I spent half my teen years suspended over the frame of my daylight basement bedroom window, either sneaking out … or sneaking back in. So when I found my son’s bed empty at four a.m. the other night, I was only surprised by the fact that I’d not caught him before.
We’ll not go into the details of where he was…what he was doing…or how I managed to hide the bruises when I finally got ahold of him…suffice to say his cell phone is but a distant memory and he’ll remember the summer of his sixteenth year as the one he spent with this mommy.
Sometimes I wonder, though…just how hypocritical I am.
My career as a ‘sneak’ started in the woods near my childhood home where my friends and I would hide out and smoke True cigarettes at the ripe age of eleven years old. I distinctly remember the taste of the menthol, the burn of my throat as it went down, and the hacking that followed. Man, we were cool.
I was perfect for the role of ‘sneaker’. I looked like Holly Hobby. I appeared innocent. I seemed naive. And I was fully aware of the power of that fact.
Not long into my early teen years I moved on to midnight rendezvous at the end of the driveway with those same kids, now bootlegging mom’s homemade rhubarb wine from the attic. We sat in the moonlight on those cool summer evenings, sharing a quarter cup…we dare not risk taking more, as the five gallon glass jug was well watched…and praying we’d make it back up the drive without our parents noticing. Not an easy task since darkness never comes to an Alaskan summer.
And like the gateway drug, those traipses through the neighborhood with childhood friends, though innocent in their own way, led to more dangerous outings as I entered my teen years.
Not a party did I miss. Not a weekend night went by when I could not be seen…if only my parents had looked out just once…scaling my window ledge, sprinting across the front yard and into the woods beyond. I’d meet my friends…my boyfriends…at a prearranged spot, whisper our plans as we coasted the car down the drive, and disappear for hours at a time. Doing what…I’ll never tell.
And when I spied that empty bed where my son should lay, all those memories flashed before me. Late night drunken parties…boys…back seats…pot pipes and rum bottles. Bong hits, keg shots and menthol cigarettes in the woods near my house. I remember it all…whether I want to or not.
So am I a hypocrite? Do as I say, not as I do? Probably. But the moral of the story is … it was that quarter cup of rhubarb wine that eventually led me to a pink plus sign on a little white stick at sixteen years old. It was that first sneak, that first tok, that first sip…that stole my youth, scarred my innocence, and left me dropped-out and divorced with a toddler on my hip before those wine drinking buddies of mine, who by some miracle didn’t end in my shoes, even graduated from high school.
And for my kids, I simply want a better life.
