Pre-teen priorities: When I'm 12, can I wear a crop top?

Published: 16:48 EST, 3 September 2014 | Updated: 18:04 EST, 3 September 2014

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My eldest child had a question. 'Will I be able to wear heels?' she asked. She had another one: 'Can I wear crop tops?' There was more: 'Will I be able to get my ears pierced and stay up until at least 11pm?'

These were all the things she magically believed she should be able to do the day she turned 12. As if she would be transformed overnight from my wonderful, innocent daughter into a youthful version of Kate Moss - the world at her stiletto-clad feet and a rock star boyfriend on her arm.

'No,' I replied, because that is what mums are supposed to say, right? I toyed with 'maybe', but even though I'm a pre-teen novice I'm quickly learning that if you say 'maybe' then the list of requests strays into fantasy, possibly involving going on a date with Benedict Cumberbatch and borrowing the car.

Growing up fast: Lorraine's 12-year-old is already keen to wear heels (posed by model)

I'm beginning to realise that however far I let out the safety rope of parenthood, my soon-to-be-teenager will still want more. She teeters on the emotional precipice of an exciting new life and an endless sea of hope.

How fantastic to be looking across the horizon to a million possible futures from the comfort of her childhood.

I am a little jealous, but mostly I am sad. Sad to say goodbye to the baby girl whose warm breath I first felt against my neck at 8.32am on Sunday, August 25, 2002.

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We celebrated her big birthday - Independence Day as I refer to it - two weeks ago on holiday in Cornwall. There were no crop tops, heels or earrings but she did accidentally get to stay up until 11pm. She doesn't count this as a rebellious victory. As she said the next day: 'Who wants to watch their ancient parents asleep on a sofa in front of the telly?'

She knows I would have insisted on an earlier bedtime if I'd been awake (it's the sea air, I tell you). Today she begins Year Eight at school. Year Eight? How did that happen? She's taking the first few steps on the path to womanhood, leaving her three younger siblings behind her.

Briefly, for the summer of 2014, my children were a happy gang of four messing around together; now they have become three and one.

She's abandoned them, and I fear she may soon abandon me. My ever-observant youngest, 'baby Mabel', aged three, is watching this family drama gently unfold. And, like the master criminal in the making that she is, I can see her wondering how to best take advantage of it.

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She's witnessing me and her dad with our disciplinary guards down: we're panicking in the eye of the storm of change this week as our small people experience a series of rites of passage.

Our son, aged seven, starts at a new junior school. He refuses to speak of it, though. Mr Chatterbox has become uncharacteristically quiet. 'Stop asking him what he feels about it,' my husband implores in a typically male fashion.

Gracie-in-the-middle, aged ten, goes into Year Six and has made a post-vacation pact with her friend to cut off her long blonde hair for charity. Worse still, Mabel starts part-time at nursery.

I've got permanent butterflies for them all - it's like repeatedly living through the night before exams again. Sleep eludes me, so - alongside a million mums and dads countrywide - I am up early to tick off the to do/to buy/to sew on new term lists.

Just as the last child begins to sleep past 6am, I’m awake (parenting is cruel like that).

I sit alone at the kitchen table, having what a friend refers to as a SCOT (selfish cup of tea - the one you make without offering anyone else one) and mourning the end of our summer.

I try to mentally capture what I reckon could be the last picture of them all as little children.

I remember my eldest sitting in her PJs one morning organising the shells we'd collected on the Cornish beach into Tupperware, her siblings peacefully helping, with Mabel refusing to hand over the biggest ones - claiming sole ownership as toddlers do.

I doubt my 12-year-old will want to collect shells next year. And watching her grow serves as a reminder that our smallest is tottering down the same path, slowly slipping away from us, too.

Then Mabel interrupts my early morning melancholia with a request. 'When I am four,' she asks, 'can I have a hot dog for breakfast?'

'Maybe,' I reply.

LORRAINE CANDY is editor-in-chief of ELLE.