do as I say...

not as I do. That was our family motto. My father made a mosaic table once which we used as our coffee table when I was growing up. He invented a family crest and my mother, who was into ceramics at the time, did a small banner with that saying on it in gold paint that was included in the crest. I always thought it to be hypocritical.

The summer before my senior year in high school, I smoked pot for the first time. It made me nauseous and I actually threw up a little. You'd think that that would have been enough to put me off it from then on but I am not so easily put off and it never made me sick again. And like everyone who smoked pot in the late 60s and early 70s, we knew from the first that we were being lied to. It wasn't addicting and it didn't make you go insane.

During my senior year (that would be 1967/1968) I became familiar with an underground that I barely knew existed before. I started wearing beads, seed beads that I had strung myself, and that alone attracted some unwanted attention. I say unwanted because I spent my entire high school years trying to keep a low profile. At first it was to avoid the girl bullies that I suffered from in middle school but later it was so as to not attract the attention of the teachers and administrators. I just wanted to graduate, just get the hell out, without any trouble so I never smoked before or during school and I refused to have sex with my boyfriend. That was trouble I had no intention of courting. (Meanwhile, the 'cool' kids, the ones my parents wanted me to hang with, were getting drunk, getting pregnant and getting caught.) I just didn't need that kind of grief in my life. I was getting plenty from my unhappy parents as it was.

Since my father was a doctor I heard every horror story connected to drugs that he ever encountered in his attempt to convince us (myself and my siblings) to stay on the straight and narrow. What he didn't know was that I had already slipped from that path. That was also the year that I learned just how hypocritical he and my mother were.

My mother's bedside table drawer had always had pill bottles in it but I didn't know what they were and never really gave it any thought. About midway through my senior year I was rummaging around in it for some reason, probably my mother had asked me to get something out of it for her, and all of a sudden I realized what was in those pill bottles. She had tuinal, seconal, nembutal and valium. I knew the first three as christmas trees, reds and yellow jackets, barbiturates all and though I never got into pills, didn't take them, my mother was a pill head and my father was her supplier. From then on anything they had to say about drug use fell on deaf ears.

I finally broke up with my boyfriend during my senior year because the pressure to have sex was becoming too great. Neither did I take any other drugs. I did eventually have sex after I graduated (a random choice) and I did acid for the first time at my senior prom but those are different stories.