Still Knitting

This sock yarn is KILLING me.

***
I sat with The Boy and some of his friends to watch the Middle School girls play a basketball game after school yesterday, and one of the boys, J (P knows him as Mutt), remarked to me in a whisper that one of the girls on the opposing team had a mustache. She did, too. A pretty big, full, dark one. J wasn't being mean about it, necessarily; he was surprised and bemused, more than anything.

I said, "Yes, she does. And I can promise you that she feels terrible about it every time she looks in the mirror, and that her parents probably won't let her do anything about for one reason or another, and that the moment she can, she will." He said, "Why wouldn't her parents let her get rid of it?" I told him that it might be because they think she's too young, or because they think she's great the way she is, or that it could anything . . . but that she's stuck with it, at least for now.

He seemed appropriately moved by her plight. Because, really: How crappy must it be to find yourself a 7th or 8th-grade girl with a mustache? My thirteen-year-old self, the one with braces, glasses, and zits, really felt for her.

Then I wondered if I was wrong to feel badly for her. I mean, maybe it doesn't bother her at all? Maybe she's a million times more secure than I was at that age, and she already knows that it's not what you look like that matters, and could do something about the mustache but chooses not to?

Could kids be that much more mature in 2008 than they were in, say, 1984? Maybe?