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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

My son, the junkie
I finally had to let him save, or kill, himself.
By Wendy Mnookin
[08/27/99]

Emotional handicap
What do you do when your normally sweet, loving child wholeheartedly rejects his suddenly disabled, wheelchair-bound grandmother?
By Diane Lore
[08/26/99]

Wild Thing
Is hell satisfied?
In keeping with their authors' dark histories, "The Iron Giant" and other children's tales by Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath tell ominous fables about ambition, despair and people's disregard for nature and one another.
By Polly Shulman
[08/25/99]

The dark side of Disney
There's no escaping the commodification of childhood.
By Samuel G. Freedman
[08/23/99]

Disney rocks!
Forget the long lines, the schlocky toys and the canned music. Disneyland will always be the Magic Kingdom for this lifelong Mouseketeer.
By Lisa Moskowitz
[08/22/99]

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These new labels fit so comfortably because none of the classic "warning signs" associated with drug use seemed to apply to me. I was doing well in school, editing the school newspaper, starring in plays, dating pretty girls. I had lots of friends and people thought I was cool: I was the smart, witty kid who smokes pot all the time and somehow still gets straight A's. DARE didn't just seem like a joke to me, it seemed like a farce. When I wore DARE shirts to school, some teachers assumed it was in earnest. In a high school that had its share of pregnancies, suicides and overdoses, I was clearly not someone to worry about. Everyone knows that drug addicts are not co-chairs of their student government or advanced placement students.

In fact, often I wondered if I would be able to cope nearly as well without drugs. Maybe the booze and the weed were necessary sedatives, my over-the-counter valium.

Even more pernicious, my persona as a drug-addled protégé was becoming my identity. If I stopped getting high all the time, if I stopped showing up to school drunk, wouldn't I just be another staid, over-achieving suburban teen? Would people still be as interested in me if I was simply playing the part I was expected to fulfill? Drugs added a sense of danger, a sense of daring and excitement that is not often aroused by the manicured lawns and two-car garages of Newton, Mass. Without that, I was just another cookie-cutter, upper-middle-class success story.

Because I was exceptionally good at keeping up outward appearances, I was able to hide my drug use from my parents for a long time. But in my junior year of high school, I was arrested for breaking and entering; a couple of months later, I passed out while interviewing the principal for the school newspaper. My parents' reactions to my drug addiction were different: my father furious, my mother betrayed. During the years when my dad wanted to be harder on me, my mother had pushed to give me more freedom, arguing that I was doing fine and just going through normal teenage rebellion. He wanted me home by midnight; she said I had earned the right to be out late. So the fact that I had been deceiving them hurt them both, but it was like a personal "fuck you" to my mother. We were supposed to share a bond. We were both creative, often wildly unpragmatic, dreamers. If I was out late at night, I was supposed to be wooing a girl, or skinny-dipping in a lake, or playing in a field. I wasn't supposed to be smoking coke.

Next page | Heroin didn't scare me so much as it excited me