Few things are more painful than loving a 15-year-old girl, particularly when she is your child. Ask any mother who has been through a daughter’s adolescence and she will nod in sympathy, maybe even give you the hug you have been missing.

It will pass, friends tell me. You know it in your head, but your heart is a torn punching bag with the stuffing falling out. After more than a decade of nurturing and feeding and picking up and dropping off and helping with homework and braiding hair and supervising play dates and fighting battles and holding hands to cross the street, you are suddenly shut out. The bedroom door is firmly closed. Every now and then I knock and go in, but I always feel like an intruder.

I yearn for those nights when my daughter, Paulina, couldn’t sleep and I spooned her tiny body in the recesses of mine, her warmth commingling with mine, putting us both into a coma.

These days, I barely see or talk to her. She’s busy with school, and when she has free time she would rather be out with friends. I get it. I hear snippets of her life ringing from her upstairs room, conversations and laughter, favorite songs occasionally played in the car from her iPhone.