By Shell C 
I’m not great in unstructured social situations. Parties, in particular, terrify me. What if no-one talks to me? I don’t want to arrive too early or too late. If I’m organising the party, it’s an order of magnitude worse. What if no-one shows up? What if more people show up than I have space/food/etc. for? What if they come and they’re (oh the horror) bored?
Structured situations, on the other hand, I think I’m pretty good at. I’ve been a youth leader of some description almost my entire adult life. Meetings/workshops/seminars – I can participate in them without thinking twice, and have run many more than I could possibly count. During lockdown, I even ran a couple of online trivia nights and a whole bunch of online work (structured) social gatherings.
When my son got to the birthday-party age, my party anxiety got layered over with flashbacks to being the kid who didn’t quite fit in at primary school and my stress levels went through the roof. My solution was to use what I’m good at and structure the heck out of those events. Borrowing from activities we have participated in, lots of Scout leader and other youth group experiences, we have done circus theme, pirate theme, dragons, and many, many more. Discussing what he wanted for his thirteenth birthday, he actually requested a theme party. We decided on a murder mystery party, found a kit and he wrote the invitations. On the back of the success of that party (and reflecting that I had so many programmes and resources that would never be used again), I started work on a book titled “Themed Parties from 3 to 13, even if (especially if) the thought terrifies you”. It’s been finished for over a year and is still basically a Word document and a collection of photos (although a friend is working on the graphics for me and some of that looks pretty cool). But I digress.
For his fourteenth birthday, we took his friends to an Escape Room, which they blitzed through. This year (fifteen), he organised it all himself. He had a group of friends (he said there were eight of them but it looked like a lot more in our house) over to play a social game, “Blood on the Clocktower”, for which he was the Storyteller. It wasn’t all smooth sailing: I found out on Wednesday that it was going to be on Friday night, and a couple of guests arrived early before we’d finished trying to make the house look like we don’t live in squalor (don’t know why we bothered – most of them come around for role playing every weekend). The game was held in the family room but smaller groups kept popping out around the whole house to confer about who was likely evil. I asked how they knew they could trust each other, they agreed they didn’t. His dad and I were on catering, which is quite the epic for hungry teens. When we weren’t doing that, we didn’t really know where to go, because there were conferences going on all over the house. It felt like they were never going to go home. But how wonderful it was to hear them get right into the spirit of the game and, better yet, to not have to stress about whether anyone would show up and if they would be bored. I wonder what he’ll decide to do next year.
