Redmum column March 9 - The First First-Date

The first first-date

THE gates of parenting hell have opened this week. Baton down the hatches and sound the alarm – the Young Wan has gotten herself a boyfriend.

And I mean gotten.

Teenagers are a strange bunch of people with new rules, parameters and my 14-year-old beauty has kinda asked this boy out.

I said kinda because it happened during one of those rambling nonsense text message exchanges, carried out on my mobile.

She met him a while ago and only recently started to chat and has been going on and on about him since then. So I suppose I should have seen this coming.

Anyhow they were texting and the next thing as I am trying to watch Fair City, she is whooping and hollering all around the flat shouting ‘Yes YES’.

Then she said ‘We’re going out’.

Me: ‘Oh great where are we going?’
Young Wan: ‘Noooooo we, not you and me, me and him are going out.’

Don’t parents get asked for permission anymore? Who even said she was allowed to go out with boys.

That point aside during the text conversation she said something like ‘why all the questions? Do you fancy me or sumfin? like ehm go out with me or sumfin?’

And he replied ‘if ya wanna?’

Now call me old-fashioned (yeah yeah I hear you shouting at the back) but I think he should have asked her out, or maybe I would have preferred if he had clearly asked her out instead of the unclear asking out-ish text that my daughter sent.

I am all for women taking the initiative but I would have preferred that scenario to happen when she is older. Besides his answer could have been better.

Am I just being a doting mother here? but seriously ‘if ya wanna’ doesn’t sound too enthusiastic to me. But then I am not a teenager.

How and ever, the bottom line is that she has a wee boyfriend.

When he walked her home from school on Friday in the snow, she was in romantic heaven. As I let her into the house, she was dreamily saying ‘isn’t the snow beautiful?’

‘Yeah, yeah, love’s young dream, get inside before you catch your death.’

So they had their first first-date over the weekend when he asked her to go into town to shop for a couple of hours.

The deal was the bathroom must be cleaned, my bedroom tidied and her own bedroom tidied.

She appeared to really get stuck into this work desperate to be allowed out on Saturday. But over the evening I realised that nothing was actually be doing.

There was lots of headless chicken running about antics but no actual substance tidying being done.

The full extent of this wasn’t discovered until Saturday night, luckily for her or she wouldn’t have gotten out at all.

As it was she was leaving behind a trail of destruction in the bathroom and my bedroom completely undoing whatever good had been carried out or I should say tidied up.

And off she went looking gorgeous with me videoing her going for the bus, as you do.

She was back at 5.30pm despite the 6pm deadline and she was not impressed.

There were 30 other kids out on the date. They were kicked out of McDonalds, nearly kicked out of St Stephen’s Green at which point she decided to head on home.

The treatment of teenagers who are just out and about and not causing any trouble is a topic for another day. But people should lay off them. Just because a gang of kids are hanging about does not necessarily mean they are up to mischief, far from it.

The day/date was such a non-event for the Young Wan that she even refunded me seven euro out of the tenner she went out with.

While she may have been annoyed at the sheer numbers of other kids out for the day, I on the other hand was delighted for a plethora of reasons.

I wonder what the official second date will be like? I would hate to be 14 again.



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