Pass it to the left…

No child should have to hear her parent say, “Yo, bring me my bong.”

Last night Drama Queen and I were in the car with my neighbor. We we’re heading towards home around 8:15 when the neighbor suddenly blurted, “Let’s stop at Papa John’s on the way home and get a couple of slices.”
I paused for a second and said, “Uh…OK. I guess if you want to.” There are several great pizza places around Redlands and Papa John’s isn’t one of them. Their pizza sucks. Maybe in another part of the country they would be pretty good, but not around Redlands. There are too many awesome pizza joints for me to waste my time on Papa John’s.
“OK,” she said. “Hey! There’s this place right up the street from here that I’ve been dying to try. Let’s stop there.” I asked if she meant Giovanni’s and she said yes. I’ve never tried it, but have heard good things. I was totally down with stopping there.
They were out of slices for the night, so we decided to order a small pizza and have them throw it in two separate boxes so we could eat at our respective places of residence. We sat down at a table to BS while we waited for the pizza. What I heard at that table absolutely blew my mind.
My neighbor teaches adult education (GED classes) in Fontana and, as you can imagine, she has some pretty interesting students. She told us of a conversation she had this afternoon with one of her students. I know I shouldn’t be shocked by this, but for some reason I kinda am.
This particular student came into the room and my neighbor said, “Hey…how you doing?” The reply is classic. “Better now. I just smoked a blunt in the parking lot.”
Yeah. She said she was doing OK because she just toked up a fattie in the school parking lot. Nice.
The two started conversing about her marijuana use and somehow it came up that not only does she smoke in front of her 11, 13 and 15 year old girls, but she also smokes WITH her 13 and 15 year olds.
Where do I start? How about we start with the 11-year-old. No child should have to hear her parent say, “Yo, bring me my bong. No. Not that one. Bring me the tall one. Yep. Thanks. Got a lighter?”
A lot of parents won’t buy cell phones for their kids until they’re 15, yet this mom rolls blunts with her 13-year-old. I sense a very different parenting style here. Very, very different.
What kind of a Sweet 16 party does a mom like this throw? Maybe at 16 the daughter gets a meth pipe. “Time to graduate, baby.” Mom probably goes so far as to introduce her daughter to Tommy, a local meth dealer who’s giving her the first hit for free. As a birthday gift.
What criteria does she use for determining when her children are ready for their first puff? Do their grades have to slip enough that mom feels they’re well on their way to being a full time slacker or is it strictly an age thing? I’m really not sure.
With a mom like this, there’s no telling how these girls will turn out. There’s a high probability that they will be all kinds of messed up. I hope not. Fingers crossed.
This might be a good time to mention that the students my neighbor teaches are all placed in her class by social services. These people are all receiving public assistance of some kind and since they don’t have a high school diploma, they attend school instead of job hunting.
That means the weed was paid for by the people of California. With our tax dollars. I helped buy that chick and her daughters weed. No one invited me to the party. I wouldn’t attend, but if I helped pay for it, an invite would be nice.
I’m totally shaking my head right now. I can’t believe this is a true story. But it is. Every time I wonder if I’m being a good parent, I hear stories like this that tell me I’m doing OK.



P.S. For the record, the pizza was pretty damn awesome.