Buzzkill

As a parent, you sometimes know when you have totally screwed up, the kind of screw up that your child might bring up in therapy as an adult. You never intend to do permanent damage to your offspring, and yet, just by happenstance or plain not thinking, you go and say or do something that once out there, you can’t take back. If you are anything like me, and hopefully you aren’t, you beat yourself up over these parenting blunders. I can’t seem to remember that I am allowed to make mistakes as a parent, that just because my children might occasionally think I am an expert on many things and fairly infallible, that doesn’t make it true. I screw up just as much as the next mom, with alarming frequency. If parenting were a paid position, I don’t know how well I would fair at my next performance review.

The other afternoon, I picked up my daughters from day camp and drove them home. On the way, they took turns telling me about their days. My younger daughter, S, gave her usual report of who got in trouble and what she didn’t like, saving the good positive parts of the day to share later with her father at the dinner table. She is only nine and she already knows how to filter her information to avoid conflict and elicit sympathy.

My older daughter, E, was not quite as coherent in her retelling of the day. She had gone on a field trip that day to a nasty little kid spot called GattiTown. It is one of those pizza buffet and arcade houses, a huge box with no windows, neon patterned carpets, and no supervision. It’s like Chuck E. Cheese without the giant mouse and ball pit, catering to the older child with ADHD. Even I get stimulus overload in that place, which is why about three years ago I put a moratorium on going there with my family.

E had every intention of relating several good stories about her field trip to me, but every time, and I mean every time, she began a sentence, she would mumble out two or three words, then sort of toss her head around and laugh. I drove along, patiently waiting for her to make even a bit of sense, but that never happened. She would start talking and stop, laugh some more, mumble, her head lolling loosely on her neck. At one point, she became quiet and rested her head on the window with her eyes closed. I turned the music up to indicate our attempted conversation was over.

I thought I recognized that behavior in my eleven year old child. It was reminiscent of being stoned, a kid version of high as a kite, and it scared the hell out of me.

When we got inside the house, I waited for my younger daughter to slink upstairs and park her ass in front of the television before I confronted E.

“I need to ask you a question,” I said to her. “Can you come here for a second?”

“What?” she said, standing next to me by the kitchen counter.

“I am a little concerned about the way you were acting in the car just now,” I said. “Did you or any of your friends take anything on your field trip?”

“Take anything? Like steal? No, Mom,” she said.

“I don’t mean stealing, I mean drugs. Did anything give you anything to taste or swallow or sniff or anything like that today? Or did you see your friends sniff or swallow anything?”

E immediately sobered up, or, rather, woke up. “Mom, you think I’m on drugs? Why would you think that?”

“You are just acting really weird, not at all like yourself. I’ve never seen you this disoriented or incoherent. And you don’t act that way when you’re tired. So I asked.”

“I can’t believe you would think I would do a thing, like that! Gosh, Mom.”

Yes, she said “Gosh.” E speaks like Napoleon Dynamite on an alarmingly frequent basis, considering she has never seen the movie or that character.

She looked at me, her eyes all watery and on fire. “Don’t you trust me? I can’t believe this.”

“I do trust you,” I said to her. “But you’ve been at a field trip all day in a dark, unsupervised building with a bunch of teenagers. Then you get in the car and you can’t string two words together. I’ve never seen you act like this, but I have seen plenty of adults act like this, and they were either drunk or on something. I don’t smell alcohol on your breath, so I asked.”

She glared at me and stormed upstairs, and I stood alone in the kitchen, wondering how I could have handled that better. Was I overreacting? Was it fair for me to ask her? Was she being honest with me? Did I have any reason to doubt her?

I thought about our exchange for the rest of the afternoon, trying to get over the guilt I felt for confronting her about something for which I had no proof. She is, after all, eleven. She is a good kid, and just a kid. She doesn’t like to talk about love or sex, she doesn’t make or receive phone calls from boys, she doesn’t hang out with a rough crowd. She still likes stuffed animals. How could I make such a big leap? I apologized to her before dinner, and by dessert, the entire episode seemed forgotten.

I discussed it with my husband later that evening, trying to assuage my guilt. He sort of agreed with me, that if she acted so oddly, it was worth questioning, but he did seem to think I dramatized the whole situation. I might have; I honestly don’t know. My mommy instinct told me to ask, so I did. Maybe I didn’t handle it that great, maybe I could have been less accusatory and more understanding, maybe I was wrong. At least I cared enough to ask and was paying enough attention to notice, so that can’t be all bad.

I believe she wasn't on anything. I didn't get a blood test, but I do trust her. Maybe she was tired, and after a full day of tween talk, with all its "likes" and "ums," coherent conversation was beyond her. And perhaps next time, I won't jump to conclusions. For all I know, she might have been crashing from too much soda, which in my house we do treat like an illegal drug. I wonder if she will be as scarred as she claimed to be. She can just add it to the list of grievances about my parenting, and I, in turn, will drop another dollar into her therapy fund.