her mind and cycling between missing them and angry at them. I&amp;#039;ve tried to stay supportive without being intrusive. Peter must&amp;#039;ve noticed and questioned it, and he wanted to know what was going on. Which is a first for him, really. Not that he doesn&amp;#039;t love and care about Anna, but he&amp;#039;s usually the first one to shrug and chalk that stuff up to girl drama. It was nice to bounce conversation off him about it, because it&amp;#039;s troubling me, too. Tonight there&amp;#039;s an event at the elementary school that David is taking part in - it&amp;#039;s not a big thing at all, and I really didn&amp;#039;t expect that Peter would go, with this being his free weekend. He&amp;#039;s going to be there, though. It&amp;#039;s going to be rotten battling traffic out to us and then back again on a Friday night, but he&amp;#039;ll be there all the same, for David. It makes me feel....good. Really, really good. It&amp;#039;s nice to feel like I still have a parenting partner and not just some guy who parents when it&amp;#039;s not my weekend.  How long did it take you to feel like you were truly co-parenting with your ex? Or do you even feel that way? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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