Throwback to when I was grounded on St Valentine’s Day
A secret transcontinental phone call on why giving the present first may not work as intended.
Me: “Did I tell you my friend C from High School had his second baby?”
Mother: “C? Wasn’t he dating your best friend back in high school?”
“Yeah they were together for a bit, but then he broke up with her on St. Valentine’s day. No wait… He didn’t break up with her. He gave her the present first!”
“What present?”
“It doesn’t matter. He did it because P told him to do that! It’s all coming back.”
“What does P have to do with them breaking up?”
“They didn’t break up. P was the Dungeon Master and C wanted to play D&D on Valentine’s Day, but he was dating A and he knew she’d be pissed. So P told him to give her the present first so she wouldn’t be mad.”
“And was she mad?”
“Darn right, she was! That’s why we went out drinking on St Valentine’s night and you had to drive us back home drunk.”
“Oooh it was THAT night!”
“Yes! You grounded me until June and it was all P’s fault. Classic.”
“You weren’t drunk though, right? I remember her being in a horrible state, not you.”
“Well, in the spirit of sharing, and also because it’s been 20 years: I was pretty drunk. We took a sip after insulting C with every letter of the alphabet.”
“Every lett… Barbara! That’s why I grounded you! That’s not how you care for your best friend when she’s down.”
“Would you like to know what we called him for letter V? And by the way, you grounding me was unfair because she was allowed to go out the following weekend.”
“You did too!”
[Audible gasp]
“Excuse me? I went to the neighbour’s birthday at her house. I crossed a hallway without technically going outside. She invited me weeks prior and, as we learned, you did not raise a flakey friend. I didn’t leave anyone alone on St Valentine’s night. I’m there for my friends from A to Z.”
Why was this conversation relevant? Other than the timing of it, also because this article somehow reminded me of what I thought when I sobered up, the day after that night, and had to come to terms with the reality of the situation. I was grounded.
Just like @gabrielanguyen outlined talking about Social Media apps, I had to consider hard but essential questions. What and who did I actually care about? What was the best way to spend my life? Who was I? And, most importantly, what to do with my newfound Saturday Night Freedom?
She didn’t ask that last question.
She advised writing down our deepest fears with the process of uninstalling Social Media apps, our reason for leaving, and realistic analog activities we could do instead of scrolling. I didn’t have any deep fears about being grounded. I saw all my friends in school every day, but going out on Saturday was the focus of my social life!
I should probably disclose that while drinking at that age was not technically legal, we knew the bartender because we’d been going to that pub for years. This doesn’t help my cause, I know.
This happened in February, obviously, and I was supposed to be under lockdown until June. June! That was 4 months away. 16 whole weekends!
I tried to come up with a list of sixteen Saturday night activities I could do instead of going out. Playing The Sims, watching TV, and reading easily accounted for three-quarters of the list.
When I returned from my neighbour’s birthday I sat my mother down and explained how her uncharacteristic choice to ground me would be detrimental to our trust and my ethos.
Ethical reasons against being grounded:
My job was doing well in school and not talking to strangers and I was great at both.
It was my first offence.
Considering that my friend’s mother did not punish her, my grounding was simply not fair. She just had a 10 pm curfew, and she was the one passed out.
I’d already accepted the invitation to my neighbour’s birthday party at her house, which technically did not involve me physically going outside. A last-minute cancellation due to alcohol consumption would have reflected poorly on my mother.
As her favourite daughter and only child, I thought I deserved special treatment.
She caved immediately. She said she appreciated the maturity of my response and I was allowed to have my social life back.
What I didn’t know until this phone call, was that she called one of her sisters who may or may not have told her that grounding kids was useless and that I’d already faced the grim consequences of a wild night. There was no need to create more resentment, especially since we had good foundations of trust. After all, I showed up at our meeting point on time carrying a passed-out girl and asking to take her home. That’s a responsible behaviour.
Both me and my mother needed that transcontinental phone call to come clear and to blame it all on P and his stupid present theory.
After that, my mother asked if she was keeping me on the phone because I mentioned I was out shopping. She thought I was physically holding a phone to my ear, lingering around the till instead of paying because I couldn’t use my hands or talk to the cashier.
“Cashier? What is this, Italy? We’re in a modern city with self-checkouts. We don’t like talking to real human beings here. We’d rather scream at machines while telling secrets in foreign languages nobody understands…”
I glanced around me circumspectly.
Directly from the archives, please enjoy this authentic photographic evidence:
lol...deserve special treatment. I wished I could teleport back in my late teens and tell my mom that to prevent me from being punished/grounded multiple times.
Somehow the elder sister feeling got me thinking you’ve never even touched a drop of alcohol because you’re a baby in my head and now I’m crashing into the reality of things (you’re not a baby, I’m not young anymore, our mothers are still upset about our teenage alcoholic SPORADIC events)