Busted

Mom wasn't feeling well that Sunday, so she stayed home from church. But even when she was sick, she wasn't good at just doing nothing, so while the rest of us were gone, she decided to empty the trash cans.

When she came to my room, there were torn pieces of paper in my trash can, and she saw “Mom” written on one of them. I guess she just couldn't resist. We had a difficult relationship, and I had done all I could to shut her out of my life my whole adolescence. I’m sure she wondered what was really going on with me, beyond the surface that I let her see.

So she pieced together the puzzle that was my torn-up letter. Today, the advice is, “never send anything in email that you wouldn't want to read on the front page of the paper.” The advice I needed then, in those pre-email days, was “if you write a letter to your friend in college, don't tear it up and leave in your trash can for your mom to find.”

There were probably three or four things in that letter that I really didn't want her to know about. But the thing guaranteed to send my mother off the deep end was that I mentioned getting drunk. The legal drinking age back then had recently been raised to 19, but even had it been legal for me to be in possession of alcohol, drinking was a big no-no in our household. My parents didn't drink, and if anybody else in the extended family drank, they hid it well. Drinking was wrong, period.

There was a big scene, of course, or at least what passed for a big scene in our house. First, my mom called my dad back into their bedroom to discuss what she'd found, then I was summoned and confronted with the evidence. This was not a calm, reasoned discussion of why they thought drinking was wrong, nor was the legality of my action much of an issue. Drinking was wrong, period, and I was drinking, so what else was I doing? What drugs was I taking? Who was I sleeping with? How could I do this to them, and with Dad a deacon? How could I do this and then go sit in church on Sunday? Maybe I didn’t deserve to go to college. Maybe all I was good for was waiting tables.

I reacted the way I always did. I lied about what I thought I could get by with, and shut up about everything else. “The Silent Treatment”, my parents called it. There wasn't much point in doing anything else. Trying to defend myself would only make my mom angrier; “don't talk back to me!” I just went into survival mode; eventually, if I didn't give her anything new to feed on, she’d wind down. I admitted to no more drinking than had been revealed in that letter, though I had been drinking for close to two years by then. My goal was to get out of there with my ability to go away to college that fall intact; I had a couple of scholarships, which helped a lot, but didn't cover all my expenses.

And they were threatening not to help with college, were threatening to not let me go a hundred miles away to the college where I had the scholarships. I was only 5 months away from starting college, and getting some room to breathe, so I was going to do whatever it took to not lose that. So I quit drinking; I didn't drink for the next 5 months. Even though I had been able to hide it for two years, been able to walk in the house drunk and maintain enough control to not get caught, I couldn't risk it under their roof now.

It took me two years, but after two years of college and working in the summer and saving my money, I no longer needed their support for college. Never again would they be able to use money to threaten me.

They taught me to manage my money wisely. I graduated from college without any debt. I always paid my credit cards in full each month. I didn’t spend money that I didn’t have. Even today, the only money I owe to anyone is mortgage debt.

I didn’t ask them for help with the down payment, either.