Mommy needs a joint

This morning Geraldine shared a post that had a pretty woman smoking a joint.
The caption said.
'mommy needs a joint, should be as socially acceptable as mommy needs a wine'.

I get it and totally agree with the sentiment.

What I thought was worth mentioning is that I come from a world where the first premise is not valid either.

In the world I live in a woman couldn't say 'mommy needs a wine'.
It's nothing sexist, as even a man wouldn't be free to drink wine after a killer day in the trenches.

Growing up in a conservative part of the community I noticed that none of my Muslim friends drank. Back then. When we needed to rebel we smoked cigarettes. Some took this further smoked weed.

While our non-Muslim friends experimented with alcohol, we stuck to cigarettes and the really 'bad boys' went to weed.

I realise that times are different now and lots of Muslim kids drink, on the down low these days, but not back then.

What does that say about us?

Maybe we were repressed, and ask ourselves if we missed out on an important rite of passage.

Do we see that, in the same way, that we view all romance that passed us by because we didn't act, in time?

We carry with us the angst of all the crushes we had, and the opportunities missed that could have altered the course of our lives, but I don't think the fact that we didn't drink is on this list.
Not for me at least.

I was very repressed as a young man and I wrestled with the demons of the "paths not taken" in so many areas
Until in the end I too rebelled and went crazy and found my own path. And in time I came to accept my path, and later still, it dawned on me that I couldn't imagine my life any other way.

I am critical enough to realise also that given enough repetition the mind can make anything appear normal. So it's possible that the contentment I now feel, and the satisfaction with the way things turned out and the fact that I don't lament what could have been, might just be a personal delusion that my mind has constructed to make reality palatable, and even if that is the case, I find that I am ok with that.
The alternative to that is not pretty.

M Parak
Aug 2018