All Grown Up Now.
20 Nov 2011 Leave a Comment
in General
I have to admit today I got a little emotional, let me tell you why.
When people hear that I want to teach highschool students they think that I am insane. Why would I? But I have always had a rapport with them, yes, even the so called ’delinquents’. Working at Woolies you work with all age groups and working on the Service desk you work with A LOT of teenagers. It is the perfect after school job until they move off to Uni, the next stage of their lives or if we were lucky some of them stayed on as fulltime after they left school. Some of these kids I admit I did a little dance out the back when they left, then again I did a little dance when some adults left too. I am not going to lie and be all rose coloured glasses here, I worked it out and I have worked with some 600 – 700 teenagers over my years (not just service other departments too) and just like with any group of people some did drive me nuts but there were a lot that I came to think of as ‘my kids’, those that I would drive an hour out of my way to go and get for work, answer the phone at 2am to go and pick them up from a nightclub and those that I would spend an hour with in a back office counselling over some personal crises. I did genuinely care about them, they were not just employees to me but kids who were learning the hard lessons in life and lets face it some of the hardest lessons we learn are when we are teenagers.
Over the years I have lost touch with a lot of them as we all have moved on with our lives, but they are never far from my mind and thankfully with the help of Facebook I have reconnected with a lot of them and been able to watch them ‘grow up’ becoming the young adults that they are now. Getting married, having babies, being promoted through their new jobs, graduating Uni or Trade school and I always feel a little proud of the people they have become. One of these ‘kids’ was a young girl that we called our ‘baby’ at Coolalinga, when we opened the store and hired all of our juniors, little Oddie was the youngest, just barely 15 but she was/ is a super happy and friendly kid (and a damn good worker). Every body had a soft spot for Oddie, you couldn’t help it. She is now heavily involved in mission work and youth outreach and last week she married her American boyfriend in the States and is now going through the immigration process of being allowed to live over there. Today her wedding pics were finally uploaded to Facebook so all of us Aussie friends managed to finally glimpse her wedding and I admit I shed a few tears as there was my ‘first’ baby taking the next huge step in her life and she looked so happy that you just know that everything is going to work out for her and her new hubby. So, if this is what I am like with one of my ‘kids’ that I adopted in my heart, heaven help me when it comes time for my own to get married.
