Alison Sullivan
It’s hard to get older. It’s even harder when you try to interact with younger people and they make you feel like you’re practically dead because you’re no longer a teenager. But even teenagers aren’t safe from little kids, as this short story from writer Dani Fernandez shows.
“What is an example you have of kids not understanding age and making you feel old? Mine was when the kids I babysat asked if I had kids,” she tweeted. “I was 16.”
This story brought up a lot of memories for me, not only of children insulting me to my face but of being a rude little snot myself and making 25-year-olds feel like the Crypt Keeper. Time just moves differently when you’re little and it seems like anyone older than you is a million. In a way, I wish I still had that flexible perspective about linear time, but I’ve gotten old.
So many people responded to Fernandez’s tweet with their own tales of being unintentionally verbally abused by the very young. It’s a right of passage, and one day it will happen to those very same kids as they age. Getting older is a privilege and so is being rude to adults as long as you can get away with it.
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