Tra La.

So, the highlights of my 9th grade year were the Quaalude incident and the arrest for possession of marijuana. I know, I know. You guys were winning trophies for cheerleading or working on your Girl Scout badges or something. What can I say? I was special.

I'm going to gloss over the rest of it because quite frankly it causes me some anxiety to even think about that part of my life.

But you might like to hear about the hippie high school that my parents sent me to in a desperate attempt to help me find my way. Yeah. Find my way to MORE WEED. It was called The Eberhard School, and it only enrolled around 50 kids. It described itself as "a college preparatory school for intelligent underachievers." My friend's mother described it as "an expensive school for kooks."

We were allowed to smoke cigarettes in class and go to school barefoot. Technically, we weren't allowed to go out and get high at lunch time but we often did. And when I carpooled with John and Mary Mac we would sometimes get high on the way to school.

Don't look at me like that! It took the sting off that 9am geometry class! Which I barely passed! I wonder why!

One time a bunch of us got high with our English teacher, Marie, but not during school hours.

There was a school secretary who got fired for dealing marijuana, but that was a year or so before I went to school there. There's a great story behind that but it's not mine to share. Maybe Josh will tell you.

High school, by the way, was where I met Josh. He was one of the few kids in the entire school who didn't get high. He wore a cowboy hat and signed all his papers "John Wayne" or sometimes simply "Duke." He was the star quarterback of our school's football team, the Eberhard Screaming Eagles.

So, I made it through high school and I did a little college and I did a year in California where I behaved like a person without a lick of sense in her head.

Eventually I straightened up and turned my attention to Josh. And, tra la, we lived happily ever after.

A few thoughts--

• I don't think that youthful experimentation with drugs is harmless. I think I was really lucky to come through relatively unscathed.
• I think weed saps initiative and motivation and puts you in an unhealthy fog. And in my case, it was a gateway drug. Maybe your experience was different.
• My parenting was different because of my adolescence. I had more than the average amount of anxiety about my daughters' adolescences. Hell yes, I hovered. 

I have a lot of empathy for troubled teens. A young person engaged in risky behavior has arrived at that place through some unique combination of circumstance and personality. They need help. Don't be too quick to judge them.

Comments

[Paula]

Great post! I especially love the last two paragraphs.

I am totally stealing "intelligent underachiever." It sounds so much better than "lazy fucker."

[Karenth]

Last two paragraphs reassure us that you sure do know how to get in touch with your "inner teacher" in a hurry, Miz S!

[Liza Lee Miller]

Good follow-up. Yes, it's important to laugh at ourselves but it's also important to learn from our mistakes (or regrets). I am a hovering, over-protective mom because I was a latch-key kid from 3rd through 6th grades. My mom had no real choice in the matter so we made it work. However, I consider it a true miracle that my sister and I survived to adulthood. Perhaps only because my mom remarried and my stepdad worked at home and we had much more supervision from 6th through 12th grades. Perhaps. Anyway, I'm not risking it. :) Love your line, "Hell, yes, I hovered." And, love that you didn't apologize. I don't apologize for my hovering, either. Mostly.

[Sue]

Great post. I grew up in that same era. My best friend/cousin smoked weed every day, but for some reason, I never wanted to. I hung around her while she did it, but I didn't. Things seem so much less complicated in 1973 than they do now. My cousin went away to college, I stayed back in our little podunk town. My cousin got into the drug scene, heavily, but still managed to graduate and become a nurse. I got a good job, got drunk every single weekend with my friends, married my high school boyfriend when I was way too young (21), and built a house 3 miles outside of our podunk town. We still live there and have been married for 30 years! (Boy, I'm old.) My cousin worked in Philly as a nurse in a burn center, and still did drugs. She died of a brain tumor when she was 40. I miss her every single day. Sorry for such a long comment, but 1970-75 just seemed so much simpler than today. Nobody judged you if you did or didn't do what they were into. So there, you got a little bit of my teenage years. Kinda boring.

[Pam L]

First of all... a high school with 50 kids had a football team??? My sons HS of about 2300 has around 150 kids on the football teams, JV & Varsity.

Anyway, yes, way different times. My Dad, as I mentioned, was a teacher at my HS. One day he told me he did not think pot was that bad. Can you imagine a parent/ teacher saying that to their child now? How did we survive? I remember driving through the woods after my boyfriend and I did "reds" and thinking I wasn't going to make it home. But I did. In college, art school really, we would walk home for lunch, get high and not go back for the afternoon some days because it was only a drawing class. None of these qualities in me would I like to see passed on to my kids. Luckily they didn't. As I said my older son is and always was, totally anti-drug and my younger one seems that way too. He takes ADHD meds so has to be really careful, a coffee could be too much for him when they are in his system. One day in middle school I got a call from the nurse that some kid had handed out No-Doze, or something similar to kids and Paul's name came up. When confronted he told her he had taken it from the kid but decided it would be stupid to actually ingest so dropped it by the fence and when he took her there the pill was still there. Thank god. I can't imagine what he would have been like had he swallowed it. The only good thing that came from our 1970's days is my husband and I know what to look for, smell for etc. Today Meth is the thing I would worry about. It is so addictive and fast. The police officers who are parents in my son's Scout troop who did the DARE lectures for us necessary for rank advancement (the schools don't do them anymore) told us the 90% of the crimes they investigate these days are Meth related whether they are robberies, deals, deals gone bad eg: assualt, murder etc, check fraud , you name it...90%. Yes, pot is bad but there is some other really bad stuff out there. These days more than one glass of wine is too much for me and we never drink and drive, ever.

[Laura/DaPFG]

DUDE!! after all of this, i have a question for you. my boyfriend's niece just turned 18 last night, and her mother was allowing her to go to a hookah lounge to celebrate. thoughts? just curious :P

[Heidi]

ESK(tm): Expensive School for Kooks. Hee! And Josh was a kook, too? Who knew?

Aside from a few keggers here and there, I pretty much steered clear of altering my mind in high school. Instead I made the brilliant (BRILLIANT!) decision to get married at 18 to someone in his mid-twenties who smoked enough pot to make up for me and six of your closest friends. And life slid downhill from there. Ah, youth.

Oh, and Pam L, I grew up in Washington state.

[Wende]

I'm reading your past and frankly, am fascinated. Not for the details as much as your willingness to have a walk-about in the pages that give you anxiety without torching it all in flames. It seems to me, your past has served you well.

[maddy]

Some of the high school parties I went to were more extreme in terms of alcohol and drugs than anything I've seen since. I would not want my kids to experience that. So I hear ya...

[Ree]

You know the best thing? Is that you're now a teacher who can steer her students to a different direction than they may otherwise have gone.

[Paula]

ACK! I didn't mean YOU were a lazy fucker! I mean I'm going to call my SON an intelligent underachiever now instead of a lazy fucker.

Mea culpa. That didn't come out right in my first comment.

[Margaret]

My exploits during that period of my life would put people to sleep. I had a goal to read a whole book every day during 9th grade and did so. (my crowning achievement) I gave Nerd a whole new meaning.

[blackbird]

In my house we don't judge young people. It's a rule.
Young people are not fully formed - they are still finding their way and it is not our business to criticize their paths.
Really.
Sadly, there are plenty who will/do judge my young people.

I know.
I'm a saint.

[Anne]

Hey, that's where I met Josh, too! C'mon, Mary, let's see the group graduation photo. And I think there's one floating around of Josh in full western/briefcase regalia, isn't there?

Guess what? I had lunch at the Grubb Road deli just this past Tuesday!

And Owen? What's up with Owen? He was my favorite teacher during my brief sojourn at Eberhard. He taught something about China, and the Cultural Revolution.

Ah, and then there were the volleyball games . . .

Yep, you really nailed the times in which we lived back then.

[FC]

Wild thang!
I like your closing. I agree completely ... even though my past was less chemically enhanced than yours.

[Kimberly]

Josh was your knight in shining armor (that also got you off the crack rock) ...ahhhh, so romantic ;-)

Seriously, I think it's wonderful that you actually learned form your past. Some people I know are still using alcohol & drugs to get over theirs. That's not as good for the kiddos.

[vicki]

No wonder you're so charmed with the Snarl. "They laugh alike, they walk alike, At times they even talk alike -- You can lose your mind, they're two of a kind!"

Ya, ya. Just getting caught up. Love you.