Crasstalk Parenting: Mildred will make you stop drinking

I was kidding around on a past post about how I will punish my children when (I know it’s not an if, they’ll try it) I catch them drinking. Someone pointed out in the comments that not much will stop a teenager from drinking. That’s almost universally true. But there is one glaring exception and that exception is my mother.

My mother has been a teacher for something like 45 years and when I was in high school, she taught at a Catholic high school (she still teaches there at the age of 80 and any of her current students will tell you that she’s still as scary as ever). The nuns have nothing on my mom in terms of intimidation. Mildred has it down to a science. I didn’t actually attend my mother’s high school. She mercifully allowed me to attend the public high school. My brother got into trouble and had to go to my mom’s school and actually had her as a teacher. But I was allowed off the hook.

Like every other teenager on the planet, I tried drinking. Unfortunately, I wasn’t very good at it and made a huge strategic error early on in my drinking career. I and two of my friends got drunk at a high school dance. When I say “drunk”, I mean “annihilated”. With typical teenage savvy, we decided that we would split two full bottles of vodka between the three of us. Clearly this proves that we were not experienced drinkers because no one who has ever had a red wine headache would consider drinking that much alcohol. We got busted almost immediately, probably because none of us could walk and at least 2 of us were in the bathroom puking up pure alcohol.

They called our parents who had the privilege of picking up their shitfaced daughters at a high school on Friday night. My two friends were told that the raging hangovers were their punishments. However, things went a bit differently for me.

Here are some of the procedures Mildred put in place to dissuade me from doing any more underage drinking:

• A 3 hour lecture at 6 am the following morning while I had what is still the worst hangover of my life (and that includes college)
• Grounding for a full month and in Mildred’s house, that meant no tv, no phone, no leaving the house other than for school and church
• Many, many Catholic masses
• An AA meeting
• A detailed report on alcoholism (researched at the library)
• I was suspended and had to spend the time working for my grandfather. Sweatshop owners have nothing on my grandfather when it came to making people work.
• During the week of Christmas break, I had to report to the janitor at the high school and help clean graffiti off the walls. I also got to clean toilets in the gym.
• I had to attend counseling meetings with two dimwitted teachers at the high school. They’d each taken a psychology class in college and felt qualified to diagnose my family as dysfunctional based on the fact that I, a teenager, had drank alcohol.
• Sniff tests every time I walked through the door for the next year.

Now, I’m not going to lie and say that I never again did any underage drinking, but I cut waaaaaaaay back after that incident. Especially in high school. College is another story entirely.