Oh geez. I haven’t laughed this hard in months!
My puke story is pretty dull, actually. I remember it mostly because my parents were just so darn reasonable about it.
I was 15 years old, and I’d gone to a graduation party, for my boyfriend, who was a senior. It was the first graduation party I’d ever attended. I didn’t party a whole lot in school–my parents were very cautious about things like that (of course, I thought they were Nazis, but it wasn’t until I was an adult myself that I learned that they partied pretty hard themselves as teens, and knew ALL the ropes).
The party was a lot of fun. There was alcohol there (BF’s family was all there too, so the alcohol was supposed to be for the adults). I’d never touched booze. So a couple of other friends of mine offered me a seven & seven. It was good. I ended up drinking three of them, the last one being almost entirely booze. I was feeling pretty warm & happy by the time I left.
A friend drove me home. In the car, I started feeling a little warmer & happier. By the time I actually got home, was full-on plowed. My virgin system was doing it’s best to maintain, but it just wasn’t happening. I staggered in the door. My dad was there, watching TV (my mom was out of town). I try to walk a straight line to my dad to say goodnight (enough of my brain cells were functioning to tell me that hanging around Dad for too long would not be a good thing). My Dad is just looking at me, with that “You Can’t Snow Me, Missy” look on his face. I lean over to kiss him goodnight, and he says “You’ve been drinking, haven’t you?” I know I can’t blow anything past my dad, so I say “A little bit.” He says “Go to bed, and we’ll talk about it in the morning.”
So, I go to bed. I try to, anyway. The bed refused to cooperate. It just kept spinning madly underneath me. ot good, not good at all. I yell for my dad. He opens the bedroom door, and very calmly says “is the bed spinning?” I can barely answer. He says “Put one foot on the floor. Sometimes that helps.” Then he leaves.
Then the puking starts. I still remember it being pink. Why it was pink, I don’t know. I just remember that there was a LOT of it. Oh my heavens. My dad heard me being sick, and came back in to the room with a wastebasket and a washcloth. He gave them to me, and left again.
I think I hurled up everything I’d eaten for a week. I was certain tht my toes were going to be coming up eventually. I dry heaved for what seemed like an eternity. Oh, the misery!
The next morning, when I saw my dad at breakfast, he asked how I was feeling. In fact, I felt fine. I’d puked up everything that could have given me a hangover. We had a loooooong talk about what I’d done, and why it was very, very bad. But then my dad said “I called your mom this morning, and told her all about it. My original intent was to ground you, but after some thought and discussion with your mother, we’ve decided not to. We hope you got sick enough last night to have learned a lesson.”
I did. I don’t think I drank again until after I moved out of the house, some four years later. And I will be forever grateful to my parents for not going completely berserkers on me for that one. They could have, and they certainly would have been well within their rights to do so. I can only hope I can be like that with my own kids.
