What? She was holding it for a friend.

This is what Daddy issues look like.

A few years ago, my mom and I watched the Disney remake of Freaky Friday. Criminal, I know, but it was awesome. See, they updated it, and Lindsay Lohan? She was in a rock band? And her mom? Her mom was like all uptight and wore ladysuits? And then they switched places? And they understood each other?

My internal timeline is a little messed up, on account of all the boozing (hey, nobody bought ME an alcohol monitoring anklet) but this could have been the summer I went a little wild in the MPLS. See, I had just come back from a semester in London, 6 awesome months spent living in squalor with a pack of boys. Coming and going as I pleased, hopping to different cities in different countries on the weekends, spending my spring break on a train crossing through Switzerland rather than Ft. Lauderdale. Coming home was a shock. My parents wanted to, like, spend time with me. And talk to me. And get to know me. And me? I was TWENTY-ONE YEARS OLD. I was a grown-ass woman. I had beers to drink and dudes to meet and strange couches to pass out on.

And that's how I found myself face-to-face with my mom on a hot summer day, struggling to focus on her while MTV played in the background and I fought the urge to puke up the poison that had settled in my stomach overnight. She was trying to kick me out of the house. Send me back to college early. Out. Enough. Game Over. No room at the inn.

I cried. I promised reform. I think I did end up taking a break to vomit in the bathroom. I went to the gym. I stopped answering my cell phone and spent more nights nestling up to my mother and watching movies.

I am not a beautiful and unique snowflake. I am not special. I'm just a middle-class white girl who did what every middle-class white girl did. We girls go wild. And you know what? So did Lindsay. She just has more means to do so, like the prep school girls in our athletic conference who talked about their coke-fueled weekends like I knew what they were talking about, when really I thought they were talking about the classic coke, the kind in a can.

I'm thankful, really, for parents who give a shit about me. Who aren't going to let me squander millions of dollars on handbags and cars for me to crash. Who aren't going to let me call in sick to work because I'm brutally hungover, who are going to parent me, even at age 24, to make sure I'm not a total fuck-up.