<p>In general, all of our kids have ouside lives we know very little about. That’s assuming our kids ever go out of the house unsupervised.</p>
<p>In our extended family, Thanksgiving and family reunions are when all those old stories come out. My dear mother in law had no clue what her children were up to as teens. My own parents were more savy, but even they didn’t know most of what we did. Family teens at various times smoked pot, drank, escorted parties out the back door as parents were parking in the driveway, went out the bedroom window at night, were caught by the police while toilet papering trees, spent a night in jail for urinating in public while drunk, stole all the lawn ornaments in a neighboring small town and set them up on the chamber of commerce lawn… You get the idea. Between my siblings, my husband’s siblings, and his step siblings, there are twelve of us, and every one of us did SOMETHING (illegal or merely naughty) as teens, almost none of which our parents ever knew about until many years later.</p>
<p>I am absolutely sure that my own time will come, when the stories will come tumbling out, and I will be <em>shocked! Just shocked!</em> at what my darling, sweet, smart, nice kids were actually doing.</p>
<p>A little stash of pot in his room? Pshaw, just wait till the really good stories come out ten or twenty years from now.</p>