The question posted at the end of this entry was "If you used drugs in your younger years, would you fully disclose it to your kids?" That's a good question. Being as the big kids are now teenagers, or close enough to it, I'm pondering all the questions that they may or may not ask me. I really try and be as truthful as humanly possible with them. I think kids deserve that. They don't deserve to grow up in a world totally sheltered from the harsh realities of life. This is what has produced kids whose parents go with them on job interviews and still wipe their butts when they're 30. You know, pretty much anyone under the age of 30 these days.... All that in itself is a whole different post.
Back to the topic at hand here. A few years ago when both of them went through the DARE program, Gavin asked me if I ever did drugs. He specifically listed out pretty much every drug you could imagine. Luckily what I was totally into for quite a period of time didn't appear on that list, so it amounted to me admitting that I smoked pot back in the day. I managed to wrangle Brandon into the conversation as well because I wasn't about to have this conversation twice. I answered their questions the best I could without being too descriptive. In the end, they were satisfied with my answers and that was the end of the conversation.
It did get me to thinking about back then though. I moved here in the 10th grade from a tiny town. My graduating class of around 700 here was the entire population of the high school, grades 7-12 there. I came here as a naive 14 year old who had never been exposed to drugs or drinking. I didn't party when I lived over there. I hung out with my friends at the mall and was just all around a dorky kid. You saw the pictures, I went through an ugly duckling phase from about 5th grade until the summer I moved here. There is about a one year difference in the pictures below. If I could find a damn school pic I would post it, but apparently I don't have all of those, only the ones from when we moved through graduation.
Anyways, despite my best efforts to fall into the "good" crowd when we moved here, I ended up falling in with something a whole lot lower on the social scale. I had all intentions of befriending the rich kids and pulled it off for a period of time, but I couldn't keep up with them. My parents didn't have the financial means to keep up with them I should say. My neighborhood was solidly lower middle class, and that's where I started to make friends. I have alot of great memories from that neighborhood and occasionally when I head over that way, I'll drive by the old duplex. It's a shame to see what a dump that area has become.
I've always been a floater. Someone without a core group of friends, I just floated between groups and was accepted by alot of them. Eventually, I found the group that would eventually become my core crew. Looking back on it all, I realize that if I wouldn't have met any of them, my life would be so completely different. One night I had snuck out and gone to a party and smelled it for the first time. People were smoking pot in the other room. When I walked into the room, I had a flashback smack me square in the face. Waking up when I was probably 7 or 8 to that smell when I got up in the morning. It dawned on me that my mom and her boyfriends were smoking in the house at night. Later on I realized that those cool feather hair thingys that you could buy at the fair weren't just to put in your hair, they made excellent roach clips..... That night I smoked for the first time and after that I did it pretty much every day until I found out I was pregnant 3 years later. In that three years, I pretty much fell to rock bottom. I wanted to go back to the life we had in Pennsylvania. I wanted to graduate with my friends over there. When I smoked, I didn't care that I was somewhere I didn't want to be. I almost failed the 11th grade due to my inability to a.) get to school in the morning and b.) stay there all day. By then most of my "friends" had dropped out of school, so I wanted to hang out with them, not be at school.
My parents were totally ignorant as to what was going on with me. They knew that I wanted to go back to PA, but wouldn't let me go live with my Nana and finish school there. I hated them, what I hated more was the fact that I would come home stoned, only to smell the same smell wafting out from their room as they came out to chastise me for being out past curfew. Oh well, I didn't care. I'm sure I was fucked up when B was conceived. That was the life I had chosen for myself. I didn't have any aspirations beyond graduating high school and that was only because my mother tolerated my shitty grades as long as I passed.
When people ask me what it was like to have Brandon at the age of just over 18 and then turn around and have another one a year later, I tell them the truth. Had I not gotten pregnant, I would have ended up in jail or dead. It's hard to see that from what I've written here, because I'm leaving out so much, but believe me, my life could have turned out so much worse.
So, back to the question at hand, I think I owe it to them to give them as truthful an answer as possible. Ultimately, when my kids are asked who their hero is, I want to be the first person who comes to mind, not some athlete who turned out to be fake as fuck in the long run.......
So anyways, I'm not all that thrilled with the costume. I don't know, I saw a cuter one:
I'm no furry animal lover, but that's just weird. Anywho, we wiggled ourselves in front of a group of college boys and were all set to go. The opening act had finished and it was time to just wait......and wait.......and wait....... It was 9 freaking thirty five before STP came out. The crowd was getting restless, especially the frat boys behind us. I let it go and didn't junk punch anyone because most of them were cute.
Remember, we were outside in 42 degree weather. Retards were moshing, beer was getting spilled and I was a lil unhappy. It was time to push back.... And that we did. Thank God we didn't get pulled over on the way home because I reeked like a beer. Ewwww.
