E-tubing with punks

My gift to Molly for her birthday was a day of snow tubing together at Mount Seymour's tubing park. It was great to get to spend the day together and get out of the rain and into the snow. Unfortunately with school out, lots of other people had the same idea and there was about a 15 minute line up for the rope tow back up.

After a couple of minutes in line, a group of 4 boys about 14 or 15 years old came to the line and just decided to go to the front. I was shocked to see none of the 50 people in line say anything so I decided I would see what was happening. I left Molly where she was, walked up to the punks and in a voice loud enough for the rest of the line to hear asked them if they had some reason for going ahead of everybody else who was waiting. They said no and I figured they would be embarrassed enough to go back. I was wrong.

They stayed where they were and even started yapping off to me. It was an interesting dynamic to be faced with a bunch of lippy kids who were clearly in the wrong and pissing everyone else off, but aware that Molly did not need to see me lose my temper dealing with this situation. Even when the park attendants talked to them they still kept doing the same thing until eventually a supervisor came down.

I have been a parent now for over 8 years but rarely felt like the scary adult that I remember fearing as a kid growing up. However, dealing with these totally disrespectful teenagers brought out another side of me as a parent....one that I can hope doesn't have to surface too often as my own kids approach that age in life.