This year, it's just about bourbon. And Grace.

Two years ago yesterday, on December 20, 2007, I started this blog with a post about bourbon balls and how furious I was at Grace for eating a slew of them without anyone's permission. That seems like an eternity ago. Let's visit an event involving bourbon that is more recent and far more challenging: what my husband found after Grace's five friends had been over for the night unsupervised.

It was an innocent enough idea. On Halloween night, Grace wanted to go out trick or treating with a few friends then come back to the house for movies, candy, and a sleepover. Our house is set up so that the den can be isolated from the rest of the house. So I welcomed them home from trick or treating at 8p or so, showed them to the den, and closed the door for the night. By noon the next day, all but one friend had gone home and Grace was cleaning up the house. Grace seemed tired and a bit irritable, but there was nothing else notable about her behavior.

The following morning when I came down for breakfast, my husband told me we had a serious situation that we needed to address. On the counter was an empty bottle of Jim Beam. The last time I saw the bottle, it was almost full. We only have one bottle in the house; it gets stored along with the rest of the hard liquor in a inconspicuous chest in the den. Grace knows it's there, but up until this point, I never dreamed she'd touch the stuff. As I stood there staring at the empty bottle, I wanted to believe so much that it was an adult that had drunk the whiskey rather than a group of Grace and friends. Unfortunately we just don't serve drinks that often; the Jim Beam comes out only once in awhile, like when I make bourbon balls at Christmas time. I could feel my stomach sinking deep into my belly. THIS was not a bridge we had ever even come close to crossing previously.

I'm not stupid or naive. Teens drink. Lots of them drink. Lots of them drink a lot. I'd be deeply in denial if I believed that there was no chance that teens might drink in my home if left unsupervised with alcohol. I wanted to believe that Grace would never touch the stuff and never let her friends touch it either if she could keep them from it. But as Sherlock Holmes says, "once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." The whiskey didn't vanish or evaporate. It didn't get up on its own two legs and walk out. Someone drank it, and no one who would have drunk hard liquor in high volumes had been in the house for months as far as I could remember.

So we brought it up over breakfast. It didn't go well. Grace was angry, upset. She absolutely denied knowing anything about the bourbon. She pitched a hissy fit. Her irate, insistent refrain was, "I can't believe you'd think that I would do something like that!" Despite all her protesting, I wasn't convinced of her innocence at all since she'd pulled this kind of a fit before, lying like mad, in order to cover lesser transgressions.

Then finally when I had given up hope and started to accept that my young teenager was drinking and lying, she said, "It could have been one of your friends! What about M?!?" Indeed, M had visited for a week this past summer. I had told him to make himself at home during his stay, our home is your home. He spent the week trying to quit smoking. As a result, he ate ravenously...and he helped himself to plenty of hard drinks after work day hours were over. As soon as Grace brought it up, I realized that there was a good likelihood (actually, a much better than average likelihood) that the bourbon had been consumed by M.

I was quiet for a second. I didn't apologize, I just thought for a second. Did I owe Grace an apology? All I did was ask her what happened to the whiskey and she threw a huge temper tantrum. If she was the kind of kid who was always forthright and honest with me about everything, it would have ended there. I would have trusted her and thought of what else could have happened. But Grace has lied to me before. Suddenly, I realized what the biggest problem we had was. It wasn't teenage drinking; it was lack of trust based on a history of dishonesty.

We talked for a few minutes longer at the table about how this whole episode illustrated exactly why it is so crucially important for Grace to NEVER lie to us about anything, no matter how small. Not about a bad grade on a test, not about losing something valuable, not about eating candy in her bedroom after hours, not about ANYTHING. For years I have been telling her that if I can't trust her, all is lost. Finally we had a crystal clear example of why that is the case. My guess is that this episode finally made the point clear to her. Never, never lie. I don't care what you've done, I don't care if you've killed someone, just don't ever lie to me. If there isn't trust between a parent and child, everything else about the relationship will become painfully difficult.

As I'm looking back on two years of blogging, I'm realizing I've grown a lot as a person, a woman and a mother. It's taken a lot of difficult moments to grow, some that I'd rather not ever go through again. Now I've grown to the point where I want my teenage daughter to learn from me by reading and writing with me. At this point, I know I still have growing to do, but I hope to do it in a more interactive way with my oldest daughter.

Grace is going to comment on this after a bit in order to give her two cents worth on the event. I'm probably as anxious as all of you are to hear what she has to say about it.

Regardless, I am reminded at this time that part of why I started this blog is that I love my daughter dearly. In order for me to show that, we have to traverse very bumpy parts of the road. All of you out there have helped me and her through some of these patches. As we keep traveling along, I know there are many more bumps to come. But I don't look at them with quite the same dread I used to. I am cautiously optimistic that all will turn out fine if the two of us keep holding hands during the journey.