Teenage Parties – Barf!

What a lovely thought – your house is the house that all your teenage kids’ friends want to hang out in. Great idea. It’s win, win. You don’t have to taxi them anywhere and you know where they are and they get to be the popular one with the cool, laid back parents. When my kids were younger, this is what I thought too. Now that they are older: NO FUCKING WAY! You are having a laugh. For starters, I love my kids, but let’s be honest, kids are like dogs: you love your own, but other peoples’ are bloody irritating. Actually, other peoples’ kids are way worse than dogs, because at least with dogs you can stick them in the kitchen with a bed and a bone and they will pretty much shut the fuck up. Teenagers in your kitchen need food. Teenage boys need stupid amounts of food. I look at what a 14 year old boy eats and think, bloody hell! Seriously, how can your mother afford to feed you? No wonder she’s always wearing clothes from a charity shop – you’re eating all her fecking money! They also need drink. Now I’m not one of those liberal minded parents who think that giving your teenage kids alcohol in the home will make them more responsible drinkers – shut up! Come on! I’m not so old that I don’t remember raiding my parents’ drinks cupboard for literally anything we could get our hands on – yes, even that thick, creamy yellow shit, whatever the hell that was. Sticking it all in a plastic jug and thinking it was a great idea to goad each other to drink it. Hey, that made me really responsible – responsible for blocking toilets and covering carpets in puke. Then SO responsible, that rather than clearing it up, or offering to pay for damages, I’d feck off back to my own sick free, clean, cream carpeted home and into bed.

At least back then there was no internet. ‘It’s only a gathering, Mum’. Two police carriers, 15 armed officers, 2 police dogs, 16 angry neighbours and 60 drunk teenagers later, you realise the power of Facebook. I have a sister who is a police inspector. I’ll give you the benefit of her pearls of wisdom in reply to your teenager’s request for a house party: NO WAY! You see, you may very well trust your little hormone-fuelled darling, but teenagers have an uncanny knack of letting us parents down. Just when you thought you could book that weekend away to remind yourself which man is your husband, they’ll shit on you from a great height (your kid, not your husband – unless that weekend away really was rocking).

So, I will happily say, ‘no’ to my 4 girls when they ask me. I thwarted a gathering at our house that step daughter had organised when we were away. The gathering was gathering  Facebook guests by the minute, until we took her front door key away for that night and told her to sleep at her mums. Harsh – NOT AT ALL! Just look around at your lovely house. Look at the only mildly stained carpets and your three piece suite, harboring just the odd wine stain (and remember how pissed off you were with yourself for that one spillage). Wander into your toilet and admire how clean it looks – just the odd pube under the loo seat, but you don’t have to lift it up. Float into the kitchen, open your fridge and admire the fullness of it. Feel content. Now close your eyes and imagine a load of shit faced teenagers, rampaging throughout; forgetting that they actually do give a monkeys and are normally actually pretty nice people. Trust me, even your own bed will not be sacred. When teenagers want sex do you think that they give a toss that it’s a matching valence and duvet set from Laura Ashley?

If you do choose to trust them and more importantly, their mates to be able to resist spreading the word, then I can only apologise if one of my daughters ends up puking in one of your shrubs. Oh, those were the days!