‘What would YOU know about sex!’ my teen daughter snorted . . .

I don’t know how I do it Lorraine Candy

Two new superheroes have emerged on the domestic front this week: Backchat Boy and Moronic Mum. Neither particularly welcomes their new character persona, but both are stuck with them for the foreseeable future.

Backchat Boy is our spectacularly pedantic nine-year-old son who has rapidly achieved olympic Gold levels of winding up his three sisters.

He’s a lover of tiny details, a fan of factual accuracy. The sort of person who corrects spelling on Twitter.

His constant questioning of every sentence anyone utters is extremely tedious and causes eye-rolling of epic proportions from the eldest two girls, aged 12 and 13. I fear for his life, given how prone teenagers are to extreme exaggeration and how they hate being corrected — especially by small boys.

Next is Moronic Mum, the woman who is never correct. She does everything — and I mean everything — wrong.

She is more stupid than a cross between Homer Simpson, the cat that got stuck in a box on YouTube and Gogglebox’s Scarlett Moffatt (who blamed Jesus for binge-drinking and once said: ‘Evaporated milk? How would you add evaporated milk [to tea]? It’s not there’).

Moronic Mum’s superpower is that she has made it halfway through her life and yet knows nothing — plus she takes forever to do anything. She is so boring, she really should stop talking.

If her 13-year-old daughter had her way, Moronic Mum wouldn’t speak, she would sit in the corner on the human equivalent of standby until she was needed, which is rare. I don’t like being Moronic Mum, the parental buffoon, even though I know that it is a necessary, evolutionary stage of parenting.

I understand an adolescent’s need to break free means they must believe they are the smartest humans on Earth — far smarter than the barmpots to whom they are related.

After all, I have been there (and go there again every time I watch my father slowly make a cup of tea and fight back the urge to shout: ‘ In God’s name, stop poking the teapot, it brewed 45 minutes ago!’). But it’s a painful fall from grace, this cataclysmic shift from adored centre of your little one’s universe to badly dressed nitwit who shouldn’t be seen outside in daylight hours.

I can still feel the shadow of her little hand in mine, even if she can’t, and I miss it every day.

It is cruel that just as you should be feeling more confident about life in your advancing years, a small, squeaky voice creeps up behind you to tell you how useless you are.

Admittedly, I do occasionally forget things but, dammit, I have relevant advice that would be helpful to an independence-craving teenage girl, having been one myself. As Moronic Mum, I found myself one evening in the oddly inappropriate situation of arguing about sex with my 13-year-old daughter, while trying to dispense some of the aforementioned valuable advice.

My daughter looked at me with horror and asked what on Earth would I know about sex?

I told her I was a mother of four and had once edited Cosmopolitan magazine. Plus I had bought her a book on the subject, which I also read.

‘I know a lot more about it than you do,’ she pronounced, in that patronising voice one reserves for talking to toddlers who are wearing their clothes backwards and eating jelly with a fork. SHE added, triumphantly: ‘ I bet you can’t even name five sexually transmitted diseases.’ This is not a conversation I ever thought I would have when I first fell pregnant all those years ago.

But in her teenage brain, she is permanently SBI (Surrounded By Idiots), which, I suppose, must be quite frustrating.

So, in order to survive the next few years, I have decided to change tact and adopt an air of magnificent indifference.

I shall neither react nor respond to situations that require my advice or know-how.

I shall wear the coat of maternal stupidity, because it is what mothers do, and go about my business quietly, pausing only to be useful to number-four child, who is five and still needs me every day as much as I need her.

LORRAINE CANDY is editor-in-chief of Elle magazine.