If you spent any amount of time at friends’ houses as a kid, maybe you remember the agonizing walk into the bathroom.

It was something you did by necessity, of course, but for me it always felt illicit somehow. This was a private family space, and here you were, seeing the detritus of their every day — the razor abandoned on the side of the tub, the tube of toothpaste uncapped on the sink.

Most unnerving for me were the times I felt the need to take a shower, stepping into this foreign space completely vulnerable.

Perhaps I was the exception to the norm, but I can’t imagine I was the only deferential teenager, trying to leave as little evidence of my intrusion into the family space as possible.

It hit me this weekend as I tidied away a tube of toothpaste and pulled our shower curtain closed in preparation for a pile of teenagers to descend on my home for a small Super Bowl party that I’d come full circle.

It is now my family space regularly opened to a cast of teenagers who have by all accounts been perfectly deferential.

Sure, there was the odd discovery of a spoon in my linen closet, left behind when my teen’s boyfriend got hungry while doing some painting in the room. But what teenage boy doesn’t get hungry? A lot?

But now I’m the mom insisting it’s perfectly OK to take a shower when kids sleep over, reminding kids they don’t have to ASK to use the bathroom ... of COURSE they can use it.

I’m now the mom who takes pleasure in kids being comfortable in her home, opening her fridge, eating her food, plopping on her couch and roughhousing with her pets. I’m the mom who wants her family space over-run by raucous teenagers because it means my own teenager is comfortable being at home and being themselves with their friends in their own space.

And I have to wonder what it was I worried about for all those years.