Oh, to be a teenager. . .

Last Friday, our family attended and volunteered at a fundraiser for my daughter’s school. Conceived to raise money to pay for an art teacher, the school’s first Fine Arts Festival was a hit. It was well attended by parents wanting to see their children perform as well as students wanting to see their friends perform. I worked the front line selling tickets.

This is not something I normally do. (Usually I like to chat with people, and there’s no time for chatting when people are trying to get a good seat in a school auditorium.)

But eventually the line slowed down. My volunteer buddy left to see her son perform, and I sat there in the vicinity of a huddle of teenage girls. My attention was drawn to them because there wasn’t really anything else going on.

It was slightly awkward, but I continued organizing the moneybox as discreetly as I could, trying to blend into the background while the teenagers did their thing. Which included using the F-word.

I looked over at them, and they looked over at me, guiltily. I remembered myself as a teenage girl—stretching the boundaries and all that—and chose not to come down too hard on them.

“I know. I was a kid once,” I said to them.

They looked at me, and then moved away. As they walked up the stairs, one of them muttered under her breath, “You were never a kid.”

Ouch. That was worse than the swearing.