Story Prompt
For lack of anything more interesting to say, this post is inspired by Princess Nebraska’s story prompt.
I wouldn’t say it was my best idea. One summer evening when I was 12 and having a friend sleep over at my house, I decided that I would show off by sneaking alcohol out of my parent’s liquor cabinet.
My parents have never been big drinkers. An occasional beer or maybe Fuzzy Navel was about as adventurous as they got. This meant that the selection I had to choose from was small. All I could find was a bottle of Peach Schnapps and a bottle of Root Beer Schnapps. My friend and I mixed them together in a big cup and swilled them down. Then we fell asleep.
As you might imagine, the combination of various schnapps and a ninety-pound sixth grader didn’t mix particularly well. It wasn’t long before I woke up vomiting all over the basement couch. It was a particularly nasty smell as the mix of beef-a-roni and flammable root beer alcohol filled the air. My friend panicked and ran to get my parents.
When my mom came to clean up the mess, she did not seem to notice anything was amiss. “It must have been bad beef-a-roni.” I told her as I stumbled up the stairs to my bed.
The next morning, I had a bitty-league softball game. When I got up, my parents deemed me healthy enough to attend. I didn’t mention my nausea and my splitting headache. In retrospect, I wonder if they suspected we had been drinking because they served particularly runny eggs. Maybe they were trying to punish me by making my hangover worse.
That was the beginning of a series of bad choices that went unnoticed or unacknowledged by my parents until I left for college. Did they really not notice the occasional binge drinking? The saying I was at the library when I was really sleeping with hanging out with a skateboarder boy? The sneaking off to the nearest big city to hang out in college bars? There were a million instances where I was convinced I had outsmarted them.
If my children happen to read this in their adolescent years, I want to take this time to assure them: I will notice. And there *will* be consequences.
While I don’t think there is anything necessarily wrong with experimentation and sneaking around (isn’t that the job of teenagers?), there will be consequences. Or at the very least an acknowledgment of their dumb choices.
Why? Because *my* children will not labor under the illusion that their parents are too dumb to figure out what they are doing.
To this day, I don’t know if my parents really were too oblivious to figure out what was going on, or if they just chose to ignore it.
July 30th, 2008 at 10:30 am
What kind of impact (if any) on your (”bad”) choices do you think it would have had if it had been clear that your parents HAD noticed, and if there had been consequences? Do you think you would have tamed your (ahem) extracurricular activities any? (Not that you could know for sure, of course.)
July 30th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
I think about this too- my parents and what they knew/ignored- bc it was pretting fricking obvious some of the shit i did!
July 30th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
I think about this quite a bit.
It scares me when I think back to all the crap I did. I was lucky — the consequences weren’t too horrible, but it wouldn’t have taken much of a turn of fate for something terrible to have happened. Anyway, I know I got away with a lot because I was pleasant to my parents, my grades were good, and the friends that my parents met were pretty darn tame.
I like to think I will be more observant than my parents were — I hope I’m not being horribly naive…
July 30th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
It is pretty easy not to see what you don’t want to acknowledge or deal with. My parents seemed to see everything and I am not sure that is better. I didn’t really do much experimenting because I knew I would be caught and punished. I often wonder what I missed out on.
July 30th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
[...] American Family [...]
July 30th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
I wondered if my parents knew about my drinking too. And then on my 21st birthday someone announced, “And now her first drink ever!” as they looked on proudly. Wow.
July 31st, 2008 at 8:43 am
I’ve just started wondering a lot about that too. Whether my parents knew some of the stuff I did and chose to ignore it or they just never noticed. I mean, it was pretty obvious with a lot of crap I did but, I always thought I outsmarted them. I think what took the cake was that on my 20th birthday, my mom gave me a book on ‘godly’ courtship. I’d already been living with my boyfriend (now husband) for about 6 months or so. Though I think a lot of us would rather not know what our parents knew about us then.
July 31st, 2008 at 8:50 am
In my case, my parents knew when I was as baked out of my gourd. They knew and purposely messed with me, which is just so bloody cruel. My parents would start talking to each other in front of me normally and then all of a sudden they’d slow their speech down to a halt and freeze for a second, and then resume their conversation normally like nothing happened. They’re special people, to say the least.