My Mother Let Me Drink, Smoke, and Watch Porn
By: Tracey Folly
Tags: This Happened To Me, Sexuality, Lifestyle, Culture, Parenting

My Mother Let Me Drink, Smoke, and Watch Porn

It was a strange and confusing time in my life

Photo by shannon VanDenHeuvel on Unsplash

My mother let me drink, smoke, and watch porn when I was growing up. It was a strange and confusing time in my life — and I wouldn’t change it for the world.

Drinking underage — way, way underage

The first time I got drunk, I was in the single digits. Every time I said I had a stomachache, my mother would fetch the blackberry brandy from the shelf and pour me a shot.

I don’t know whether the booze had any positive effect on my stomachache, but I definitely liked it. It wasn’t long before I learned that if I wanted to feel warm and fuzzy from the tips of my toes to the roots of my hair, I really ought to tell my mother that my stomach hurt.

My entire family had a relaxed attitude toward children and alcohol. Growing up, I was always served alcohol at family parties. Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year, birthdays, baby showers, and weddings were all occasions when I was allowed to drink without question — and that’s just my elementary school years.

By the age of twelve, my mother was calling me a lush, and I was being served alcohol in a bar run by a family friend. I would sit on a barstool in a short skirt while older men bought me drinks. If no one bought me a drink, the bartenders still served them to me for free.

I didn’t even realize it was customary to pay for drinks. They had always just appeared in front of me like magic.

We had a well-stocked liquor cabinet at home. It did not have a lock on it. While I sat at the kitchen table and did my homework, it was nothing for me to make a mixed drink — typically coffee brandy with milk — to sip while writing answers to essay questions and marveling at the way my handwriting meandered off the page as I wrote.

My mother bought me wine coolers and pints of peach schnapps. I kept the schnapps under my bed and drank it at night when I couldn’t sleep.

When my cousin came to visit, we blended booze, ice cream, and instant coffee crystals according to a recipe we found in a women’s magazine. It became our signature summer staple.

When I visited my cousin, she whipped out the blender and made frozen margaritas to drink while we watched football on television. We were in our mid-teens, and no one said a word. We also drank liberally from her father’s wine barrels, gorging ourselves on homemade wine in the basement while her parents grilled burgers and hot dogs in the back yard for dinner.

Smoking lady cigarettes

I got my first job when I was a senior in high school. In addition to earning a little pocket money, having a part-time job afforded me access to condoms and cigarettes that I stole with reckless abandon.

Providing my friends with unlimited prophylactics and smokes certainly didn’t hurt my popularity. The vast majority of the cigarettes I stole were Marlboros that I passed along to the boy I was dating at the time. He had the prettiest green eyes I’d ever seen, and free cigarettes made them sparkle like emeralds.

In addition to stealing a steady flow of Marlboro reds, I also procured vast quantities of lady cigarettes. I had a box in my bedroom filled with Capris and Virginia Slims.

When my mother found my stash of slim cigarettes, I was terrified. Instead of scolding me, she lit one from the gas burner of the kitchen stove and smoked it while regaling me with stories of the time she smoked an entire pack of cigarettes because someone told her it would make her thin.

It was the first and last time I ever saw her smoke, but she looked really happy. “Just don’t tell your father.”

She never said another word about the box of stolen cigarettes in my bedroom.

I carried cigarettes with me at all times expressly so I could ask cute boys whether they had a light. They always did.

It wasn’t long before I gave up smoking entirely. Fortunately, I never really enjoyed the experience. If I had, I have no doubt that I’d still be smoking today — with my mother’s blessing, apparently.

The problem with pornography

My mother let me watch porn. In fact, she was the one who introduced me to pornography with the same warning she’d given me about the cigarettes, “Don’t tell your father.”

The first time I watched porn, it was summer. I remember because it was hot, and we spent most of our time in the basement of our three-family home where it was cooler.

We had an old television set in the semi-finished basement equipped with a VCR — and my mother had pornography on a VHS tape.

She waffled back and forth for a minute. “I want to show you something, but I shouldn’t.” She laughed. “Oh, why not?”

I didn’t know what to expect, and I wasn’t disappointed — just confused.

My mother turned on the television and the VCR. She pulled out a VHS tape and popped it into the machine. After a few long seconds of clicking and grinding noises from the VHS, the tape began to play.

My mother hadn’t rewound the movie. It started somewhere in the middle. There was no reference point and no explanation. I didn’t know what I was watching.

The attractive and slender men and women on the screen were all dressed like knockoff Star Trek extras. Their outfits were shiny and silver as if they were fashioned from aluminum foil or mylar.

The acting was bad. So was the dialogue. Everyone was still fully clothed, but I got a distinct impression that I was seeing something I ought not to be seeing.

The clothes came off. People were naked. They were doing things that made me uncomfortable even though I didn’t understand what was happening.

I don’t know how long my mother allowed me to watch the tape. It could have been five minutes or it could have been an hour. I couldn’t tell then, or I can’t remember now.

After she turned off the television, we never spoke of it again. It was better that way.

I didn’t watch porn again until I was seventeen. A friend of mine invited me to her house when her parents were at work. When she offered to put on one of her father’s VHS tapes, I eagerly agreed. I was still a virgin at that point, and I had a lot of questions.

While the porn tape I’d seen years earlier had an outer space theme, this porn tape had an office theme. The actors and actresses were all nicely dressed in business attire. One of the men — presumably the boss — had a big desk in his office.

I had a feeling the surface of that desk was large enough to hold two people — maybe more. Unfortunately, I never got to find out. Just as the lackluster plot and dialogue were giving way to an impromptu striptease, my friend changed her mind.

“I don’t think we should be watching this,” she said.

Although I didn’t protest, I was disappointed. We didn’t discuss it. She just turned off the television, slipped the VHS tape back into its cardboard cover, and hid it back in her father’s closet where she had found it.

The next day at our after-school job, one of our mutual friends approached me. “I heard you forced Lori to watch porn,” she said.

It wasn’t true. It was her idea, I swear.

I rarely drink, smoke, or watch porn these days. Well … Sometimes. Not often. I think it’s because I got it out of my system before I turned eighteen.

Thanks, Mom.