During the school year, we'd have to be content with getting high during the day and only going all out on the weekends, when we'd all sleepover at one girl's house, and then sneak out to hang out at the creek or this kid's tree house or near the 7-11, begging passers-by to buy us beer or Malt Duck. [The very act of writing the words "Malt Duck" produces in me the need to vomit the overly sweet tasting wine-like drink that was my drink of choice when hard liquor was unable to be swiped from someone's parents.]
After a break of sorts of a few years, where the friends I hung with were more condemning of drinking, I came back full force by the winter of my senior year. At 17, I was driving over state lines to West Virginia, where the drinking age for everything was only 18 and where we knew a place which paid scant attention to that minimum. On warm days, we'd skip school and go get wasted. The nights were spent drinking and going to parties. By that age, too, my parents had divorced and my mother had not only become one of the most-absent parents but also one of the most indulgent, buying me booze, likely in the hopes that it would keep me home rather than driving drunk.
We were busted by parents a number of times over the years. Not once did the parent who caught us tell the other parents about what we were up to.
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Monique had a half-brother who was 15. Monique was probably about 30 at the time. I was a few years older. She got a call at work one day. He was dead. He and a buddy had been drinking and doing drugs at his buddy's house. They were fooling around at the pool. When he went in and didn't come back up, his buddy panicked. Before calling 9-1-1, he got rid of all the evidence of their partying. By the time the EMTs arrived, Monique's brother was dead. The buddy's mother had known about what the boys did at her house while she was away at work. But she kept it to herself.
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These thoughts came to mind recently when I was talking with someone about his discovery a number of months ago about what his son and his friends were up to. He went through the son's texts, and it was clear there were a number of sophomores and others doing drugs and drinking. I asked him if he told the other kids' parents, and I think he said he'd told one set of parents with whom he was friendly. He didn't tell the others because, really, how many of those parents would believe? And how many would just say it was fabricated by his son or him even? And how many would just ignore it and not face up to it?
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Looking at my children at nearly 14 and 12 and 8, I can't imagine them doing the things I did as a kid. They are good kids. They are smart kids. They aren't interested in any of that. They eschew the very thought of taking a sip of wine or beer that we occasionally offer. [Okay, Youngest does, but just to mess with the others' heads.]
My mother couldn't have fathomed what I was up to at 13 or 14 or 15. And, like I said, when I was about 17, she was complicit in my underage drinking. [I will point out that beer and that dreadful Malt Duck could be purchased at the age of 18 way back then.] In the younger years, she never busted me and my friends. But I am pretty damn sure that she would have reacted the same way as the other parents did when they did discover the truth: she would have turned a blind eye.
I can't say with certainty what I would do were I in any of those parents' places. My kids aren't there yet. But I want to believe that not only will my kid face the music, but those other kids will, too. I'm willing to corral the kids and their friends and the students on the playground when they're young. I'm planning on doing the same when they're older.
