Mom’s Deafening Silence.

I had a law enforcement training officer many years ago who taught me when you stop an offender, you do one of two things. You either arrest them or warn them and chew them out for the offense… You never do both.

Over the years I followed that advice, even into my present job as a municipal judge. When a defendant comes before and they are found guilty, I either lecture them and give them a lower level punishment or I give them a more serious punishment and send them on their way. I rarely do both. The elevated type of fine or jail time I allow to speak for themselves as punishment.

Mom had a version of this that she used sometimes when I was growing up.

As a 17 or 18 year old boy, most of my injuries or troubles were self-inflicted somehow. I was more concerned with girls and driving too fast than to consider the consequences. On top of that was the fact that I was child number 6 in a family of 7 children. By the time I became a teenager, my parents had seen it all and heard every excuse possible.

Mom realized the futility of trying to control a teenage boy much of the time. I think she was just plain tired out by the time she got to number 6. She figured if I survived the experience, then hopefully I would learn a lesson from it.

Mom had this wonderful way of acting like she didn’t notice when I screwed up. An outsider might think she was naive, but in reality she’d been through it all before and so she just wasn’t shocked anymore. She knew very well what I’d done, but could see that I was suffering because of my screw-up and figured that the experience was the best punishment as well as teacher.

In the spring of 1984 I was dating a girl from a neighboring town. She was Catholic and I was Methodist. At that stage in my life (18 years old) the big difference was that it was ok for them to drink and not so much for us Methodists.

One Saturday in late spring I attended the wedding of one of my girlfriends sisters. It was a big old fashioned church wedding in the town of Nortonville, Kansas. After the wedding, as was the custom, they had cake and pictures directly following the service. The difference from my Methodist experience, was that in the evening they had a wedding dance. There was music, dancing, and alcohol. The first two were just fine, but the third was not acceptable, not just to Methodists, but to the Methodist Pastor and his family.

I remember going to the dance, which was crowded and loud. Everyone was there from the area because wedding dances were a huge social event in small-town Kansas. There wasn’t a lot to do, so the wedding dance was a big event where you saw a lot of folks you knew.

I sat down at the long table which had been claimed by the girlfriend’s family. She had several brothers who had been very nice to me over the months of dating their sister. I was sort of like a strange pet or oddity which they enjoyed showing off to people. They always introduced me to people as the Methodist Preachers Kid.

After all these years I don’t remember her brothers names, but I’ll never forget one of them stepping up to the table and setting in front of me a full bottle of Southern Comfort whisky. With a big smile he announced that this was to be my bottle for the night and that I needed to enjoy myself. I was half stunned and half delighted at his apparent generosity. The other members of the family then chimed in and told me to have a good time.

Now those of you who know me or have read some of my earlier stories will know that I was already a drinker of beer. In fact, in 1984 Kansas it was still legal for an 18 year old to drink beer, but not whiskey. So my experience level concerning hard liquor was more limited.

Now I don’t want you to get the idea that my parents were on board with any of this. It was a very strict rule that I wasn’t supposed to be drinking, regardless of the type of alcohol. All they knew was that I was going to a wedding and dance. They never went to wedding dances, so they weren’t too familiar with the alcohol part so much.

At the dance I was having a great time. I was mixing that whiskey with soda pop and doing the occasional shot when a relative would hold up a glass and yell “time for a shot”. That is when you took a large drink of straight whiskey, either from a glass or the bottle itself. The night went on and eventually became a drunken blur.

My last memory of the dance was two of my girlfriends brothers holding me up and taking me to the car. One drove my car with me in the passenger seat and the other driving his own car.

It was very late Saturday night, early Sunday morning, that they rang the doorbell of the parsonage and my mother came to the door. As you came through the front door yu were in a hallway with a small bathroom at the end of the hall. The brothers helped drag me as far as the bathroom which is when I began to throw up.

The brothers then left and it was just me and mom in that little bathroom. My body revolted against me that night to such a degree that I probably lost weight from all the throwing up I did.

Mom just stood there and said how sorry she was that I seemed to have picked up such a bad stomach bug. She had me just lay on the floor of that bathroom for the rest of the night. Eventually, the next morning, I climbed onto the couch.

Suffer????

You bet.

I felt like I actually had the flu for the next couple days, when in fact it was a severe hangover. Mom would come into the room and ask how I felt and comment on how it was just too bad that I had to catch the flu and let it spoil the dance and the next couple of days on the couch.

She would have this sort of smirk or slight grin on her face which told me that she might be acting oblivious to what I had done, but in reality she knew exactly what I had done.

I, for that matter, knew that there was no way that she didn’t know that I was obviously drunk and on the edge of alcohol poisoning. She’d seen and smelled enough kids throwing up to recognize the odor of alcohol.

So I laid there, waiting for the hammer to drop and my life to become very unhappy at the hands of mom.

To my surprise, and consternation, she said not a word about alcohol or being falling down drunk. Every time she’d come in and check on me, she would have that slight, ever-knowing, smile on her face. It made my suffering that much more exquisite.

Mom didn’t chew me out or even discuss too much about what had happened. She knew that I had suffered a great deal of punishment from the ordeal. She also knew that it was of my own doing and that chewing me out wasn’t near as good a teacher or punishment as the night on that bathroom floor.