I saw Darling Niece this week for the first time in about 9 months. She lives in Northern California and has a life that is dominated by one sport after another. She was in Portland with Coach Snarky Brother for the final softball tournament of the season, which coincided with me being in the same city for the Willamette Writer’s Conference.

Hanging out with teenage girls makes me contemplate my own past as a hormonally afflicted emotional mess. Darling Niece is a relatively sane version of 15 year old. But she is still full of extremes, with no room for anything labeled medium, average, or normal. She is all love and hate — the former reserved for many boys, the latter for yoga and mushrooms (which she has decided to hate because Snarky Brother hates them). She is never getting married, but will have a string of boyfriends instead. She’s never having children, but will adopt an older one and name her Spencer Blake.

Remember how sure of everything you were at 15? I was going to have a house on the beach by the mountains with a farm. Seriously. And a couple horses. And six kids. I was going to be a famous author and my husband was going to be rich. Possibly named Bono. I was sure of all my opinions, no adult could possibly understand me, and by the way, I was way more mature than old people gave me credit for.

Recently, an old friend sent me a packet of letters I had written her when I was 15. Rereading them was enlightening, and also embarrassing. So many superlatives. So many exclamation points. So much drama and angst. And so much bad poetry. Really bad poetry. It’s a good reminder for me — to know that I survived what at times seemed an impossible time to navigate. And it’s a good lesson for Darling Niece — that there is a sane place on the other side of puberty.

The problem is that she can’t learn that lesson while in the middle of all that sturm und drang. Well, it’s a problem for Snarky Brother and his darling wife . I can smirk from a distance.