Teenagers!
9:06 a.m.
You know how I am always going on and on about how wonderful my children are, how if I didn�t already know them I would seek them out as friends, yadda yadda yadda? Well, last night I was so angry at Buddy Boy that I could have spit (I did blow my nose a couple of times), but refrained from reaming him out in front of his friends, who seem to spend an awful lot of time here (and now I know why). However, I did light into him this morning, as he was preparing to go play rugby (he couldn�t find his socks, his purple and yellow game socks, and so left the house without them, hoping he could borrow a pair from someone else), and informed him thusly:
I am neither ignorant nor stupid, and I happen to possess a rather keen sense of smell as well as very sensitive mucous membranes, which is one of the reasons I did not frequent bars when smoking was allowed in them and why I was so overjoyed when it was finally outlawed. This is not the first time this has happened, but last night I finally put two and two together and came up with an incriminating four. For two nights in a row, Buddy Boy�s friend Gabby (a year his junior) has slept over. Last night the boy from down the street, JD, joined them. On both nights I was smelling Axe, you know, the deoderant, wondering why, thinking it very odd that teenage boys with no girls around would be perfuming themselves thusly. Both nights, after most normal people are fast asleep in bed, a delivery man arrived bearing food (pizzas on Friday, chicken wings last night). Do you see where I�m going with this?
At one point last night, someone turned on the bathroom fan downstairs (it is extremely loud, making the whole floor above it, i.e. the kitchen, vibrate) and didn�t turn it off right away which led me to believe a) he had forgotten, or b) there was a health issue. Being the mom I am, I went downstairs, where my son was watching Jumanji (I loved that movie), and noticed that the other two boys were not in sight. Hmmm....why would both of them be in the bathroom at the same time? Then I smelled that smell, the one that was so prevalent at the Montreal jazz festival, you know which one, the burning leaves smell, the unmistakeable smell of dope.
Suddenly it all made sense: the air freshener, the midnight munchies, the staying over. All right, I was never really a pot smoker (or user of any kind, seeing as how the inhalation of smoke is anathema to me); I didn�t even try the stuff until I was in university (and I didn�t get there until I was 21), and I never developed a taste for it. But that doesn�t mean I don�t know what it is when I smell it. Actually, if they hadn�t resorted to the smelly deoderant (which really is vile when sprayed willy nilly through the atmosphere of a house closed up tight against winter�s impending chill), I might not have minded so much. I�ve always told my kids that if they�re going to do something of which I won�t approve, for heaven�s sake, don�t get caught.
So, as my son stood there in the bathroom, one contact lens in his eye, the other on the index finger of his right hand, I told him that if he and his friends were going to smoke dope here, they were to do it outside, on the back deck, and not in the house trying to mask it with something even more odious. I slept very poorly last night, what with the mixture of odours (add the chicken wings to that) wafting through the house (we have an air exchanger, so there is some circulation) and the bile building up inside me as I rehearsed the speech I would deliver this morning. There were a couple of hot flashes in there too which woke me after I finally managed to fall asleep.
As for the rugby socks, I just wash them. Their disappearance is not my problem.
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