Thoughts on Growing Up Inappropriately

The thing about growing up under inappropriate circumstances is that often, you don’t realize you did.

When I was nine or ten a friend and I, not to be discouraged upon finding her Mom’s stash empty, tried to smoke oregano. We did not get high. We did feel slightly more italian. I kid, I kid. I never realized this was not something all the other kids I knew were doing until many years later. It was normal.

My own daughter, at approximately that same age now, barely knows drugs exist. She’s seen the commercials for a drug free America, and we’ve discussed legal drug use with her — alcohol and tobacco, mostly in passing — but if she heard you talking about weed or pot or mary jane or even marijuana she wouldn’t have a clue what you were talking about, let alone that some of the herbs in our kitchen cabinet might be used as an ineffective substitute in a pinch. Or that trying to make said substitute work could keep her and one of her friends busy for an entire evening if they had a camper in the front yard to themselves. She thinks normal is still climbing trees, riding her bike and begging me for graphic tees with fluffy rabbits wearing sparkly glasses on them.

And she’s right. At her age, that is normal. That should be normal.

But I still worry.

You see, at ten I may have tried to smoke oregano but at twelve I snorted cocaine. And it wasn’t because I grew up under inappropriate circumstances, no matter how true that is. I snorted cocaine when I was twelve because while I knew what cocaine was, it never occurred to me that it would be in the bathroom of a family I knew like my own.

For my birthday that year my aunt had bought me a whole set of those bath powders that smell like roses and lilacs and lavender. The kind that come wrapped in gold foil. I loved those bath scents. To make them last I’d break them up into a bowl and add just half a block to my bath at once. I’d keep the rest of it — now a fine white powder with a strong, scrumptious smell — in that bowl until the next night.

One Saturday night, while babysitting for the same family I did almost every other weekend for much of my adolescence, I decided to use the master bathroom instead of the restroom in the hall between the kids’ bedrooms. I’d already tucked them into bed, and I didn’t want to wake them. On a shelf in that bathroom was a resealable bowl filled with white powder. I wondered what it smelled like; lilacs? Roses? Lavender? Maybe they had a scent I didn’t!

I brought the bowl to my face and sniffed. Strongly.

And I am not exaggerating when I say I have never had a headache in my life more intense than the one that came on almost immediately thereafter. It lasted for what seemed like ever, and then, I passed out on their sofa. They woke me at four in the morning, when they got home, and to my knowledge never did suspect that I was anything but sleeping.

We could spend all day examining everything that was wrong with that scenario — things that, had they been addressed, probably would have prevented even this from ever happening — why did my mother continually allow me to babysit for a family that routinely came home at four in the morning and then drove me home after having been out drinking (and in hindsight, doing drugs) all night? You know, just for instance. But that’s not really the point, I don’t think.

Because for as many things as my having grown up under highly inappropriate circumstances spurred, one of the most dangerous things of all was actually caused by a lack of inappropriate knowledge, by a naivete that was normal of a child my age. Why would a child of twelve think that a bowl full of cocaine would be sitting out on the bathroom counter at a home where she regularly babysat? Why wouldn’t she expect a white powder that looked exactly like the bath powders she’d been gifted her birthday to smell like flowers in springtime?

And that, is perhaps the scariest thing about parenting my own children now. Not having grown up inappropriately and knowing that kids with both knowledge and motives far beyond their years are lurking among their peers, but knowing that growing up normally, knowing that being innocent, being young, being blissfully and normally naive could, under the right circumstances, be far more dangerous to them. And there’s nothing I can do about that.

Tagged as: Childhood, Children, Daughters, Drugs, Growing Up, kids, parenting, Parenting Daughters