I’m all good on the cocaine

I hope it's been a great weekend so far! You've got Palmer today!

It couldn't have been easier for me to say no...

About five years after high school, some old friends and I got together to catch up. I had drifted apart from them a bit because of travel, living out of state, and different lifestyles, but I was grateful to see everyone.

The high school days involved some pretty wild moments I would absolutely not sign up for again, but it's always a funny stroll down memory lane when I see them. 😅 If you want a taste of those high school moments, I wrote about some of it in what teenage me would hate for parents to know.

It was late, but for old times' sake I figured, so what! I wasn't drinking, so I wasn't too worried about getting into trouble with my old accomplices. Then at about 2am, even I was ready to go home and sleep. After some drive through we ended up back at one of my friend's houses, all just talking.

Then, as casually as I'd offer a guest a sparkling water, one of them said to me, "Do you want any cocaine?"...I almost didn't know what to do or if they were serious, so I pretended to think about it for a few seconds and then said "I'm all good for tonight."

But it hit me then...Our lives had diverged more than I realized.

I'm not sharing that because there was no path that would have ever led me there, but because the one I chose took me somewhere very different. And to be fair...I often brought the list of bad ideas as a teenager…luckily none of them were cocaine.

If you had asked me before that night, I probably would have assumed we were in a more similar place. There was never one day I could point to and say, "That's when everything changed."

It was years of small choices that probably wouldn't have felt like a big deal to ignore in the moment. But looking back, I can see that ignoring those small things would have cost me some of the best parts of my life. And I know there are decisions like that I am making, or missing the mark on today, that will change how things look 5 years from now.

My life is not the life everyone needs to live...(unless you're my little brother, then I wish he would just listen to me. 🙄) But the continual commitment to be a little more intentional, push through discomfort, seek wisdom from books, people, experiences, and not assume my ideal life will happen by chance…it adds up.

Not always dramatically. Not always quickly. But it does.

And I think most parents hope their kids build a life where they can look back and see that they have actually grown. Friendships, internal peace, spiritual life, personal accomplishment, joy, all the things that feed the soul.

But that is rarely built by one giant heroic decision. It is usually built in small, repeated choices that look too small to matter at the time.

So as a parent trying to navigate teen drug use and peer pressure, there are two things I would invite you to do.

1 - Remind yourself that the changes you are likely wanting to see in your kid will, if ever, take much longer than your ideal timeline. Pressure usually does not speed that up. It often delays it, makes them do the opposite, or makes them pursue it out of appeasement, which means it probably won't last.

2 - Be intentional to find little ways to encourage them toward a more full version of life. Often times they have some sense of what they want, but they need more scaffolding around them to make it happen.

Pick just one of these to focus on over the next few weeks:

• Help them ease the emotional weight they are carrying. We all want to conquer our mountains in life, but it's much easier to make that climb if we aren't carrying unnecessary weight.
• Stay curious about what they are passionate about. And if your first thought is, "Well, I've tried exposing them to lots of things," I get that. But sometimes this takes more patience and curiosity than we wish it did.
• Help them get more wisdom around them. Books, mentors, older siblings, parents, coaches, therapists, sports coaches, travel, all of it. I will always be biased towards travel and mentors.
• Help them define what their values are. Values give kids guideposts instead of just drifting toward whatever is easiest. Values are just preferences unless you are willing to sacrifice something for them so they need to be thoughtful.
• Help them create moments of fun and joy. Most kids aren't motivated by some far off future 5, 10, or 15 years down the road. Fun reminds their systems that there are things worth doing!

That's the hope. Not that our kids build perfect lives, but that years from now they can look back and see, in a very real way, that they kept becoming more and more of who they were made to be. If you're wrestling with how to talk to your own kid about drugs, I also wrote about that directly in "Did You Do Drugs?"

Have a lovely Sunday!

Kerry and Palmer :)