Tue 6 Jul 2010
I owled it again last nite. I guess I had too much tea at my parent’s house Monday evening after dinner. My dad serves up tea traditional Chinese style, and while chatting, you have no idea how much caffeine you’re sucking down when it comes in a one-ounce cup that constantly gets refilled. So I was awake till 5a, altho I went to bed before 2a.
One of the things swirling around my head while I was trying to get unconscious was a memory from back in ’95. It was my freshman year at UCLA. I didn’t have a car in college (cars were mostly unnecessary; we walked everywhere cuz parking’s too expensive and hard to find. My legs were awesome in college), so when I’d go home on weekends, either my mom would come pick me up after work on Friday or I’d hitch a ride from a friend going that way. I was sorta seeing (long story) an OC boy, and one weekend he offered to come by, visit, pick me up, and take me back for the weekend.
I realized when he got there Friday night that he hadn’t told his parents that he was staying over. I realized this because he borrowed my phone to call his mom fairly late that night. The conversation went something like this:
“Hey mom. Did I wake you up? …Oh, well don’t wait up, I’m not coming home tonight…. Because! I’m out! …I’m with Ryan…[I could hear his mom’s voice through the phone at this point, altho I couldn’t understand what she was saying. This is how I know he was cutting her off.] I had some beer, so I’m not gonna drive. Look, do you want me to get in my car and get pulled over on a DUI? Is that what you want? … Or do you want me to crash into someone get killed? …Well okay, then! No! I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll see you tomorrow!! BYE!!” He hung up on apparently an upset mother.
What blew me away listening to this is…
1.) We were not drinking. He did not have any beer.
2.) He LIED to his mom about drinking and about who he was with in order to stay over.
3.) I was 18 and he was 19. I certainly didn’t drink, knowing I’m underage. Did he?! Was this acceptable or normal to his parents that he would go out drinking with a buddy when he was underage?
4.) Lying about underage drinking is BETTER of an option for him than to tell his mom he’s hanging with a girl? Really???
At the time I figured it was just a white boy thing. I better not get a phone call like this one day.
It’s funny the lies we make up as adolescents thinking it will “sound better” to our parents. He was probably rationalizing the fact if he told his mom he was staying with a girl she would automatically think SEX and GRANDBABIES!!
Yeah, I guess. The irony is that we were both virgins, before, during and afterwards.
I have two reactions to this:
1. Wow- you were a good girl-I can’t claim that!
2. I thought all boys lie, not just white boys.
1. Could you tell my mom that, please? She thought I was the devilette.
2. Haha, that wasn’t about the lying, that was about the drinking. It’s rare for an Asian kid to call and say he can’t drive cuz he had some drinks, cuz what’d happen is that the parents would demand to know where he was, and they would drive out immediately and pick up the kid themselves, and while there they would yell and scream at their kid in front of everyone there, then the entire drive home the mom would be having histrionics about where she went wrong to have raised such a doomed child and life’s all over for the child AND for her now, and that she’s going to send the kid to the army or back to Asia so he could be away from all the negative influences that white-washed him to drink alchohol while underage, and this plan would soon escalate to the mom deciding to kill herself since she was apparently a worthless mother whom the boy hates which is proven by the fact that he purposely went out drinking with the intent of worrying the mother into an early grave.
…that’s why few Asian kids would ever call home and say that in lieu of “I’m with a friend, I’m tired and it’s late, can I stay over?”
I should add that another thing that stuck with me with listening to his side of the phone call was how rude he was to his mom. I wouldn’t have gotten away with that. He was like, “This is just how it is, mom. I don’t care what you think.”
BTW, my mom used to say about the drinking-and-driving prevention movies we saw in junior high as part of the curriculum, “This country is so backwards. They should be teaching, ‘NO DRINKING!’ Not ‘No Drink and Drive.’ Children your age should not be drinking at all! It’s illegal!” So I brought this up to my teacher and questioned the wisdom of teaching “Don’t drive when you drink” instead of plain ol’ “Don’t drink.” Why are the movies saying Don’t Drink & Drive? My teacher looked at me like a retard. “Because,” she said in an actual exasperated tone, “They’re trying to be REALISTIC.” Honestly, drinking & driving taught to a 13 yr old asian kid with immigrant parents was not very realistic in our world.
OMG. Maybe my mother has Asian blood-because that was her MO “in the day”. I know how to turn off her “going off” button (or better yet how to avoid conversations where it might go off). But she never went off about drinking-that was ok. I guess it is a white thing. Ha ha ha ha.
Haha! See? And to this day my parents don’t know I’m certified in bartending. Mr. W keeps starting to tell them but I keep shooting him dirty looks. I blogged about this once: http://cindy.ocliw.com/2008/04/07/close-call/ altho as recently as Sunday he started to tell my parents about my bartending the July 4th BBQ, and I shot him a look and he changed direction of his sharing in time.
I’m terrified I’m gonna find myself saying these types of overdramatic mom-rants to my kid. There’s a “turning off” button? TEACH ME!