Ever try guiding 13-year-old girls going on 30?

Meet Stefanie Wilder-Taylor, author of “It’s Not Me, It’s You: Subjective Recollections From a Terminally Optimistic, Chronically Sarcastic and Occasionally Inebriated Woman.” In this excerpt, Wilder-Taylor recounts her hilarious misadventures attempting to serve as a counselor and mentor to girls between the ages of 9 and 13.   

Bigs and littles
When I was almost 30 years old, my friend Samantha talked me into being a camp counselor with her to a group of 13-year-old girls at a YMCA camp. Samantha was a major do-gooder, always up for getting out and volunteering for causes usually involving animals or kids or the elderly. I considered myself more of a mental do-gooder. I had good intentions but preferred community service I could do from my couch while reading magazines and eating takeout — kind of like "The Secret" but with trans fats.

But this actually sounded sort of fun to me — specifically because I had great memories of summer camp and because I’d be with the 13-year-old group, which I felt was my target demo. Hell, I was practically like a 13-year-old girl myself with my love of Gummi bears, shopping at Forever 21, and illegally downloading Britney Spears songs — except that I lived in my own apartment, had a job, and had slightly easier access to alcohol. So I quickly agreed to do it, and before I knew what happened, I was a few hundred miles from home at a camp by Big Bear Lake getting to know my young charges.

As I quickly found out, a lot had changed since I was 13. Today’s 13-year-olds were smoking pot and, as it turns out, very, very over Britney Spears. They preferred hard-core rap. And out of 12 girls, at least 10 of them had names that were some version of Kristine.

As soon as I’d hit cabin nine and laid my knapsack and boom box down on my steel bunk, the girls started sussing me out.

“Do you like rap?” an impossibly tall African-American girl named Cristal wanted to know. Are 13-year-olds supposed to be 7 feet tall? I wondered. Would it be rude to ask her if she played basketball? I thought it might be. I mean, it should be obvious she did, right? Or, at the very least, volleyball.

“Sure. I love rap.”

“Are you down with Mobb Deep?” asked Krissy, an overly smiley girl with strawberry blonde pigtails and braces. I had a bad feeling her mother sent her out on commercial auditions.

“Mobb Deep? I’m not familiar with her work but I love Tupac.”

“Mobb Deep isn’t a her. And Tupac? He’s dead.”

“That may be true but it hasn’t stopped him from putting out album after album.” The guy was more prolific from up in heaven than I’d been my entire life on earth. 

“Album? What’s an album?”

“It’s like a CD only ... hey, we’re due in the mess hall for breakfast and I hear they’re serving banana waffles,” I said in a voice that reminded me of a preschool teacher.

“I don’t eat waffles,” yelled a different Crissy from across the room. “I only like plain toast with I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter zero-calorie spray. I brought my own.” If her goal weight was that of an anorexic flamingo, she’d already attained it. But I didn’t think this was the right time for a lecture on eating disorders, especially since I could’ve stood to lose a few pounds. Maybe she’d lend me some of her spray.

Despite the fact that these girls were clearly more mature than I was, I tried to make the most of my two-week session: I attempted to rock climb (getting an avulsion fracture on my ankle in the process), watched them water-ski from my perch on the dock where I iced and elevated my ankle, and made an only semiangled lanyard keychain in arts and crafts. To get on my campers’ good side, I purposely “forgot” when it was our night for cleanup duty after dinner, and pretended not to notice when they dressed in clothes that even the Bratz dolls would have deemed “too slutty.” Didn’t their parents supervise their packing? Did they have parents?

When the girls decided to run a massage booth at the camp carnival, I realized I would have to stop trying to be their best friend and become more of a role model/parental figure. While the younger kids did water-balloon throwing and face painting, my girls wanted to put out mattresses to give out back rubs. The male counselors and campers lined up in droves before I put a quick stop to it. To my amazement, the camp administration saw nothing weird about our booth. My girls may have thought I was a buzz kill, but I felt proud that already in my new leadership role I’d saved them from a life of prostitution. Clearly, handing out back rubs at 13 is a gateway to giving full body massages, which is inches away from working in a downtown massage parlor offering full release. They’d thank me later.

I decided it was time to turn their attention to the end-of-session talent competition. I busted my ass choreographing a dance number to Anita Ward’s “You Can Ring My Bell,” which they’d never heard of but thankfully liked. “It’s cool ’cause it’s so old!” said one of the girls whose name started with a K.

“Thanks, Kristen. It’s called disco.”

“It’s Kirsten, not Kristen.”

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I forced them to practice over and over. I was like the Paula Abdul to their Laker Girls. And when they took their victory lap after taking first place in the talent show, I wept like a premenstrual chick watching “Titanic” and they completely ignored me like the 13-going-on-30 teenagers they were. Then they snuck out and smoked a joint behind their cabin, which I pretended not to smell. But when the bus took us all back to the YMCA building where their parents were waiting to pick them up, a few of them gave me a hug and told me I was their favorite counselor. And only one of them furtively gave me the finger. I may have been in a bit over my head, but deep down, I knew I was onto something.

So the following year when Do-gooder told me she was going to apply to be part of the Big Sister program, I was all over it. But I figured as a Big Sister I should set my sights a little younger. Maybe a newborn.

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