Stoned With Your Parents

When you get high with friends, there’s this unspoken agreement that you’re all going to drop your guard at the same time. Nobody’s performing. Nobody’s got their armor on. It’s just people being stupid together and it’s fine because everyone signed up for it.

So what happens if the people on the couch are your actual parents? You know the weirdness I mean. Your parents are supposed to stay out of that space. They’re your parents. You don’t get high together. That’s not how the thing works.

And yet here’s the shift: a lot of older people smoke now. More every year. So somewhere there are families where that line doesn’t really exist anymore, where getting stoned is just something everyone does. I can’t quite picture what that looks like. Not because it seems wrong, but because I’m genuinely uncertain what you’d even do with that moment—everyone relaxed, no performance, no distance. You’d finally see your parents as just people. That would either be really nice or really complicated, probably both.