When I was 14, my parents purchased a second home, a beach house. Dad, an attorney executive, was “doing well.” My mother was what was then dubbed a “housewife,” and worked harder than anyone I knew. She never paused. A voracious reader, she only sat when reading Time or a book, or eating (“Sit down when you eat! Standing is bad for your digestion!”).
The beach house stood in a quaint, sleepy hamlet (Leucadia), subsumed now under San Diego’s “North County” (because the sprawl of San Diego just goes on and on). Our unit encompassed the right end of a triplex, cozy at less than 1500 square feet. It sat on a bluff directly over the Pacific. My three older brothers and I spent years scrambling down that bluff to a relatively unpeopled, honey-sand beach. Salt waves and briny air; seagulls, sand crabs, and kelp. Stunning.
One weekend, my brothers and I clambered to the beach, or hung out on the balcony overlooking the ocean. My parents left on a Saturday-night marital-health date, a time-honored, ritually safe time to misbehave (so long as we left no trace).
We smoked weed and got high, maybe drank; details remain fuzzy. That Saturday at the beach with my brothers, stony-eyed and giggly or serious in turns, Steely Dan and Boz Scaggs pulsing through the stereo, we discussed the marvels of the universe. The scent and surf of the mighty Pacific offered backdrop and eventually, we went to bed.
I woke Sunday to the aggravating, mechanical whir of the vacuum. I was a teen, I wanted to sleep until 11 or noon at least, but Mom was cleaning and sleep was hopeless. I growled, escaping to the bathroom as Mom whisked in to vacuum “my” room (I lucked out—the boys all had to share a tiny loft, gender standards being what they were). I finished showering and popped a tab of bubble gum into my mouth, loosening the hard core, smacking loudly, soothing and satisfying. Sweet Bazooka juice oozing over my tongue.
Then I heard Mom yell. “Di-ane!” her voice sharp, aggressive on that second syllable. I knew that yell. Not good, not good at all. Softly and warily as I could, I unfastened the bathroom door. She lurked on the opposite side, giving great meaning to the expression “in your face.”
“What’s this, what’s this?!” her eyes fired cutlasses. She shook and clutched an amber plastic pill bottle in her palm. She’d found it with that damn importuning vacuum, bumped against it far under the bed, no inch of carpet safe from her probing Electrolux.
I knew the bottle: Remnants of weed from the evening before. My mother was naïve—she had never smoked marijuana—but she was not stupid.
She seized my arm. “We’re going to talk to your father right now!” she vowed, gruffly steering me toward the balcony.
“Herb, Herb!” she warned, navigating the sliding glass doors. “Look what I found in Diane’s room,” she spat. It was as though we had pets and they’d pooped under my bed, fouling her sanitary, sacred vacuum. She shoved the amber bottle into his hands. “It’s… it’s… mari-juana!”
Dad lay on a chaise in the sun, with floppy hat and tinted shades, Sunday paper in hand (how gender-role-rife this life was!). He glanced up, absorbing Mom’s fury, my trembling, and the diminutive pill bottle. “What’s the story?” he asked, squinting up at me.
I started to lie. To blame the older brothers, my normal and usually true alibi. But this time, it wasn’t true. That bottle was mine, my pocket-sized, personal stash. I lived in Southern California and it was easy to come by. I opened my mouth.
Then closed it.
Earlier that year, my parents had gone out of town for a weekend and, for some reason, insisted I sleep home, not at a friend’s. I defied them, sleeping at my friend’s anyway, and lying about it. I was grounded—lying being the most egregious offense possible. The crime of sleeping over paled. This was the only time I was grounded, ever. Honesty and integrity were the highest values, period. They became forever instilled, thanks to Mom and Dad’s live examples and a poignant, month-long, desolate teenage grounding.
On the beach house balcony that Sunday I looked at Dad, then at the Pacific, inhaling fresh salt air for fortitude. “Yeah,” I spoke over the crashing waves. “It’s pot, we smoked it last night.” I smacked my gum, blowing a bubble and popping it, anxiously awaiting my verdict and sentence.
Dad just laughed. “Well Diane,” he chuckled, “bubble gum and pot, that’s some combination.”
“Herb!” Mom’s voice quivered with rage. She was beside herself. “She’s a juvenile delinquent! This is a disgrace!” She knew she’d lost this one, I was a model student and decent daughter. She had no case.
“Well, it’s not much,” Dad peered at the dregs in the pill bottle. “And you told the truth,” he gazed up at me. “That’s what’s most important. There’s not much we can do.”
“But Herb!—” Mom’s voice rose again.
I ducked into the house, leaving my parents to duke this one out between them. Feeling, for the moment, safe.
I make it a point not to lie. Even white lies. They can be avoided with parts of truth. I impressed this intergenerational lesson on my four children: honesty is the highest value. Through adolescence, of course they lied. But I had done all the things and knew all the tricks, so they pretty much failed. They learned dishonesty boded far worse consequences than any possible infraction. I rued their lying at first—wondered what I’d done to raise such a pack of miscreants—but as each survived adolescence, the honesty/integrity lesson (and the apocryphal weed-found-at-the-beach-house story), sunk in; it did its job.
Gratefully, they’ve learned to tell the truth even when it’s hard or awkward. The more they practice, the more natural it gets. And honesty flows easier when I don’t press, don’t make them defensive, don’t yell, “What’s this?!” like Mom did (though I certainly have).
Mom learned, and I have too. “Do you have anything to tell me?” I might ask softly. Or “What else…?” in a gentle tone, with quiet conversational space. It’s magic.
Please be honest. Tell the truth. It’s better for your digestion!
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